Retail is already starting in on the XMas theme… so why not here too?

Here are a couple before & after pictures of some Dwarfs I started long ago. I wasn’t happy with the gritty-looking primer job (the white primer I used didn’t aerate as well as the GW Chaos Black spray primer), and the base colors I used were slopped on pretty badly. Now that I’m pretty much out of models that are already shaved & primed & ready for paint, I went back to finish this large group of Thunderers.

Those on the left are the general starting point for all of the Thunderers I have with a base layer. The gents on the right are how they look after finishing the paint job — Not my best work, but significantly better than before!

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Some of the tings I wasn’t originally happy with, and what has changed:

  • The skin tone was WAY too orange. I’ve now got a great selection of flesh tones, and used a pale flesh color since these guys are from the frozen northernmost Dwarf Kingdoms
  • I didn’t have good highlight colors for red & green. I’ve got a much larger selection of paints in general now, and some better techniques for painting them
  • I only had one type of silver/gunmetal at the time I started them. Now I have various shades of silver that make the guns look better.

Very early in my painting career, I was pretty ambitious about theme-painting a large batch (20!) of Dwarf Thunderers as “Santa Shooters”. I got through the base paint layer, and I think I tired of doing the same color for an entire evening on a batch of minis, then realizing I needed to touch up a previous color on one model or missed an entire part of a model with a color, etc. All of the pitfalls of painting multiple miniatures at once. At any rate, I got through the base color layers of this batch of Dwarfs and gave up on them for a while (with the intent of eventually getting back to them). In the meantime other models were purchased and painted, “fixing” the terrible paint job on these guys slipped down the painting priority list.

I finally got of my duff and picked up 3 of them to be cleaned up, and the results were actually pretty good. The next 3 days will be close-ups of these finished Thunderers!