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Oh man, you've got a good eye on you.

You are indeed correct. From the one angle, I wasn't sure, but when you're right, you're right.

Oh it is too.

From the angle of my pic it looks like a really bad mold line... I can't anti see it.

Really weird how the line seems to move as you rotate it.

 Achaylus72 wrote:
Coming from a military modelling background of over 45 years, GW paint jobs are the worst examples of painting in the extreme.

Would never catch Tamiya painting their models that bad.

GW painting in general is shyte.

Having seen, and built my share of Tamiya and other assorted scale kits in my 29 years on this blue planet, I agree to a point.

Thing is, I've talked to a couple pros about the craft (as in one guy's models were cover art for a number of Revell kits, and the other was a regular judge at scale painting competitions) and the amount of time given to a modeler for say, a magazine article, or a competition is staggeringly long. Especially when you compare that amount of time to the time given for GWs "show case quality" that you see in WD, boxes and codices/army books. As in, in some cases, the guys building a scale military model is given 6+ months to prep, build, paint and display a model kit, 6 months time is pretty normal also when you consider the "How To" articles in magazines like Fine Scale Modeler.

There's a pretty big difference between "box art", or studio army art, and the 'Eavy Metal showpieces or Golden Demon winners.

Keep in mind that a Golden Demon might be a 600 hour job for 1 model or small diorama. A studio paintjob is intended for a model that will be a part of an army -- for instance, a large display consisting of perhaps 200+ models. Some of those characters might be really well done, but it's not feasible to put 120,000 hours into the models for 1 display. The box art is supposed to give you inspiration for painting your own 100+ model army, not show you something that took a year to paint.

This Golden Demon silver winner was a 600+ hour job, I think (it was featured in a white dwarf):



It's inconceivable to have an entire Space Wolves army painted to that standard. It's not even conceivable (to me) to have a box art for 5 models painted like that. By the way, some of the models in Visions painted by the 'Eavy Metal team are pretty spectacular. It's just not possible to have *every model* painted like that, certainly not with GW popping like, a couple hundred new models every year (that's a wild guess, but it sure feels like it).

Incidentally, I am one of those that far prefers the "World of Warcraft" style of exaggerated, bright, unrealistic colors to a realistic paintjob on a miniature -- mostly because if I want to see something realistic, I just have to look out the window. For my miniatures, I want the scifi/fantasy gamey look.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 Achaylus72 wrote:
Coming from a military modelling background of over 45 years, GW paint jobs are the worst examples of painting in the extreme.

Would never catch Tamiya painting their models that bad.

GW painting in general is shyte.

Having seen, and built my share of Tamiya and other assorted scale kits in my 29 years on this blue planet, I agree to a point.

Thing is, I've talked to a couple pros about the craft (as in one guy's models were cover art for a number of Revell kits, and the other was a regular judge at scale painting competitions) and the amount of time given to a modeler for say, a magazine article, or a competition is staggeringly long. Especially when you compare that amount of time to the time given for GWs "show case quality" that you see in WD, boxes and codices/army books. As in, in some cases, the guys building a scale military model is given 6+ months to prep, build, paint and display a model kit, 6 months time is pretty normal also when you consider the "How To" articles in magazines like Fine Scale Modeler.

You have to keep that in context though. Many of those finescale kits are massively more complicated than your average wargaming kit and have to be built in stages that take a long time between steps.

I'm currently building a 1/32 Spitfire, I've so far spent a week on JUST the cockpit and I'm a long way off finished. But there's so many little fiddly parts that need to be cleaned, things that you have to assemble bit by bit waiting for the glue to dry in between (and don't even think about using superglue, you HAVE to use plastic cement). You can't work on it solidly for a day because after a few hours you inevitably reach a point where you have to wait for something to dry before moving on.

Then moving along you have tons of joins that need filling and sanding. If you decide to paint in enamels you have to wait several hours between coats and a day or so between colours then a couple of days before applying your acrylic varnish then a day before applying your oil wash then another couple of days before applying your matte varnish.

The kits are just much more complicated and the techniques are ones that favour working an hour or two a day over the course of several weeks rather than just working solidly for a couple of days to get it finished.

