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| Picture unrelated. |
Has it really been a week since my last post? Seems like it has. I've had a lack of things to post about lately, but perhaps I can dredge something up to break radio silence. How about a nice, random list.
- Names withheld to protect the innocent, but I've just spent a couple minutes looking at various commission painting sites and....wow. It's amazing what people will pay for and what passes as "pro" painting. You get what you pay for, so when you troll the cheaper end of the spectrum you have to expect a hit to quality, but mold lines are unacceptable at any price. Washes seem like the best way to churn out minis, so if it's your business to churn out minis why would you skip washes and go with only base coats? I'm not a "pro" so perhaps I'm missing the finer points.
- The 40k itch is back. I blame Fulgrim, which I finished this afternoon. It is my favorite of the series so far and the first that made the fall to Chaos believable for me. The Emperor's Children present an easier nut to crack in terms of motivation, but that doesn't take away from the book as a whole. This is what I expected the series to be from the beginning, hopefully the books to follow can keep up.
- Thoughts of armies follows the itch like q does p. I think I may have found a way to paint a variety of marines while keeping them as part of a whole: a crusade. This approach lacks the cohesion of a single Chapter army, but does allow for a broad range of schemes. I think I've had this idea before and discarded it though. Ultimately I think I want about a company's worth of every chapter, along with pre- and post-heresy traitor legions. Is that so wrong?
- This is a larger topic for another day, but I've been rolling around why spam is so dominant in 40k and so (relatively) despised in Warmachine. While returning to this thought at work today I came to a realization: I like Warmachine as a game because of the lack of spam, but I like 40k as a hobby/platform for art because of the spam. I have no real desire to collect 100 Winter Guard, but I'd gladly spend the rest of the year (at the least) painting up companies of various Chapters. Motivations are funny things.
I think I'm going to take a run at finishing Orsus tomorrow. After that, perhaps the Devestators I stopped working on a while back. Or perhaps I'll just keep chewing through books tomorrow while pausing to maintain my Tiny Tower.
I do local commissions and have looked around at online sites and yes...its pretty sad. Dry brushing is really prevalent in commission painting, and to me it just seems a lazy way of doing things. If your doing a job why not do it well?
ReplyDeleteAnd good luck on orsus hes an awesome sculpt!
Like I say, you get what you pay for. It's possible that the minis I saw came pre-assembled complete with mold lines in tact, but if I were a professional painter I'd want my work to reflect well on my abilities, which would extend to something as simple as properly cleaning any mini that I paint. I have no issues with drybrushing as a technique, though if it's the only approach then that's less than what I would expect from a "pro," though that's the same for any single-technique approach. I saw one guy who clearly used an airbrush for the majority of his work, and to good effect, but I could only wonder at what the end result would look like had he employed a bit of drybrushing or washing in addition to the airbrush.
ReplyDeleteObviously there's a market for having someone else paint your minis, but when I look at the "pros" and see a standard well below my own when I'm half-assing a paint job then I start to wonder about return on investment.