The Deredeo

After a fair bit of swearing, some greenstuff and assistance from Marisa I finally built my Deredeo Pattern Dreadnought. My first Forge World Vehicle that I have purchased. Hopefully he will live up to expectations.

Eros

Eros of the Half-Pint Heartthrobs 

Deest

Deest is my converted daemon to be used as a proxy for a certain Catachan hero in my heretical guard army.

A Mentor in a Friend

One of my paintings from 2014

While I am a self-taught artist and have had moderate success in earning out of my hobby/addiction, painting miniatures was completely new to me. The skills were transferable to a degree but there was a learning curve. Painting something 3D is very different to painting a 2D picture. 

My dear friend Ben, a passionate miniature painter, taught me everything he knew and even lent me the DVDs that he had used to skill up over the years.

Now, in life I have not received this kind of passing down of knowledge often. People tend to be guarded or keep their skills close to their chest.  Much to my frustration when I had questions early on in the hobby, no one would give me straight answers.  I didn't know that I had to wash some plastics and resins or how to properly maintain tiny brushes.  Ben gave me all the knowledge I needed and taught me all the basics and beyond.

In April 2016 I started this journey in order to improve and through this knowledge I have ended up getting some commission work and it has made my tabletop experiences look a lot better.

The painting DVDs Ben lent me were the Dark Sword painting series.  I would highly recommend them to any novice or seasoned painter wanting to up their skill set.

After watching the first DVD I attempted to put my skills into practice and painted a Reaper Bones series miniature. My DnD character was a goliath rogue, so I wanted to make her look good for the session.  I used a 2p coin for the base and mixed my colours to create highlights.

With a hint of Blood for the Blood God texture paint I was thrilled with how she came out.  After this I embarked on painting my Zombicide base set, which took a few months to finish.

Since then I haven't looked back and have painted well over four hundred miniatures in under a year, mainly sticking to fantasy or 40k miniatures but I have branched out a little bit since.

In regards to Ben and his mentoring.  I am thankful to have such a generous and enthusiastic teacher to start me off in the hobby.  If it wasn't for him my transfer into miniature painting would have taken a lot longer.

A New Hobby

Last year I started out on a new hobby.  A combination of starting to play DnD with miniatures and being re-introduced to Warhammer 40,000 led to me picking up a paintbrush and applying my skills to miniature painting.

What started out as just putting a fresh coat of paint onto minis turned into a full scale hobby and addiction, and even some commissions as my technique improved.

I actually painted my first two figures back on the 30th of December 2015.

The two at the front are my work and the one skulking at the back is Marisa's

In early January I focused on painting a handful of cheap miniatures I picked up for free at our local Games shop, Marquee Models.  On the 9th January 2016 I moved onto my Space Marines.

They were all re-based a month ago but the paint jobs remain unchanged.

After this I took it upon myself to paint a base sets worth of Zombicide Black Plague.  This was in an effort to improve my skills so that I was ready for Blood Rage.  From the 23rd of June to the 31st of August 2015, I managed to paint the entire set of zombies and a bunch of heroes (None of the starting 6).

I started with a freshly dead look. Pasty fleshy and angry.  After some time this got pretty old so I moved on to...

The carnival crew!  Day of the Deadish zombies/NPCs for DnD. I enjoyed the colour scheme but felt painting anymore would make them less special.

Deciding to go for a more zombie theme I went for the rotting green. Slightly less realistic but effective. 

On Instagram I saw some great two colour zombies. I decided to try two individuals to see how they turned out.  I was pretty happy and when I get back to painting the extra kickstarter zombies, I shall paint a few more like this.

Once I only had a few zombies left I realised that none of the zombies were particularly horrible. I decided to make a handful look like they had been feasted upon.

These two fellas were customised with spare parts from a Bolt Action unit. the miner's pick and the backpack make them stand out from the norm a little.

Finally I needed some ghosts for DnD so I came up with this ghost colour scheme using a green wash on white.  Possibly the quickest painting process but it looks pretty effective. 

Once the characters and zombies were complete I took an indefinite break from Zombicide and moved onto the huge host of other projects that I had piling up.  They taught me a lot of different techniques and I feel that my skills progressed leaps and bounds.