Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Nearly finished a mini - a GW hobbit and just couldn’t get the face right. I knew I’d never be happy with it so I put it in the alcohol, scrubbed all the paint off and am going too reprime it and do it again. I seem to have done that a lot this year and I’m just wondering how often the rest of you find yourselves in the same boat. It’s frustrating but I’ve never regretted it. The minis always turn out better on attempt no 2.

I’ve only stripped a few minis.

A couple were test beds for new schemes. Blocked in the colors as a rough draft, stripped, and then painted in the final scheme.

I had a large chunk of custom chapter and blood angels from my RT/2nd ed days that were doing nothing but collecting dust in boxes/overflow shelf. Working getting them cleaned up and in the blue of my Ultras. They still might collect dust, but it will be in the main cabinet. And potentially on the field in a 30k army.

I’ve stripped off bad primes before. Sometimes the rattlecan goes fuzzy.

Generally if I’m not happy with a paintjob, I’ll just get it to the best I can and move on. Plenty of other things in the Pile of Shame that need work. If I revisited every mini I wasn’t happy with, I’d make no progress at all.

Pretty much never. I don't particularly like stripping models, trying to get the gunk out of the crevices and whatnot. The only models I've ever stripped were some old Space Hulk terminators that I had already repainted a couple of times and some 2nd hand stuff that I bought and was too poorly and thickly painted for me to just touch up.

But I'm not a display painter in any way shape or form. So if I screw up a model generally I'm not going to care enough to want to repaint it anyway. The few display models I have painted I spent enough hours painting that I didn't really want to paint them again even if I wasn't happy with the result, lol.

I hope never in the future; but I had redo some of my armies due to cost efficiency of doing so, that's only because my early armies were not well prepped(mold lines, gun barrels drilled, magnetization etc.) prior to painting or primed too close causing textures; as my painting skills increase, I hope to never strip any figures, only to touch up on some details.

 Big Mac wrote:
I hope never in the future; but I had redo some of my armies due to cost efficiency of doing so, that's only because my early armies were not well prepped(mold lines, gun barrels drilled, magnetization etc.) prior to painting or primed too close causing textures; as my painting skills increase, I hope to never strip any figures, only to touch up on some details.

Going back and cleaning mold lines left by late ‘80s/early ’90s me is not fun. “If you had just done this right the first time you young slacker, I’d not have to deal with it NOW!” Young me needs to be slapped. (For this and a lot of other things, but we all trade youth for wisdom)

By and large, I only strip stuff I bought used. It's VERY rare that I'll completely strip a mini I've painted.

Faces, yeah, getting them right can be tricky. Easily the hardest part of the mini to get right. That's why I do the faces first; if I blow it beyond repair all I'm not losing hours of work on other parts of the mini.

I've stripped hundreds of minis, but that's to save money buying crappily painted figs. almost never ones I've already painted.

Technically never, in that all the stripping I've done - of miniatures - is stuff I painted centuries ago, so I didn't 'give up', I just genuinely thought holding a mini by its feet and dunking it in a pot of paint was how it was done (I mean I have to assume that's how they got that way). Contemporary minis if I mess something up, I just paint over - too much effort to start again from scratch, and we're talking mistakes like the brush slipping or changing my mind on colour on a little detail, not the whole thing. If I start to think a paint job's just fundamentally flawed, I just put it at the back of the desk and slap a colour on it from time to time when I'm not busy with anything else, then when it's done it can go at the back of the squad, I'm not fast at this so I need the numbers even if they don't bear close scrutiny.

I stripped ~60 dark vengeance chaos cultists.
The first batch I primed them grey and just painted one Mini a day, each one totally different. My attempt at painting a band of ragtag survivors, banding together for this one fight utterly failed. They just looked like a bunch of rich kids in designer clothes that took a sewer swimming challenge. And I never got past the first 10.
My second batch came with a board game (with 4 imperial assassin's), I primed them red and added some khaki to mimic a uniform. Looked better then the first batch but i want really convinced. Then I got another batch with the hachette part times and bought someone's cultists he had used for Necromunda. They were primed black.
I got inspired to do a simple alpha legion paint scheme, so I stripped all of them, painted them blue, and I'm very happy with them now.
I also stripped my first batch of Dropzone minis. They were the first I ever painted and looked horrible.

Thanks for the replies. Some interesting perspectives here.

As my painting improved, I have stripped an entire army and repainted it unit by unit (like my old metal Eldar). Any figures off ebay get striped as well.

Cheers,

CB

Every once in a while, I pull out some Oldhammer models (msotly Elves or Chaos models) painted by teenaged me, strip and then repaint them. Doing so hits me in the nostalgia and help keep me from buying new models.

Once, usually. And then only when it's stuff that I've found 2nd hand.

I don't have any "embarrassing models painted when I was schoolkid" as I didn't get into wargaming until I was 19, and had left school (40k didn't exist until that year).

I will only strip a model I've personally painted in the rarest of circumstances. Even then, it's usually dealing with something long OOP that I need to repurpose for a project and I don't want to go hunting on eBay.

 KidCthulhu wrote:
I will only strip a model I've personally painted in the rarest of circumstances. Even then, it's usually dealing with something long OOP that I need to repurpose for a project and I don't want to go hunting on eBay.

I'm very similar

I tend to view any model I paint as a record of that moment in time, good or bad its something I can look back to to see what worked and what didn't, how far I've progress or give me inspiration for other things.

I have stripped junk from ebay.