Compare that to your average wargaming miniature, even if you are a pedant when it comes to prep work it still should only take a couple of hours to assemble and prep a model and then once it's prepped you can usually do one step after the other and get it finished in a day or two.

The spitfire I'm building is the cheap Revell one and it still has 165 parts. A high end kit like the Tamiya Spitfire, here's the contents list....

"360 parts in grey plastic; 17 parts in clear; two nickel-plated photo-etched frets; six parts in flexible black vinyl; eight steel pins; seven miniature magnets; various small screws and metal parts; a self-adhesive masking sheet for the canopy parts; two metallic self-adhesive name plates and two decal sheets with markings for three aircraft."

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

The spitfire I'm building is the cheap Revell one and it still has 165 parts. A high end kit like the Tamiya Spitfire, here's the contents list....

"360 parts in grey plastic; 17 parts in clear; two nickel-plated photo-etched frets; six parts in flexible black vinyl; eight steel pins; seven miniature magnets; various small screws and metal parts; a self-adhesive masking sheet for the canopy parts; two metallic self-adhesive name plates and two decal sheets with markings for three aircraft."

Lol, mate, I've built 2 Tamiya 1:48 scale Sptis (A Mk. I, and a Mk. V Trop B), I completely understand. I'm currently working on a Red Bull Renault RB6 F-1 car in 1:20 scale (also by Tamiya) and honestly, I've found formula one cars especially to be the MOST tedious scale kits in existence.

What I was trying to point out, apparently not well enough, is that the old Eavy Metal team were painting whole armies in the span of a few weeks for a photo shoot for WD. I think outside of the "big" units (such as Karl Franz, Ghazgull, Calgar, etc), most of the models were painted basically to table top plus levels, and as we know they are touched up a bit with editing software. It's a different level of painting and display than scale kits, so naturally, IMO the "quality" is going to be different.

Not to mention the fact that my Tamiya paints act absolutely nothing like my GW paints, which necessitates different painting techniques right off the bat.

@Ensis Ferrae - I understood you right, I think, and I agree: if you ask an amazing painter to paint 50 models in 150 hours, they're going to give you models that are 3 hour paint jobs by an amazing painter, right?

I think the quality of the studio art is pretty good for army sized battleforces -- I think it's a notch above "tabletop plus", because what GW comes out with exceeds what 99%+ of gamers have as their painted armies (or are capable of), and anything with the word "tabletop" should be at least an aspirational median of work.

Incidentally, it's stuff like this at WHW that makes me super excited, more so than a solitary awesome model (though I still love those too!!) --

Going back and looking at 'eavy metal paint jobs from the 90s I realize that they are not as impressive as they were when I was younger. I hate what's happened with GW's photography (they never bother to set up scenes that actually look like battles anymore. It's always just a big pile of soldiers filling up the entire shot, arranged in some layout that would never happen in an actual game) but model for model things look better than they used to.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

The spitfire I'm building is the cheap Revell one and it still has 165 parts. A high end kit like the Tamiya Spitfire, here's the contents list....

"360 parts in grey plastic; 17 parts in clear; two nickel-plated photo-etched frets; six parts in flexible black vinyl; eight steel pins; seven miniature magnets; various small screws and metal parts; a self-adhesive masking sheet for the canopy parts; two metallic self-adhesive name plates and two decal sheets with markings for three aircraft."

Lol, mate, I've built 2 Tamiya 1:48 scale Sptis (A Mk. I, and a Mk. V Trop B), I completely understand. I'm currently working on a Red Bull Renault RB6 F-1 car in 1:20 scale (also by Tamiya) and honestly, I've found formula one cars especially to be the MOST tedious scale kits in existence.

What I was trying to point out, apparently not well enough, is that the old Eavy Metal team were painting whole armies in the span of a few weeks for a photo shoot for WD. I think outside of the "big" units (such as Karl Franz, Ghazgull, Calgar, etc), most of the models were painted basically to table top plus levels, and as we know they are touched up a bit with editing software. It's a different level of painting and display than scale kits, so naturally, IMO the "quality" is going to be different.

