Saturday, February 20, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
Little Lumps of Gray Plastic: What I've Learned about Painting
OK - I apparently have a mental block against the correct spelling of the word gray (I tend to spell it grey). Forgive the spelling mistakes if I don't catch them as I go.
I stopped by Louisville Game Shop the other day on the off chance I could impulse buy (I LOVE impulse shopping - so much more fun some days) for my army and happened upon a friendly (non-tourney) game of 40k. On one side I found a beautifully painted Tyranid army fighting little lumps of gray space marines. Where the two armies melded together in assault looked like someone hand vomited gray across the board and littered with green and purple.
And this got me thinking about painting my own army, which I am sadly far behind on.
First there are these two articles: Paint to Play and Paint by Mistake which talk about at least getting a non-lump-of-gray-plastic army on the field. I'm trying to move to this philosophy of painting for the vast majority of my armies.
The bit about basing the army got me thinking then of a way to mark my units more visibly than unit markings: painting their bases . The top of the base will be green, but then most of the units that gets a base (mostly fire warriors, pathfinders, XV-8s, and kroot) will have a ring around their base with a color signifying their unit and/or stripes on that ring.
Following that I will begin designating certain models as "extra-care projects." These will all be carefully hand painted then assembled and are models that I especially care about. Mostly they will be unique models, etherials of any sort, or Forgeworld models but occasionally I may just simply want to paint a standard unit of fire warriors really well.
However I will never have any models that has at least not been moderately painted. I think in the end it'll look better than just lumps of solid color plastic - especially unpainted gray.
I stopped by Louisville Game Shop the other day on the off chance I could impulse buy (I LOVE impulse shopping - so much more fun some days) for my army and happened upon a friendly (non-tourney) game of 40k. On one side I found a beautifully painted Tyranid army fighting little lumps of gray space marines. Where the two armies melded together in assault looked like someone hand vomited gray across the board and littered with green and purple.
And this got me thinking about painting my own army, which I am sadly far behind on.
First there are these two articles: Paint to Play and Paint by Mistake which talk about at least getting a non-lump-of-gray-plastic army on the field. I'm trying to move to this philosophy of painting for the vast majority of my armies.
The bit about basing the army got me thinking then of a way to mark my units more visibly than unit markings: painting their bases . The top of the base will be green, but then most of the units that gets a base (mostly fire warriors, pathfinders, XV-8s, and kroot) will have a ring around their base with a color signifying their unit and/or stripes on that ring.
Following that I will begin designating certain models as "extra-care projects." These will all be carefully hand painted then assembled and are models that I especially care about. Mostly they will be unique models, etherials of any sort, or Forgeworld models but occasionally I may just simply want to paint a standard unit of fire warriors really well.
However I will never have any models that has at least not been moderately painted. I think in the end it'll look better than just lumps of solid color plastic - especially unpainted gray.
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