Well, where to start? 2019 was the year I properly got back into the hobby. My interest was piqued way back in 2011 and I dipped my toe in and out here over the next 8 (?!) years without ever fully committing. That all changed in 2019. One of the biggest reasons I finally managed to become a fully-fledged miniature painter again was clearing out the spare room in our house. We have a box room that was previously just used as a dumping ground. It was the room where we put everything we didn't know where else to put. I changed jobs back in February and had a week off so I cleared the room out, put a shelf up and set it up as my hobby room. Having a dedicated space really made a difference. One of the reason's I never used to have the motivation to do any painting was because I couldn't be to get all of my stuff out of a cupboard and put it all away again once I was finished. The other big thing this year was setting up this blog and my Instagram account. Being able to t...

Something I've really struggled with is getting decent photos of my miniatures. I'm not a photographer by any stretch of the imagination but getting good lighting in my house to be able to get even a respectable photo from my iPhone has been a real problem (god bless Instagram filters!). In order to try and rectify this. I've bought a collapsible light box from eBay. Now, this thing only cost £6.99, so I'm not expecting to all of a sudden start taking incredible photos straight away, but after a couple of tests I'm pretty pleased. As you can see from the above picture, it hasn't been unfolded for very long, so the sides are still bending inwards. I'm also not sure I've put the white backing sheet thing in properly (the instructions aren't the best). I need to get in quite close to the miniatures to stop the holes in the corners from being visible. Here are a few pictures I've taken using it though. They're all models I've posted ...

OK, so he's not quite  finished, but I'm calling it. I've already spent far too long on what was supposed to be a bit of a practice model. The cloak isn't complete (especially at the back) and I've left the face as just base-coat plus shade and that will do for now. I'm really happy with the red and the yellow and the gold looks OK. I've learned a lot and tried out some techniques I'd never tried before so all in all I think this has been a positive experience. But it's a shame I didn't get him done to the level I wanted him to. That cloak just killed me. Turns out blending is really hard! Definitely something I'm going to have to practice in isolation. I've spent so long fiddling with it and adding new layers that it's got to the point now that brush strokes and paint crumbs are starting to show and if I keep going I'm just going to ruin the whole thing. I think my problem is that before this guy, the vast majority of mo...

Just a quick update this week. I've been mad busy recently and have found it really hard to make time for any painting. I have managed to give Shazam a wash though! I started by giving him a couple of coats of Vallejo gloss varnish through my airbrush. I was pretty worried going in as it's something I'd never done before but overall it was really easy. Gloss varnish is tricky, it's hard to know when it's actually dry because it always looks wet. It seemed to dry pretty easily though. I haven't tried to use my airbrush again since so time will tell if I've knackered it! Next I applied some Citadel washes: Seraphim Sepia for the yellows and golds, Reikland Fleshshade for the skin and Nuln Oil for the grey cape. I really didn't like the way the Nuln Oil looked so I spent a bit of time touching it up with Celestra Grey. I'm still not 100% happy with it but I've got time to fix it. Finally, I used an oil wash for the first time. I had a tu...

I've finally got my paints out and made a start on Shazam. Feels good to finally get going with painting a miniature! I even got my airbrush out. I've played around a bit with airbrushing but I've never really got to grips with it. I still don't really feel like I know what I'm doing. I'm happy with how this turned out though. For an undercoat I used Vallejo surface primer. I started out with black and then did a zenithal highlight with white. I then used Citadel Air paints to get the reds down. I started with an all over coat of Khorne Red, I then applied Mephiston Red to the front and top of the model, followed with Evil Sunz Scarlet from above. Finally, I blocked in the rest of the base coats. These were Averland Sunset for the yellows, Celestra Grey for the cloak, Retributor Armour for the golds, Cadian Fleshtone for the skin and Abaddon Black for the hair. The only other thing I've done so far it to paint the base. I think it looks p...

This is my fourth blog post, and so far in all of my previous posts I've used some variation of the phrase "...as I mentioned in my last post..." and it's already starting to annoy me. Hopefully once I get going with painting properly this will stop and my posts will be a bit more independent from each other. Anyway, as I mentioned in my last post, before I get going with my Blood Angels company I decided to take a little detour and paint a single miniature that would be a bit of fun and hopefully let me practice some new techniques (mainly, painting red). Well that miniature is none other than...Shazam! I got the inspiration to paint this guy after watching Scott over at Miniac on YouTube paint him. If you haven't already checked out Miniac I really can't recommend him enough. Scott has a ton of videos demonstrating pretty much every technique out there and he's a really funny and charismatic guy. I watch all of his videos and this one really caugh...