Not to mention the fact that my Tamiya paints act absolutely nothing like my GW paints, which necessitates different painting techniques right off the bat.

Oh yeah, I agree that I think a possible reason for a lack of quality is lack of time, in fact I said it on the previous page

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Also possibly time constraints. Really nice looking models can take even a skilled painter a day or more to paint each infantry figure, if you ask them to paint 100 of the blighters in a certain amount of time it might be inevitable you have to lower the quality.

I just went off on a tangent about how finescale models aren't really comparable to wargame models as far as time investment because even if you're not doing anything special there's a large time investment in just building the damned things let alone painting them, lol.

 Achaylus72 wrote:
Coming from a military modelling background of over 45 years, GW paint jobs are the worst examples of painting in the extreme.

Would never catch Tamiya painting their models that bad.

GW painting in general is shyte.

I keep hearing stuff like this. You'd agree that GW stuff is a bit above actual tabletop (i.e. what is actually on the table, not some vague idea what it should be), right? Are we really at the point where over half the stuff out there is "shyte" because somebody who's been painting for decades can do better? I know the top end of painting has improved a bunch in the last 15-20 years (the guy who I gamed with who was an early Golden Daemon winner has stuff that wouldn't even get close now) but to act like that actually moved the middle of the hobby, as in what normal people bring to the tabletop, is asking a bit much.

I get that there's a lot of hate for the style GW uses, but that's an artistic choice. It would be like calling impressionist painting poor because it's not photo-realistic. For most people and in most lighting, realistic contrasts and highlights don't work out well-- they look like a slab of a single color that gets eaten up by the poor lighting you're playing under. I get why it works for display pieces, but complaining that stuff for a wargame is painted for play seems odd to me.

Kilkrazy wrote:
I call it a 'heraldic' style. it's intended to be easy for moderately skilled painters (like me) to copy and get decent results without madd skillzzz. The design of the models, with lots of embossed detailed complications, is designed to help it.

TBH I think the Sigmarine is fine, but I am not fussed about super-high-quality paint jobs on small wargaming pieces. I have often thought that the super-high paint jobs done by Eavy Metal and other top class painters are counter-productive in terms of convincing ordinary players to do an okay job getting a painted army out on table, and thereby contributed to the hordes of grey death phenomenon.

But that is just my view.

Mine as well. I love looking at the amazing stuff pro painters put out, but I don't have that level of commitment, and probably not the raw talent. 'Eavy Metals stuff is attainable to me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Talys wrote:

This Golden Demon silver winner was a 600+ hour job, I think (it was featured in a white dwarf):

That diorama is gorgeous, but to give some context on what 600 hours means: That's 15 weeks of full time work, 40 hours a week. That's a full semester of school, or more time than I spent studying for the bar exam.

There's some really bad stuff that's made it to box covers, like the Eldar model that's coming apart on one.

I have been quite surprised at the increase in non studio painted stuff appearing in GW books. The Grey Knights codex has some painted stuff in there that are noticeably not done by the 'eavy metal team and look a little bit poor next to the ones that were painted by the studio. An example is some of the Grey Knights models in the Grey Knight codex having big blobs of red paint for their visors with very little in the way of highlighting or blending on them or their armour/weapons, not good for a showcase of an army's models. The same with the Blood Angels codex with some not so great paint jobs where there are a few pages with paint jobs not done by the eavy metal team.

When I look at painted miniatures on the GW site or in a codex, I want to see an absolutely amazing paint job rather than something that is just tabletop standard. I will unlikely get to such a high standard as the 'eavy metal team, but I still want something to strive/aim for, i.e. anything showcased should be miles upon miles ahead of anything I could ever do. If it is not painted by their very best painters then they shouldn't show it.

Just seems odd, because when I compare the recent codices for Grey Knights and Blood Angels to their 5th edition ones, the 5th edition books have an overall better quality of paint jobs on the models and the good ones in the recent books are the ones that were in their previous codices. I probably sound a little bit picky here, but I'm sure others agree that there is more and more of less quality painted models turning up in GW books and on their website.

