The Beginning - Act 5 Scene 3

In which a second hero joins the fray

A free afternoon, and on to my second practice marine. This time I intend to learn some of the lessons of the past, and use my new colours. Specifically:

1. Using a blue ink for shading the armour, and
2. Using a proper gold and not trying to mix it with non-metallics

As per marine 1, I started with the base layers:

I think the neatness has improved marginally, but the speed hasn't. The new gold base layer looks a lot better to my eyes, but I've used a too-pink paint for the belt this time - it looks less like leather and more like human skin. Not exactly the look I was going for on my honourable hero of the Imperium... Onto the shading.

Hmmm. The colour does look more natural, and the paint did flow better over the larger panels, but the final result is a bit shiny. I'm hoping that will reduce as I add the layering and highlighting.

Time's up for today, but I've already learnt a few new lessons:

Lesson 1: paint dries out really fast on a ceramic tile under lights; I frequently had to make up more paint before I'd finished a coat (particularly on large areas) which caused inconsistent water/paint mix and quality problems where drier and wetter paints met. I need to try using a wet palette.

Lesson 2: if I use the same water pots for metallic and non-metallic paint I end up with shiny flecks in all the paints I mix up. I should use separate water pots for both brush washing and paint thinning pots for metallic and non-metallic paints (so 4 water pots in total!).

Lesson 3: there's no ctrl-z in painting miniatures. I work in IT and my instant reaction to an error is to hit the "undo" key combination; that feature encourages rapid typing and editing - but in painting there is no "undo". Fixing mistakes takes time and sometimes just looks plain bad. I must take my time and try to get it right first time.