Paint Your Minis

The first mini I did repainted. Original on the right.

I realized that I was resisting getting into mini painting out of fear of Doing It Wrong, because every "how to paint minis" website lists some gawdawful complex (and often mutually exclusive from site to site) set of steps and specific paints and brushes and glues and paint strippers and so on and if you don't use these exact products your minis will catch fire and explode and your family will catch the plague.

Original on the left. This one turned out... acceptable.

So, earlier this year, I just said "screw that", pulled out the paints I had inherited and bought for art class and the smallest brush I happened to own, and just went to town without regard for Doing It Right. (My family still has yet to catch the plague.)

The one in the middle is completely repainted. The one on
the left only has his quilted padding repainted. The one on
the right is the original.

The paint I happened to have -- mostly Galeria and Americana acrylics -- are apparently adequate to the purpose of mini-painting, and have served my needs just fine so far. When I run out of these, I may buy paints intended specifically for models.

Original grimlock on the right. Original goblin and
gravedigger on the left. Just repainted details, mostly.

Mostly, I've just been repainting the minis I happen to have doubles of. I repainted one of my dark-skinned minis with light skin, purely to make it easier to tell her apart from her dark-skinned doppelgänger, but I felt bad about it, because my mini collection has so few dark-skinned people (who aren't orcs) to begin with. But I repainted the next light-skinned double I got with dark skin, so hopefully it balanced out. I think I'm more concerned about this than is absolutely necessary.

Original on the left. The one on the right is black to make
up for repainting the earlier mini light-skinned.

I never noticed how many of my minis had eyes that are the same colour as their faces. Now they have actual eyes. The worst offender was my Tundra Scout, in part because each eye is as big as most minis' entire heads. Now my woolly mammoth has eyes instead of blank brown spots.

Original snake and beetle on the left. Original runespiral
demon on the right. Repainted the orangutan's rock, and his
Lasertron token to match.

So my advice to you: don't fuss about it, just get out your brushes and your paints and get painting. It's remarkably soothing. (Maybe if you don't happen to have brushes and paints, you can fuss a little bit about which ones to buy, but try not to fuss too much.)

I didn't repaint the Cap'n, but I did repaint his Lasertron
token to match the wave he's riding. I was pleased with
how closely I got it to match.

I also got a whole bunch of Ziploc bags and a Sharpie and organized my minis by Type and Subtype: "Misc Humanoids & Monstr Humanoids", "Animals, Plants, & Vermin" (because I only have a few of each), "Aberrations & Outsiders" (sometimes hard to tell apart, so they just get a shared one), "Oozes, Undead, & Constructs", "Humans & Elves" (again, sometimes hard to tell apart), "Dragons and [Reptilian]s", "Orcs & Goblinoids" (and also a cyclops), "Dwarves & Short Ppl" (including gnomes, halflings, and other human-like Small creatures), "Tokens" (leftover bases and Lasertron tokens), and "PCs" (so I don't have to go rooting through several different bags at the beginning of every session). So I recommend doing something like that, too.