 Slaphead wrote:
I have been quite surprised at the increase in non studio painted stuff appearing in GW books.

Actually the LOTR rulebook (the big blue thing) had quite a few pages with models that weren't studio painted as well and that's going back quite a few years now. Though I guess it hasn't found it's way in to 40k publications until more recently.

I noticed some of the publications from the most recent Space Wolves release had some figures that looked to be amateur painted.

hands_miranda wrote:

 Achaylus72 wrote:
Coming from a military modelling background of over 45 years, GW paint jobs are the worst examples of painting in the extreme.

Would never catch Tamiya painting their models that bad.

GW painting in general is shyte.

I keep hearing stuff like this. You'd agree that GW stuff is a bit above actual tabletop (i.e. what is actually on the table, not some vague idea what it should be), right? Are we really at the point where over half the stuff out there is "shyte" because somebody who's been painting for decades can do better? I know the top end of painting has improved a bunch in the last 15-20 years (the guy who I gamed with who was an early Golden Daemon winner has stuff that wouldn't even get close now) but to act like that actually moved the middle of the hobby, as in what normal people bring to the tabletop, is asking a bit much.

I get that there's a lot of hate for the style GW uses, but that's an artistic choice. It would be like calling impressionist painting poor because it's not photo-realistic. For most people and in most lighting, realistic contrasts and highlights don't work out well-- they look like a slab of a single color that gets eaten up by the poor lighting you're playing under. I get why it works for display pieces, but complaining that stuff for a wargame is painted for play seems odd to me.

Meh. As much as I dislike GW, their box art is not any worse than anyone else's box art. That style of painting looks good for tabletop games and way better than anything I see on game tables, so it's not "tabletop". Tabletop is 3 colors and a wash or paint between the lines or just "looks ok on the table", and tabletop plus is "a little better than that".

What you're spotting aren't the kinds of things that take 40 hours to get right- they're simply assembly errors. Sometimes this happens, and small ones can get by whoever is in charge of sending them back for fixes.

Here's the biggest error I've seen them make- it got onto the wraithguard box:



I really don't know how many people would have to have missed that in order for it to get onto the box...


Now, the studio painting is always marketing/advertising, so the paint jobs will fit into that budget. If you want your painter spending 40 hours on a mini, then you'd better be ready to pay him for it as well.

I think asking 'collectors' to comment on GW painting is futile. GW sells game pieces to gamers. True collectors aren't part of their equation.

As an average painter, I never would have seen any of those mistakes and think that model looks great. I couldn't do that.

Dakka seems to lose perspective sometimes. Dakka is a small representation of the table top world. But within that small community is probably a large portion of the top painters and modelers. So some of this criticism is unrealistic honestly.

 odinsgrandson wrote:
What you're spotting aren't the kinds of things that take 40 hours to get right- they're simply assembly errors. Sometimes this happens, and small ones can get by whoever is in charge of sending them back for fixes.

Here's the biggest error I've seen them make- it got onto the wraithguard box:



I really don't know how many people would have to have missed that in order for it to get onto the box...


Now, the studio painting is always marketing/advertising, so the paint jobs will fit into that budget. If you want your painter spending 40 hours on a mini, then you'd better be ready to pay him for it as well.

I guess thats what happens when you put an employees attitude ahead of competency in their jobs.
Mistakes like that should not really be made.

 Buttery Commissar wrote:

kb305 wrote:
you are being picky for sure. It is a nice job. The blue shine spot on the shoulder pad is very beautiful. nice execution, im assuming they used an airbrush for that.

May just be i'm on a brighter monitor, but from here it looks like just very well executed brush blending on the blue pad.

And it's not picky to point out there is spilled and stray paint on a product photograph.

Would you not consider a stray hair or half blinked eye on a large company perfume advertisement to be sloppy?

It is very picky. These guys have lots of this plastic junk to paint . The minis are small and the pictures are big to the point that you can sometimes notice a spec if dust if you wanted to be picky enough. If they cared about your opinions they could just resize the picture and make it smaller and you would have nothing to say.

kb305 wrote:

 Buttery Commissar wrote:

kb305 wrote:
you are being picky for sure. It is a nice job. The blue shine spot on the shoulder pad is very beautiful. nice execution, im assuming they used an airbrush for that.

