Spyglass Miniatures...

I hadn't really planned this blog to be a shameless promotional engine for my work, more a place for me to mutter incoherently about whatever minis stuff I like but occasionally these things cross over so I hope you'll forgive me announcing that I've set up a new website for Spyglass Miniatures. Initially the main idea was to have a place to sell my new 28mm Monk and the other bits I'm currently working on and I really think Eolith, the other brand name I've used, is more associated with 54mm.

But, I can hopefully saunter over to a relevant side of things as I've painted my new monk and he was an interesting process that harks back to previous blog posts. Yay for vague relevance. It's my excuse and I'm sticking to it...

Here he is by the way.



Painting him was a curious process. I had one resin casting of him so I kind of had to get him right not having any useful stuff about the house for stripping resin. He was to be painted with my recent wash techniques and I tried a slightly different approach as I'm still developing the best way to make the technique work. Went with white undercoat this time and I ended up with a rather grainier basecoat that didn't take the wash so well. Wasn't awful but lacked the quality I'd been pushing for. So I ended up repainting a few bits. In the end I was never going to get the result I wanted inside the normal way I work with the basecoat double wash technique so I had to improvise...

And here we get to a new painting tip.

I decided to re-highlight the figure. This is the normal way of working with these washes but I find it's a tough one to pull off as it can look harsh and I love the subtle effect of the washes. Still, the fig needed it. So, I tried something new. I ixed a highlight colour basically the same as the original basecoat and then I added wash to the paint to achieve several things. Firstly the wash tints the paint below it so the highlight colour is a tough one to judge. Mixing the wash and the paint makes it much easier to amtch and get a a matching tone. You need quite a lot of wash in the paint as the pigmentation is so low. But this has a side advantage. The washes have enough body that they don't ridiculously thin the paint and they also add to the transparency nicely so it makes for a great paint on highlight without chalkiness or stepping. This made life rather nice to be honest.

The Monk ended up taking the best part of two hours though a lot of that was wasted motion. He's probably an hour or so paintjob if I'd planned this from the start. Came out quite nicely anyway...

And rounding back to my announcement, you can find my new online store at...

Spyglass Miniatures