Behold the greatest road block of every artist

Every creative has a massive road block that they start with when it comes to their art, hobby or craft. What is it? Nothing… Behold the greatest road block of the miniature hobbyist…

Missing my point? okay… let’s get into it.

Here is the issue, you don’t start with a blank canvas you start with a box of models on a sprue, with art done by a professional artist who has honed their craft and their style specifically for creating the best artwork they can for selling models.

These models are unassembled but just remember if you don’t drill your barrels or clear your model lines there will be people who will specifically comment on your stuff and mock you because for some reason that’s the kind of people the hobby attracts. (If you are looking for the opposite of that, people who will encourage people and a positive environment try here WAYPN)

Now try painting on a scale that is so tiny that many people outside of this hobby have trouble imagining it… And don’t you dare use the wrong colours because some very special person will tell you how you painted your art project wrong… (did I mention WAYPN?)

You do not start with a blank canvas

Now does that mean you can’t flip the script and use totally different parts? Does it mean you cannot paint them however you want? No of course not, in fact I encourage it!

All I am doing is stating facts…
Some people don’t like when you do that.

Now the issue is this, what you are comparing to consciously or unconsciously is the box art, you aren’t creating from nothing and you have to work with parts rather than from whole cloth, the figments of your imagination or a blank canvas. This can be a great thing. I think before starting a project get yourself a mood board but that is a totally different thing.

Now onto the topic (Finally they scream…) when does your paint job start looking like a proper paint job? Here is one of mine stop at the image and say when you think it is looking like a proper paint job.

Not here… it was stripped clean

My bet is that it wasn’t until the last three pictures… If you are going to do as most people do and block in everything before you even start working on a single area, especially with the over-complicated Warhammer models…

Its the 90% problem

It’s not until 90% of the model is done do you have a good idea of how it will look or if will you start to be happy with it

You may be spending as much as four hours on a single model before you even know if you like the colour combinations you like and you still may not know because of how you planned to highlight something…

So what do you do?

Well there are a number of options.

Tutorials/Pre-planning
Faster painting methods
Be aware

So you can look up tutorials on how you want to paint up the models if someone already has the techiques down pat you just follow some steps and you will get the result that is presented (hopefully). However this is a bit limited.

The alternative is to create a mood board of what exactly it is you want.

Have a series of images from art and from painted images so that you are able to understand where it is you want to go and you have a much stronger idea of what will and won’t work so you don’t have to do a lot of experimenting. You can say I can use this bit from here, that bit from there and just go for it.

Faster painting methods

Using contrast paints, dipping models, drybrushing or any other number of ‘hacks’ that make your mini finished more quickly, that is a great way of getting around this problem… HOWEVER…

These aren’t ‘hacks’ they are styles. Contrast paints and other such things will get you a certain types of results so just remember that. If you like how that looks and it helps you get stuff on the table quicker absolutely fantastic…

IF you like that. If you don’t it’s not a solution.

Be Aware

Long before G.I Joe was a show and well before this was a meme on the internet, there was a much older meme, in the traditional sense of a meme a memetic transfer of information which was…

Trust the process

Now just being aware, ‘trusting the process’ and any number of ways of saying the exact same thing, well that has its own issues. However, it is probably the best way just to realise that if I want to experiment, try new things, I have to give myself some time because if don’t I set myself up for failure.

And that ladies and gents is the 90% problem. I hope for you it helps you understand an aspect of miniature painting that perhaps you didn’t think about before. And in the wise words of Shia LaBeouf

“If you are sick of starting over stop giving up”

Until I see you, next time friends.

Keep those brushes wet

The 90% problem