May just be i'm on a brighter monitor, but from here it looks like just very well executed brush blending on the blue pad.

And it's not picky to point out there is spilled and stray paint on a product photograph.

Would you not consider a stray hair or half blinked eye on a large company perfume advertisement to be sloppy?

It is very picky. These guys have lots of this plastic junk to paint . The minis are small and the pictures are big to the point that you can sometimes notice a spec if dust if you wanted to be picky enough. If they cared about your opinions they could just resize the picture and make it smaller and you would have nothing to say.

I would have noticed if was smaller...

Also making excuses for someone not doing their job is like telling the handy man "not to worry about faulty wiring, you have so many jobs to do, just put in a smoke alarm and I have no reason to be upset".

I mean, yes we are talking about models, but as most companies know, presentation goes a long way. The issues with this one model they chose to do close up photos of could have been fixed in seconds by anyone before the picture was taken.

 Swastakowey wrote:

kb305 wrote:

 Buttery Commissar wrote:

kb305 wrote:
you are being picky for sure. It is a nice job. The blue shine spot on the shoulder pad is very beautiful. nice execution, im assuming they used an airbrush for that.

May just be i'm on a brighter monitor, but from here it looks like just very well executed brush blending on the blue pad.

And it's not picky to point out there is spilled and stray paint on a product photograph.

Would you not consider a stray hair or half blinked eye on a large company perfume advertisement to be sloppy?

It is very picky. These guys have lots of this plastic junk to paint . The minis are small and the pictures are big to the point that you can sometimes notice a spec if dust if you wanted to be picky enough. If they cared about your opinions they could just resize the picture and make it smaller and you would have nothing to say.

I would have noticed if was smaller...

Actually if GW sized all their images so they were realistically sized rather than zoomed in, I highly doubt you'd notice a lot of the things you're talking about. I'm glad they do zoom in because it lets you see the model properly, but if they didn't it'd hide most of their sins. For example, the Sigmarine you posted in the OP, if I resize it assuming most people have monitors 110DPI or less (110 DPI is reasonably high by desktop standards) then the image would look like this:



Even those hideous Tau shoulder pads don't look nearly as bad when you zoom out so they are correctly sized on a 110DPI monitor.



There's many models that look "average" on GW's site then when you consider that they are only 28mm models zoomed in to 100mm on your monitor aren't nearly as bad.

Of course I'm not excusing them for it, if they intend to have zoomed in shots then they should paint models so that they look good when zoomed in otherwise they're only hurting themselves.

Also making excuses for someone not doing their job is like telling the handy man "not to worry about faulty wiring, you have so many jobs to do, just put in a smoke alarm and I have no reason to be upset".

Yeah that's not even remotely similar It's an electrician's job to do good wiring, it's a painter's job to paint what they are told in the time they are told in the style they are told.

I'm pretty sure the GW painters are told to paint in a style that matches their tutorials. Back in the day (90's and earlier I guess) the studio models were all painted with lots of blending even though none of their tutorials actually demonstrated HOW to do blending. If you followed the basic painting styles outlined in GW's tutorials, you'd never paint models like they had in their publications, no matter how neatly you did it the techniques weren't the same.

I think the point was missing mold lines or disconnected parts are misses from a painter's point of view.

@AllSeeingSkink - the very first "How to Paint Fantasy Miniatures" by GW actually talks about blending! It doesn't describe how to do it though, just that it can be used to great effect

I don't have a problem with GW painting great-looking models for the box art that represent what can be achieved using just beginner and intermediate techniques. Given the size of 40k armies, it's unrealistic to expect someone to spend a 50 or a hundred hours a model anyhow, and the models painted relatively quickly using layering and shading can look fantastic.

I agree with you, by the way: the tau shoulder pads look fantastic when they're not gigantified, as do the Sigmarites. My WD77 Sigmarite I did really quickly with drybrushing, yet it looks pretty good even if you stick it up to your nose. When you blow it up to a full screen photo, you can definitely tell where TMM or NMM would have been better.

