Friday 24 February 2012

Painting Blood Bowl miniatures

I've been trying to spend some time away from my computer lately - which is quite difficult since it's not only my work, but my hobby and most of my other hobbies (electronics, music etc) use a computer somewhere along the line too.

Since working on my Blood Bowl electronic clone, I've been looking at miniature-based war games. I never understood them, nor was I particularly interested in the whole dragons-and-wizards games, even when I was a teenage nerd-bag baby (listening to Iron Maiden, baby). But I always thought that Blood Bowl was a good game in it's own right - or rather, it could be, if it wasn't for all that pesky dice-rolling and looking up results.

One thing I have found, however, is that I can wield a tiny 000 paintbrush quite well. I'm not up to Games Workshop Golden Demon, professional painting standard, but I do seem to be able to blob colours in roughly the right places on a miniature. So I'm trying to develop my own painting style. I can't be bothered with all those washes and blending and teeny-tiny details, but I do quite like my thick black outlines and the "toon shading" finish on these models


So this is going to be my signature style. Van Gogh had his, Escher and Matisse had theirs. This is mine. Two-tone shading and thick black outlines; miniatures that look like they've been coloured in using a set of children's felt-tipped pens. I'm still building up my range of paints, so I've a couple of miniatures on the go while I'm waiting for different shades to arrive in the post. Here's an Orc "thrower" started in my new "toon shading" style:


(the colours on the actual model are much more vivid and vibrate - my camera-phone obviously isn't very good with garish bright colours!)

While I'm actually enjoying regressing back to my 14-year-old self doing this sort of painting, I still can't wait to get the models painted and actually see them being used in an electronic Blood Bowl game!

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