First things first, I've been toting a few minis around with me for last decade or so "just in case." A handful of 6th edition swordmasters, shadow warriors, and two heroes. Not much but very convenient when packing my life into moving boxes. I thought about painting a few years ago and got as far as stripping the shadow warriors, but that's it. So, here we are:
Not great and they've had a rough few years. The SW's were probably the ones I painted the best and I took no pictures so oh well. I plunked everything in some IPA to strip the old paint and waited. Turns out lots of layers of old Testors enamel paint doesn't quite "fall off the bone". Tried Simple Green which was more of the same story, but after a while and a toothbrush, eventually most of the old paint gave way. Considering how hard I had to scrub with a toothbrush I'm concerned about how to strip plastic models, but I guess I'll get there when I get there. Anyway, now everything is stripped and can be primed:
Black primer doesn't make for great pictures. I've been watching all the "how to speed-paint" videos which are all over youtube (hopefully completing these in fewer than 6 months), so the first step seems to be several layers of drybrushing. Got it:
Now for some color. I picked up some Army Painter Speedpaints kit after watching countless videos of "just glob it on, move it around, and it does the rest". So I decided to paint the skin first, which is when I realized none of the paints in the kit really matched the stereotypical elf skin. The first paint I tried way way too yellow, the next way too dark. I tried a few washes on a third and wound up with a Khorne Red skintone. Not ideal. So I said screw it and went on to the armor. Overall color scheme I figured a purple/white with gold armor would look nice, and I got the speedpaint kit with metallic paint in it so it was easy. Well, I globbed it on, moved it around, and quickly realized it was just regular old gold paint that had good coverage over base coats. Feeling very lied to by all the Speedpainter-shills on youtube, I decided I could probably do a rough-and-dirty NMM. Why not at this point, everything had gone poorly so might as well try. So I did a base coat of a mid brown with yellow over top, and the end result was a copper-y-bronze-kinda looking color, which I like a lot more than the regular gold color anyway. Cool beans. I threw some white and purple on (which did work as advertised), and I got this:
Hmmm. In a word, disappointing. In more words, not quite the "glittering host" High Elves are meant to be. I could go through and add highlights to try and lighten everything up, but in reality the problem is the base layers are too dark for what I want and I'll spend more time trying to highlight than starting over and figuring out what is right. I do like how the armor turned out on certain models that had more highlights, but the armor color on un-hilighted areas is... yuck. I also need to think more about white/purple so it doesn't look too dark.
Until next time...
Eventually I watched some video claiming LA's Totally Awesome is a great paint stripper, and it turns out it is and didn't damage anything. It also dissolves super glue. Given it's a useful chemical I suspect its not REACH compliant so I have no idea what you Europeans do. Anyway, I reprimed the spearelves, this time only getting a little bit of cracking, and started to paint. I've been trying different techniques and colors so they're all a bit unique but they're spear elves so it's okay as long as the shields match. I'm close to being done, I need to move them to their new bases and that's about it. I'm sure I'll get to it soon.
