Ye Olde Inn

This thread made me think of something... Quick question:

How many here painted the barbarian first and the dwarf last (of the heroes)?

That's exactly what I did. Barbarian first, Dwarf last. Can't remember if I did the elf before wizzy, or the other way round.

I haven't painted any one of them.
But late at night I hear those funny moans when the Elf is trying to paint the Wizard.

I think it may have something to do with the Barbarian feeling like the easiest model to paint when you are just starting -- after all, he's mostly one colour (skin), so what could go wrong, right? Of course this is nonsense, so I only learned my mistake after covering the model in screaming pink -- see the previous page for that.

Conversely, the Dwarf can be painted to look okay-ish with relatively little fuss, but I'd say it's pretty hard to make him look good. The Elf is probably the most straightforward model of the bunch, making for a great entry as long as you are at least reasonably handy with a brush. The open pose really helps. It would be the same with the Wizard, but the fact that you just know you have to do something crazy and magical with him makes him more intimidating.

But that's all with the benefit of hindsight, of course -- back then, I started with the Barbarian because I thought he would be fairly simple. I was wrong, and my modern paintjob only barely managed to salvage the ruined model

Oh, and I also allowed myself to have some fun with one of the models and replicate a fun weapon swap I saw in the gallery here in the forum, I believe.

where is that zombie axe coming from?
To paint strip the chaos warriors you can try Dettol. You can put miniatures in for days and it will not damage the plastic. It works very fine with many paints

Nice job on stripping the paint. "I love the smell of Dettol in the morning!"

That zombie weapon swap is brilliant in its simplicity. And yeah, that sculpt is still great thirty years later.

Cheers for the feedback, guys!

@ lestodante: That axe came from the old plastic Warhammer Skeletons. Their weapons have that clunky design that fits the HeroQuest look very well, and I still had a few weapon arms in my bitzbox.

As for stripping paint off models, I have mostly been using a German brand of floor cleaner, which I prefer because it doesn't strip the skin off your hands In some cases, however, no amount of scrubbing and stripping will do any good, and that chaos warrior seems to have been one of those cases...

...which is why the cheeky guy jumped the queue when it came to painting: I simply had to check whether or not I could salvage the model. So here he is:





I decided to go for something resembling the art on the monster card, rather than trying to replicate the classic Mike McVey paintjob -- I am simply not enough of a pro painter for that, and all the designs on the classic paintjob also seem a bit busy to me. Anyway, I am really happy with how the model has come out, even if there are one or two areas where I'll definitely want to be a bit neater on the other chaos warriors.

Also, a small addendum on the matter of painting the hero models: Like I said, I think the Dwarf is the character that can be made to look reasonably good with a couple of very basic techniques, which is why I still kina like my original paintjob:



Granted, it's still a pretty terrible paintjob by modern standards, but if you compare it to my incredibly bad first attempts at painting the Barbarian and Wizard on the first page of this thread, this little guy looks like I was almost onto something for the first time

Anyway, let me know what you think"!

Haha, Metalbeard!

Your Chaos Warrior is a beauty!

I love that Chaos Warrior, seems you only used 3 colors (red, orange and a dark wash) for the armour, but it looks very nice. Good use of the colors.
I confess I am a bit envy of you guys that are able to paint miniatures so fast, I need a lot of time just to re-organize my painting table each time.

lestodante wrote:I love that Chaos Warrior, seems you only used 3 colors (red, orange and a dark wash) for the armour, but it looks very nice. Good use of the colors.
I confess I am a bit envy of you guys that are able to paint miniatures so fast, I need a lot of time just to re-organize my painting table each time.

I have organized my painting table 6 or 7 times during the last 15 months.
During the same time, I've painted two minitures. Yes, two.

I've become lazy since they made me a boss. I wonder if that's usual...

EDIT: It also just came to me that BOTH THESE FIGURES WERE THE SAME FIGURE...