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I have just gotten into WH. I enjoy buying models on ebay but notice the paint jobs on many items I get are a bit sloppy but more so have paint missing at strange places.

I do not mind this because I enjoy touching them up and the price is right. This might be a silly question but how do models have these missing paint sections when the person took the time to paint the rest?
Is it a shipping or storage thing???

Are you referring to genuine paint chips etc? As an avid "rescuer" of eBayed models...there is zero logic to what people do with their figures (I hope I'm simply referring to painting them...).

Some other eBay listings are scattered bits which are glued together to sell --- so you may have new parts mixed with old recycles parts, I suppose.

This is a pretty standard eBay paintjob (received this one a couple days ago):


These fellas just had a long rough life of being abused/pushed around a table (or thrown in a bin)

Then you have stuff like this:


I think this guy was just half-way through painting some of these and got lazy (some of the figures are obviously from a different source). Why he left random parts unpainted --- I can only assume he quit halfway through?

Or perhaps he painted them, decided to covert some of them, and never got around to repainting.

Many times the best thing you can do with a e-bay paint job is throw the mini into Simply Green and scrub it off.

^Yepppp. Agree.

My poor Eldar :(

Yea the stuff I get looks like the first pic you posted. I seems strange cause I assume people are buying these brand new at full price.

Then again anything can happen I guess. Still I enjoy getting them cheap and making them mine by completing the paint job. Of course I am no expert in painting but isnt that a big part of the fun learning and getting better?

Which once again makes me wonder why these things are looking so poor.

Also, worth mentioning that a lot of GW fans/players start between the ages of 10-12-14 or so. That means a lot of those paintjobs come from teenagers with minimal skill or minimal funds.

It's also very common to find no undercoat/basing/priming on the models I strip down (or several different paintjobs layered on top of each other).

There's a ton of fun taking this:


and turning it into this:


And I'm just a speed-painter myself. I find an odd joy though in saving miniatures, particularly old metals. I "hope" they've been enjoyed by someone in the 90's and I can give them a new lease on life. They may live on another 10-15-20 years in my collection. After that? Who knows.

From the other side of the aisle, for your perspective:

I take so long to paint models (I'm a perfectionist and all) that the idea of repainting models, even from when I started years ago, is akin to torture. To make matters worse, my pile of shame is pretty intense since I paint both for myself and my SO. If I were to sell anything, it would be the worst painted and oldest of my models because then I can get new shineys and new motivation. Prime example: I just sold off my old, finished Eldrad Ulthran model because I got the new one from Death Masque.

That said, for some kind of strange, sick reason, I keep my old, badly painted models for the sake of comparison for the most part (well, and because I can and do use the full number of them relatively regularly). Every aspect is grouped together, and there are squads with marked difference. I think my favorite is my Fire Dragons - 18 models, 3 different model versions, and 4 different paint jobs spanning since I was maybe a few months into the hobby up until maybe a week ago. The difference is night and day, but it sure is fun to look at the progression.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Btw, @Elbows, that is one great before and after shot!

 Elbows wrote:
Also, worth mentioning that a lot of GW fans/players start between the ages of 10-12-14 or so. That means a lot of those paintjobs come from teenagers with minimal skill or minimal funds.

It's also very common to find no undercoat/basing/priming on the models I strip down (or several different paintjobs layered on top of each other).

There's a ton of fun taking this:


and turning it into this:


And I'm just a speed-painter myself. I find an odd joy though in saving miniatures, particularly old metals. I "hope" they've been enjoyed by someone in the 90's and I can give them a new lease on life. They may live on another 10-15-20 years in my collection. After that? Who knows.

How can I get my paint stripper to add an extra model to my squads!?

Pretty easy...just add water, ya noob.

Standard protocol is to dump anything I get secondhand right into the Simple Green vat. Don't care if it's 'prooooo painted bro!', given one single base coat, etc. Strip it immediately.

 Elbows wrote:
Pretty easy...just add water, ya noob.

Spoiler:

Because painters can be lazy, there not very good painters or they just want to get them on the table.