Figure Painting

Figure Painting 

Back in January I decided I needed to find a new hobby. Work is always slow during the winter months, so I knew I had to find something to keep me busy for a while. For Christmas a friend asked me what I wanted, and I told him I wanted a paint set. I used to paint miniatures over 20 yrs ago (and still have all my miniatures), but I had long lost interest and skill sets for doing them. I was tired of my players destroying the paint jobs that went into them and several moves over the years hadn't been kind to my collection. I always wished that they would just put out some good plastic pre painted miniatures that lasted.

Low and behold, many, many years later, Wizards of the Coast Minis were born and I was once again buying tons of them. The thing I HATED was having to blow large sums of cash on a box of crap in the hopes of getting a decent monster figure. I never liked having to do this because the whole point for me as a DM wasn’t about building a collection for collection sake or what it might be worth to a collector. It was about building up my miniature collection so I could have all the creatures that were presented in the Monster Manuals.  So it was off to E-bay to spend even more sums of cash just to fill out the “rare” pieces I needed. Now I have a decent collection of minis to cover most creatures in the core books. But damn, it took a while and too much dough.

But, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve had this nostalgia for old school again and part of old school isn’t minis its metal miniatures. So, once again I decided to get back into painting miniatures. I had plenty left in my collection unpainted, and found a lot more on line I liked. I purchased the large Citadel paint set and painting supplies from my local gaming store and I was off…

With a few refresher courses from one of my players, I was back in business again. I use You Tube to get painting tips from other painters to try and improve my style. Some of the those paint jobs are insanely good, but mine aren’t bad. I actually kind of like the simple paint jobs from my earlier work. It seems to fit my old Heritage, Grenadier and Ral Partha miniatures. Here are a few things I’ve painted so far….

This was the first thing I painted- a bear ( or were bear- most likely)

Two torch bearers and a sorceress

The Firebat - I added the fire after I painted it

The Mimics

The Stirges

Carrion Crawler

Pillars of Death

The Demon Idol ( AD&D Players Handbook)