The Road To Manchester: A Few Thoughts On Painting For Competitions

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

Last week the tickets for Golden Demon 2023 went on sale and, having purchased my ticket my thoughts have started to stray towards what I'm going to paint for the competition, which lead me to thinking more widely about painting competitions in general, and I thought I'd share those thoughts here.

Now, I don't claim to be any sort of expert when it comes to painting competitions but I've entered a few (with a couple of minor successes) and judged my fair share, too, and I've learned a couple of lessons along the way*. Some of this might seem blindingly obvious but you'd be surprised how easy it is to fall into these traps.

PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTHS

While it's good to push yourself in competitions (after all, you want to produce your very best work) make sure you are pushing in the right direction. A painting competition is not the time to try to learn a new technique. Do what you're good at, what is going to bring out your best work. This Ishirann Tidecaster is a good example of this. This model was my entry into the Masters' category at the 2019 Golden demons. In my wisdom, I decided to do the armour in NMM copper, something I had never tried before. Despite looking at all sort of reference I couldn't get it right, even after multiple attempts and I ended up with an overall paintjob that was compromised due to all the layers of paint I'd applied in the trying. It also took the wind out of my sails and killed my enthusiasm for the project. It's a real shame as I think the rest of the paint job holds up pretty well. the same goes for the Stormcast Eternal, which was an entry into a local competition. I spent far too long on the NMM gold and, while I was fairly pleased with the overall result (and I did actually get 1st place with it, so it can't have been entirely unsuccessful), it meant a project took twice as long as it should. In both cases, a really good true-metallic job would have looked better than a semi-successful non-metallic effort.

HAVE A PLAN AND STICK TO IT

Think about what you want to achieve. Think about the colour scheme and techniques you want to use and, if making a diorama or duel, think about the composition of your miniatures. Plan any conversions, what parts you may need, how you're going to work sub-assemblies. Planning ahead will save you time and heartache down the line. Once you've worked it out, try and stick to it. It's fair enough to adapt as you go, but deciding that you're going to change the pose or add an extra arm once you've started painting is a recipe for disaster. Again, I have a good example. This Slaanesh Champion was painted for an online Oldhammer competition. I couldn't decide on a colour scheme before starting and made it up as I went along. Again, this resulted in a couple of repaints which meant I had to rush the finish and it really didn't come out the way I wanted. 

TIME WILL FLY BY

At the time of writing, there's 6 months until Golden Demon, which sounds like plenty of time but it's amazing how quickly that time can disappear. When you're looking at projects that are going to take dozens, perhaps hundreds, of hours' work those weeks can slip by fast, especially with all the usual complications that real life can throw into the mix. There's been many a competition entry (and winner) that has been finished the day of the event itself. Again, planning your time can help avoid the stress of looming deadlines and the potential to have a project that doesn't look as good as it could. Once again, I can illustrate it with an example of my own**. On this Ogor pirate, I wanted to do more with the old leather on his jacket, adding cracks and the effect of salt water on  it, but I simply didn't have enough time to do so. While I'm pleased with the overall result, it still wasn't what I wanted it to be. 

DON'T TAKE ON TOO MUCH

This ties in with the previous point. Be realistic about what you want to do  and think carefully about what you can get done in the time you have available. While it's great to have entries in multiple categories it's better to have one amazing entry rather than two or three that have been compromised by trying to do too many projects. This also applies with online competitions. There can often be a few small competitions running concurrently and it  can be tempting to try to enter as many as possible but it's better to pick your fights more carefully. The amount of times I've had to abandon a project because I'm not going to be able to finish them all... Another aspect of this is that, while there are some out there who can focus on multiple projects at the same time and still get great results, for most of u the best outcome will be from focussing on one project from start to finish. Get one done and then see if you have time to move on to the next. Also, if you are going to do multiple projects, get the most simple one done first. There's no point spending five months working on a diorama only to realise, with three weeks to go, that you're not going to finish it in time and now you've not got time to do that single figure entry you wanted to do either...My local GW store recently held a Mini-Of-The-Month competition. I planned on entering the Skeleton, Rotmire Creed and Votann below. In the end I only managed to get the Skeleton done. The other two have ended up in the Drawer of Temporary Abandonment****

PAINT WHAT YOU WANT TO PAINT

There's always the temptation to paint what's in vogue, or the latest release, but (contrary to what many people seem to think) the judges don't base their decisions on such things- they're looking for good painting and the best way to get a good paintjob is to paint something that inspires you. So,  if you've got something in your sprue pile that you've always wanted to paint, or something that you've always had a really good idea for then go for it. You'll get a much better result that way than doing something you feel you should be doing and, just as importantly, you'll enjoy the process that much more. If the painting is a chore, you're painting the wrong thing, and you'll never be happy with it. the Ork Kommando Boss was not an obvious choice of miniature to enter, but it's long been one of my favourite miniatures and I'd always wanted to paint it, and it was probably the most fun I've ever had painting for a competition, as I just went with what felt right for the model.

IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT WINNING

This is probably the most important thing, and it ties in with all the other points I've made. Of course it's a competition, and of course the ultimate goal is to come away with a prize but that's not the be-all and end-all of why you should be entering. There's so  much more to be gained from entering than simply the wins or  losses.  Online competitions give you the opportunity to pit your work against that from painters all over the world, and to show it off to an audience of potentially thousands. In-person competitions give you the chance to meet other painters face-to-face and see the work of others up-close and personal, and there's nothing more inspirational than that. Both types of competitions offer unique opportunities for feedback and advice. Competitions also offer the chance to really push yourself and your skills and really prove to yourself what you are capable of. And, if you don't win**** they are a great learning experience, teaching you what you can do better next time.

SO WHAT ABOUT GOLDEN DEMON 2023?

Right, having rambled on enough, what am I planning on entering for the next Golden Demon? Well, as usual, I'm flouting my own rules and planning a number of pieces. I've decided to resurrect a few projects from my Drawer of Temporary Abandonment. The Night Goblin Shaman and Phobos Captain (who was going to be my entry into the Masters category at the cancelled 2020 Golden Demons*****) are going to be my Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000 Single Miniature entries, respectively, and I have a Duel planned, that I started years ago, based on the Lords of Hellstone AoS story. 

Now, whether or not these actually get done, or end up being my actual entries, is another matter. A lot can happen in six months, so we'll have to wait and see. I will be posting updates as I go along, on my Instagram. so please keep an eye out for those posts. Anyway, that's it for me on this subject, at least for now. What do you think? Do you have any thoughts on the subject, any more advice that I've missed? Please feel free to discuss in the comments. I'd love to hear your ideas. See you in Manchester on 29th April!

Thanks for reading!

Stu

*Learned them? Yes. Actually put them into practice?...Errrr...maybe not so much...

**Can you see a pattern developing?

***more on this another day

****Or even if you do...

*****It's a real shame there's no Masters category this year. I really enjoyed the unique challenge of painting a single, unconverted miniature, and it suited my way of painting really well.

The road to Coventry...part three

Okeydokeydoo, starting over.
This time, I've gone for a much thinned-down mix of Guass Blaster Green and Baharroth Blue as the base colour, stippled on randomly letting the white undercoat show through, and I'm much happier with the result.

A happy accident of the white undercoat not being 100% whiter-than-white has also allowed a little texture from the combination of white paint and grey plastic to show through, giving the whole thing a little more texture than originally planned. It doesn't really show in the photographs but you can see the subtleties in real life. I wish I could say that that's exactly as planned, but I have to be honest and say it wasn't! Still, these little occurrences are part of the painting process. Sometimes they work in your favour, sometimes not.

I've followed the basecoat up with a couple of passes of a thinned Guilliman Blue/Waywatcher Green mix to strengthen the colour, create more random patterns and to give a bit of shading to the armour. Overall it's a much more satisfactory result, and almost exactly how I'd envisioned it before painting.

Next comes the fun/horribly frustrating and time-consuming bit (delete as applicable, depending on how much you like really fiddly stuff.) I want to add a veining running all through the turquoise, so I've used a mix of the old Citadel black ink (the really opaque, nasty-tasting stuff in the transparent bolter-shell pots- Daler-Rowney do a good alternative in their FW range) and a bit of Mephiston Red. This is painted veeeewy cawefuwwy with a Citadel XS Artificier Layer brush*. The lower edges of these lines are then given a fine highlight of White Scar**.

It is a fiddly and time-consuming process but, after some hours all the armour is done. I then gave it a final glaze of REALLY thinned Guilliman Blue/Waywatcher Green to knock the white highlights back a bit and I'm calling the armour colours done. The next stage is to shade and highlight the armour to finish it off.

Finally, before I go on this entry, I've just one more picture to show. If I have time I'm going to enter another model into this year's competition in the Duel category. It's unlikely that I'll get it finished in time, so it may have to hold over into the rescheduled Age of Sigmar Open Day later in the year, but you never know...Anyway, here's a sneak preview... 😉 More soon!