Probably 95% of the my models in my gallery, after I take the first round of photos and carefully inspect them, I find small errors that I did not see on the actual model. I mean, they're so tiny as to not be noticeable, even when you hold them up to your nose, but they show up on photography with good lighting. Even a small dust particle looks like a "flaw". So, I usually fix all the little imperfections, then photograph again. But frankly, nobody would *ever* notice on the real model, not even if they picked it up and stared at it for 10 minutes.

Occasionally, you see on 'Eavy Metal features some super spectacular model, still, which is cool. I think there was a demon prince or some such in a White Dwarf, and there are often awesome model paintings in Visions by the GW studio team.

I guess, when it boils down to it, I like to see both, and I don't expect to see the gigantic GW dioramas with 200 Golden Demon winner quality models.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 heartserenade wrote:
I think the point was missing mold lines or disconnected parts are misses from a painter's point of view.

I've missed them on occasion. It drives me nuts :(

They are especially common when it's a brand new model, and you've never worked with the sprue before. This photo also is a recent missed mold line that I didn't catch until near model completion (I left it). To Skink's point, too, look at how crappy and sloppy the edge highlighting (near that missed mold line) looks when I zoom it up to 24MP size -- but I assure you, when you look at the model "for real", that's a sharp looking line (if this were a display instead of a play model, though, I would have probably tidied it up more perfectly, regardless, though).

 heartserenade wrote:
I think the point was missing mold lines or disconnected parts are misses from a painter's point of view.

Didn't we ascertain that there weren't visible mould lines on that sigmarine and it was just being viewed from an angle that made a seam in the leather look like a mould line?

As for the disconnected arm, I think that was just unfortunate, I imagine it was probably fine when it left the modeller's desk and it came apart between when it was finished being painted and when the actual photo was taken and no one noticed before it went to printing. You can probably blame the photographer or editor for it and I'm sure there was someone along the line who got blamed for it


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Talys wrote:
I've missed them on occasion. It drives me nuts :(

They are especially common when it's a brand new model, and you've never worked with the sprue before. This photo also is a recent missed mold line that I didn't catch until near model completion (I left it). To Skink's point, too, look at how crappy and sloppy the edge highlighting (near that missed mold line) looks when I zoom it up to 24MP size -- but I assure you, when you look at the model "for real", that's a sharp looking line (if this were a display instead of a play model, though, I would have probably tidied it up more perfectly, regardless, though).

Spoiler:

The first thing I do when I take a photo of a model is to resize it If it's a "table top standard" model I usually resize it to around 1 to 1.5 times the actual size, if it's a model I intend to show off, maybe 2x it's actual size. The stuff on the GW site is often zoomed in 3 or 4 times its actual size.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
I've found formula one cars especially to be the MOST tedious scale kits in existence.

Try having a go at Fine Mold's 1/72 scale Millennium Falcon and its 900+ part count. Every single greeblie on the surface of that ship is an individual part, just like when ILM kitbashed the original model in the 70s. It's daunting to assemble.

Not to mention the fact that my Tamiya paints act absolutely nothing like my GW paints, which necessitates different painting techniques right off the bat.

I love Tamiya paints, they have such a wonderful finish.

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

Not to mention the fact that my Tamiya paints act absolutely nothing like my GW paints, which necessitates different painting techniques right off the bat.

I love Tamiya paints, they have such a wonderful finish.

Ohh, so do I. I was just pointing out that the two paint products do not behave nearly the same.

Really coincidental that I just saw this thread, as I was only chatting with a friend about this recently.

Was browsing the newer figs today and was quite surprised by what was getting into the shots without being noticed.

I'm not a skaven collector and I'm not really familiar with that model. What's that pink box highlighting?

You can actually see where they stopped highlighting the braid thinking no one would see it, then took high def pictures of without checking :(

 Ifalna wrote:
then took high def pictures of without checking :(

Ah GW proof reading at it's finest. First they can't double check reading, now they can't double check pics. lol. Good thing GW don't make cars, food or do surgery.