Edge Highlights (or Neil paints figures after 32 years)

Neil Gow

Demi-God
Some of you might be aware that a couple of years ago I cast off the pretensions of my youth and started drawing and painting again. When I was a kid, despite being 'quite good' at the art thing, I convinced myself that (a) pencilling was for losers and (b) reference was for losers and therefore if I couldn't draw like George Perez from memory with inks, I was crap. Hence a very short hobby lasting one day.

Well, like many I have been tempted back to the miniature painting hobby during lockdown. (As an aside, I hate how this particular subset of the general gaming hobby has turned the word hobby from noun into a verb. So you settle down at night to 'hobby' - what a crock of shit)

It has been an interesting process. Painting has changed. No longer did you just have three methods to master - undercoat, wash, drybrush - but now you have base coats, shades, layers, glazes, highlighting, inks, technical paints and more. Fucking air brushes for minis! Anyway, what I lacked in acute eyesight from 18 yo me, I make up for now in disposable income, so I have been steadily noodling away at the figures I somehow have acquired around the house.

And in so doing, I have unleashed the Demon of 1989! That horrible self-doubt that sits on your shoulder and taunts you for not being as good as other people, especially those internet people, and those Youtube people and .... oh f**k off Demon of 1989. I'm not some wet-behind-the-ears 18 yo anymore.

So I asked the Guvnor if he had any figures he wanted painting, so I could practice on something other than Stormcast Eternals and Orks. And he did. I knew he did. Bwahahaha. Notice the word there though - practice. Free painting as I tried some stuff out.

He delivered in one of those doorstep COVID handovers that wouldn't have looked out of place in East Germany in the 70s, a couple of sets of Universal Spacecraft by eM-4 miniatures and some Hobgoblins by local good eggs, Midlam Miniatures. And I painted, and he was pleased.

And then he let me loose on them. And then he suggested I post the pictures here. I was initially reluctant (see above Demon of 1989) but you know what? f**k it.
 
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So these are the hobgoblins. They're the first metal minis I have painted since I restarted and threw up some challenges, like paint chipping. Nothing that some matt varnish couldn't solve. I also wanted to try something different from the standard GW style of painting that you see online. Up close they look really messy to me, but under the 'two-foot rule' (ie.what do they look like on the table?) they're canny.

They have a faintly Japanese aesthetic to them, So I went for red and bronze armour with another idea that the more magic you had, the more colourful your clothes should be. Archers... not colourful. Skull on stick boy? All the colour
 

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And these are the spaceships. I had a load of fun doing these as each big set had a different theme; honestly Not-Cylons were the easiest to do, the sleek almost modern military look of the blue-and-silver was an interesting palette. The most fun, however, was easily the faux-Rebel Alliance ships, as I weathered them a lot to make them look like desperate old rust buckets on their last legs.
 
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I am so pleased, what a lucky boy I am to have such a great friend. When those hobgoblins murder @Vodkashok's characters in games we will share a frisson of schoolchildren joy.

Now, where are those space combat rules?
 
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