What a busy month I have had! I played two weekend games (not complete weekends of course but Saturdays, to be more precise), ran a whole day RPG session, visited SELWG 2019 (stay tuned for the report!) and played two evening games. With all this, it’s not a big surprise that I have not made too much progress with miniature painting.
But hey, life doesn’t stop and wait for you to catch up. Lots have been going on on the market that forced me to spend a bit of my hobby budget:
Being an uncle is entertaining – you bring presents, you know all the cool stuff, and you are a lot more fun than the rest of the adults.
Since we live in the UK and my nieces (6 and 8 years old) are in Hungary, I can see them only twice a year, so I try to make every visit special and memorable. Instead of just heaping them with random gifts, I always buy something that improves their creativity or their skills. To give a few examples, we have made gypsum mermaids and butterflies and we have painted them together. I showed them how to mix colours, I explained them colour theory, and I taught them techniques like edge highlighting, drybrushing and extreme highlighting. They are always curious and receptive, and the most rewarding thing in this process is that I can see that they use what they learnt earlier.
When I first saw Games Workshop’s Nighthaunts, I knew I had to build this army. I just loved the creepy and dramatic design of these miniatures, the clever usage of hollow structures and the mist-like shapes that give them a real ethereal look. It is design at its best!
When the two technical paints (Hexwraith Flame and Nighthaunt Gloom) were released, it became even more difficult to resist them: these guys developed special paints for the Nighthaunts! The reviews were all positive and I also found a bunch of amazing photos online. All you need is a white basecoat, a layer of these technical paints, and a bit of drybrushing or layering.
Since I also needed some ghosts for my RPG campaign and I have not seen any decent ghost miniatures anywhere else, I gave in and bought a set of Spirit Hosts.
The kit was a bit more difficult to build than I thought it would be, but it was worth it. I got a bit stuck after applying the white basecoat: Should I give them a grim look with Hexwraith Flame’s dark blue, or a more mystical look with Nighthaunt Gloom’s vibrant green? In the end, I decided to do a colour test, try my glazes, shades, and other technical paints, and pick the one that works the best.
Every story has to start somewhere… but where should I start mine?
Should I start with my decades long love of strategic games and miniatures? Or with me getting back to role-play games, both as a player and as a DM? Maybe a bit of both.
It was kind of a milestone last June when I bought the Shadespire boxed set after a long hiatus. I’ll write more in detail about this game later, for now let’s just say that it’s a tactical board game with cards and miniature figures, I love it and I really recommend it. I have always loved minis and models, and I have built and painted many of them over the past decades, so painting the Shadespire figures was beyond question.
I have to admit, the result was very far from what I imagined… Sure, it wasn’t a complete mess, it was acceptable, something I dare to call tabletop quality, but I wasn’t completely happy with it. Absolutely not… Some details were lost and some parts ended up totally different than planned. I continued with Steelheart’s Champions and the result was similar.
Steelheart’s Champions
I knew what I wanted to do with the figures, but when I was painting them, I just couldn’t work it out properly. Of course, I could blame the brushes, blame the paint and the figures, accuse every painter who had better works with doctoring the images… But let’s face it: I need more practice. So I decided to get more experience, paint more figures and use the minis for what they are meant to be used: play with them.
This blog is going to be my journal, where I record what I do, what I learn and where I track my progress…and of course, it’s also about games: role-play games, arena games, skirmish games, narrative battles!
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