* A note on brushes. I use (almost exclusively) Windsor & Newton Series 7 brushes sizes 2, 1, and 0, and occasionally a size 00 for really fine detail. I know there's all sorts of other brushes out there that everybody says are just as good and cheaper than those but I've never yet found anything that matches the Series 7s and certainly nothing that's convinced me to change. However, a while back I needed a really fine brush and couldn't wait for a new size 00 to arrive so I bought the GW brush and I have to say it's been excellent. I have a sneaking suspicion it may be a W&N S7 miniature 00 brush with a rebrand, as it seems very similar and I know that the old GW Artificier brushes were S7 rebrands...

**I use the Air version of the paint for fine highlights like this. Pre-thinned, how useful is that?

The road to Coventry...part two.

So, it's time to make a start. I'd decided what I wanted to do was to give the armour the look of real turquoise, with a bit of texture and patterning to it, and maybe a bit of marbling too. Kind of like what I did many years ago with this Dark Eldar...

So, with a mixture of stippling and sponging, using various combinations of Ahriman Blue, Baharroth Blue and Guass Blaster Green I had this:

Then I played about with some darker tones, using washes applied carefully with a sponge, leaving it looking like this:

I then painted on a couple of layers of matt varnish to smooth it over and left it a couple of days to dry. 

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Looking at it fresh a couple of days later I decided it wasn't going the way I wanted it to at all. I really wanted to introduce some marbling to it and the overall effect was too dark for that. Unfortunately, I'd put the paint on quite thick to get the textured effect and this, coupled with the layers of varnish, meant that it was not possible to simply paint over it to lighten it up so I decided to strip it and start over. It's drastic, I know, but better that than spend ages trying to salvage it and maybe having to strip it in the end. 

All is not lost, though, as it give me the opportunity to provide...

A NOTE ON STRIPPING 

It's something that comes up over and over again wherever there is discussion on miniature painting: "How do you strip the paint off your models?" and all sorts of solutions are usually put forward, from the everyday household chemicals (Dettol, Biostrip, Simple Green*) to the downright dangerous (brake fluid.) Personally, I've been using Dettol for years and it does the job well, but it's a pain in the arse to use, expensive (you can only really use it once) and it stinks. Recently, however, one of the attendees of my local painting group (hi Seb!)put me on to this stuff from Superdrug: 

And it's bloody brilliant. It does the job faster and better than Dettol. Simply soak the miniature in it for a couple of hours (or overnight if you prefer- it won't hurt the model), scrub with a toothbrush and rinse off with warm water. The active ingredient is isopropyl alcohol so look out for any where that is the main ingredient. Even better is this one:

from Poundland, as it's pure isopropyl alcohol but, being Poundland, I can't find the stuff in there on a regular basis.
Anyway, isopropyl alcohol is now my go-to stuff for stripping miniatures. It's clean, re-useable, relatively safe to use and it's cheap. I've no doubt that, if you have a friendly or local industrial chemical supplier, you could buy it by the bucketload even cheaper. And, if you want proof that it works, here's my Questor after soaking overnight and a two-minute scrub:

So, it's back to the start we go...

The Eldar Phantom Titan: The Prologue

So here we are with the biggest single job I've ever been faced with: The Forge World Eldar Phantom Titan. A monstrous collection of resin parts that come together to make a huge, elegant war machine, towering over the battlefield. I've never even attempted a kit this big (unless you count the 1/72 Millenium Falcon, Saturn V and Space Shuttle kits I did as a wee lad) so to say it is somewhat daunting is to exhibit huge understatement.
However, we must rise to these challenges!
I knew this would be unlike any other project I had attempted before, so I did my research. Fortunately there are a couple of blogs by those who have attempted such a project here and here, and these have proved invaluable, if only to get me thinking outside my usual parameters of projects of no more than 50mm in height...
As this is a Forge World model, the first thing to do was to check that I had all the components...

My first reaction was, "Gosh*, that's a lot of bits."

My second reaction was, "Crikey**, some of those bits are really big. This thing is even bigger than I thought it was."

So, once I'd got over my initial shock, it was time to make some trips to the kitchen sink and give all these bits a thorough soaking and scrubbing in soapy water, to try and get all the mould release agent off. Having done that I needed to straighten out a couple of the bits (mostly the guns) with the aid of my trusty hair dryer and steel myself for the construction of this beastie.

But first, I had to make its base...

To Be Continued...

*I might not have used the word, "Gosh."

**I definitely didn't use the word, "Crikey."