Saturday, May 11, 2019

How to Start Painting Minis

It's been ages since I posted anything on painting minis. This post happened because one of the Facebook groups I'm in had someone brand new asking how to get started. They were overwhelmed with the number of YouTube videos and was looking for help with the basics.

Note - they had already bought a paint set that comes with paints, washes, and brushes. I don't advertise here so I'm not giving the brand name but it's very popular for that exact reason - their sets come with what's needed to paint armies. They do also work for individual minis so don't be turned off by the name.

Years ago I used to teach beginning painting at a local convention. We had two hour class slots. My intention was that everyone who took my class would take home a finished mini. Maybe not varnished but at least fully painted and ready for the table. That's quite a goal to achieve with people who have never painted a mini before.

Everyone in my class - regardless of age - left with a mini they had painted and were proud to show off. It literally brought a tear to my eye when they were all excited about what they had done and doing more of it in the future. I had accomplished my goal!

A little bit of snark. One other person really wanted to teach beginning painting as well. He got one of the three classes. I had one of the people who took it at a game I ran later. They got about halfway through their minis and would have to go back to finish them. It's obvious he and I took different approaches in our teaching.

If I don't already have a post about the higher level painters and their issues with teaching low level painters I will be writing one. It's not a slam on those painters at all. It's about being able to 'reach down' to the level of the students and not do things that are second nature once you reach levels of skill.

Anyway. To continue.

My class included a handout going over everything we did, some basic color theory, and additional reading at the end that went into more detail about things I knew I couldn't to justice to in two hours while trying to teach. I had pre-painted my minis to each step so I had an example but wasn't painting and teaching at the same time. I wrote the handout as I progressed through the steps.

The resulting mini is just fine for tabletop. There's no fancy eyes or attempts to layer colors. There's no fine detail work. It's a nice mini and has the people learning the very foundations of painting - color choice, brushwork, shadows and highlights, etc. The extra material goes a bit more into choosing colors, painting the five difficult colors (red, black, white, yellow, and purple), choosing and caring for brushes, and basing. Not bad in seven pages, I admit.

Here's a link to that document. There's no pictures since it was designed to be used in combination with in-person teaching and without knowing what minis I would get for my classes. At the time I was teaching I could request minis and I chose carefully for ones that weren't cluttered up with junk. Without knowing what people are trying to paint it's safer to leave those out.

The link!

Beginner Mini Painting

I've revised it slightly to remove references to the local paint group and add YouTube as a resource. I also cleaned up some typos and generally revised it to be more generic. It had been a while since I looked at it and I hadn't made it public before.

So please. Enjoy the reference if you're looking to get into mini painting or know people who want to do it but think they don't have the skill. I had kids under age ten finish their minis as well as their parents. It can be done. It's not anything to use in a painting competition. But they look darn nice on the gaming table.

Sunday, May 5, 2019

A Very Productive Weekend

It wasn't as productive as I hoped but I'm very happy with what I got done.

First off - basing sand for miniatures. Long, long ago I bought a pound of something called 'decor sand' at a garden store. It was sand with a mixed grade of granules so there was some really nice variety in there. I used it on my minis to much success. But then I ran out. I couldn't find anything local and made a make-do mix of sand and talus.

When I went back to the Midwest for a friend's wedding a few years ago I went back to the store with the intention of bringing home several pounds of it. Sadly they no longer carried it.

I continued to limp along until I saw one of DM Scotty's videos where he recommends construction sand for that exact thing - far more irregular mix of sand for basing. I was happy!

Construction sand only comes in forty pound tubes. That's a lot of sand. I did get a broken one at a seventy percent discount and it sat in the trunk of my car for months. Mostly because I literally had no way to carry it to the apartment. It was very precariously bagged.

Finally this weekend I used the sifter I printed (I checked the manufacturer's description and found that the largest grit was far larger than I liked for minis and printed a sieve of appropriate size) and separated all the sand. I had to do it over two days because I ran out of storage containers and because it was getting dark on Saturday.



On the left, basing sand. On the right, rocks. Underneath, sixteen inch paving stones to go under the upgraded 3D printers and a broken cut-off wheel from the next listed project.

Yeah. I'm going to have to find a home for a lot of this sand. Because I have way too much of it even with the number of minis I need to paint. I'm still debating about that. There were a surprisingly small amount of rocks in the mix which makes me happy. It still leaves a lot of sand.

Next up was shelf support. The shelves I put in the craft/sewing/office room didn't have enough dividers. I used an extra set to add a level above what the intended size was so I really can't blame them. The top shelves were always intended to hold army transports both empty and full so that was going to need to be fixed.

I bought a four inch diameter pipe from Home Depot and needed to cut it down to the correct size. That pipe sat in the room for months. The shelves sagged more and more. This weekend it was remedied. The pipe was cut (combination of Dremel and hand saw) and the cut edge smoothed and chamfered. With only moderate profanity it was wedged into place and the shelving unit is now complete.

Before:

After:
Scary sag gone. I made sure the size would be enough to span all of the shelves and support them equally. No more worries about the top layer collapsing and the shelves breaking, much less what would happen to what was on them.

Next up was 3D printer related. One of the fans died and the replacement fan I had didn't have the correct connector. Correct fan, not correct connector. The solution is to solder the new fan onto the old cable. It's a known solution and not something that bothers most people. You can buy fans from 3D printer stores with the correct connector in place but I got mine from Amazon. I'd been putting off the project because I just didn't want to do it. That and my soldering skills are somewhat rusty.



Solder and heat shrink tube later and I have the new fan ready to be put into the printer. This is the one thing I didn't get done that I had planned. I was going to reassemble the printer and yes, I could have done it instead of writing this very long blog post. But I know my state of mind and would rather not have tried to reassemble it tonight. I know my limits. I'll do it this week after work one day.

Those are various and sundry 18mm miniatures I've printed along with a very handy nipper for cutting filament at the right angle to load into the printer. I printed that too - except the razor blade inside. It's also darn good at nipping incautious fingers.

Last but not least was something for me to do while I had all the stuff out to cut the support pipe. A future as of yet not disclosed project needs a rubber squeegee. It needs a small rubber squeegee. Shopping for the correct kind of rubber squeegee (I like the word 'squeegee' it seems) had me asking if I was in the wrong line of work.

Ingenuity to the rescue.

This is 3 squeegees cut down from a dollar store bathroom shower squeegee. They will work exactly the same and cost significantly less. Even better is that I can replace them very quickly.

So that was my productive weekend. I also made a trip to the not-so-local but much friendlier game store to buy the new Chessex dice that were released last week. As I warned them I ended up not buying two of the styles because they weren't attractive enough for me. These dice have swirls of color and it's very subjective. I did get two sets of another style (one to leave as-is for the collection, one to repaint the numbers a more pleasing color) and two sets from the case. One set is trade/sale fodder, the other is a nicer version of one I already have.

It might not sound like much but I did more this weekend than I've done in a very long time. I even spent a little time on the stationary bike in the apartment complex fitness room to try to make my knee feel better after standing at the trunk of my car sifting sand for far too long. It worked, along with the heating pad after.

I'm very proud of what I accomplished and the tasks I finished. I didn't just do things - I finished them. All the sand is sifted and my car trunk has been emptied. The support piece has been properly cut and finished then wedged into the shelves. Actually finishing tasks is something I'm not great at  so doing so many of them in one block of time is something I'm going to put in the win column.

And during all that I had an idea for the blog to make more content that wasn't 3D printer related. I'll have to polish up the idea and see how it flies. Stay tuned. Better yet, follow.