I finally did it: painting a complete figure on camera. Filming and editing-wise there's a lot of room for improvement, I know, but in the end I'm very happy with the results.

Please share if you like this!

Best watched on YouTube in HD.

Hello everyone, first of all happy 2014! I hope you got some great painting time in 2013 and that this year will even be better. I'll be posting my traditional year statistics post soon, but first something else:

I've been neglecting this blog a little bit over the past few weeks, so let's grab this opportunity to take a look at what I've been up to lately. As you can see on the picture below there's a bit of everything on my desk now, especially gaming-quality stuff.

I've been doing quite some work on the Hobbit set lately. I've even played a few scenarios :) I expected another boxed set to come out with the new movie, but alas only new models and a new manual, so my Unexpected Journey will probably end when I played the last scenario.

Here's the finished scenery:

And then some quick shots of some of the finished Good models. When everything is painted I will post a big showcase with decent pictures. I would also like to say that I recorded the entire painting process of Gandalf on video. I'm currently editing this so expect a painting tutorial video on him soon!

What's still left to do:

Like I already said I played the first few scenarios. The dice rolling, measuring, moving miniatures, it felt great to play a wargame again after quite some time.

So good actually that I'm seriously considering getting back into 40k. I have an Imperial Fists army in mind. Considering my painting speed this will probably take quite some time to complete, but I'm going to try it nonetheless.

Here's a test model I've completed a while ago:

The army will probably consist of models I like to paint, instead of making a very competitive one. I will of course keep track of the progress of this project here on my blog.

One last thing I'd like to share is that I recently cleaned out the cupboards and drawers of my painting desks. There's a lot of stuff that I don't need any more, so this will be sold on eBay. I still need to sort out all the pictures and look up posting costs, but when that is done then there will be many interesting deals available for everyone. Here's all what I've put aside:

See you in the next post!

Wow, 3 months without updates! What have I been up to?

After a long and cold winter and spring, I have been doing like most of people here in Belgium: enjoying the nice weather. We had a fantastic summer and I spent a lot of time outside with the kids and on my racing bicycle. And of course there were some holidays as well :) Something less fun that happened to me were some problems with my lower back... just sitting, standing, sleeping was all very painfull, let alone hunching forward over a miniature. So that also kept me from the painting table as well the last couple of weeks.

But now that summer is coming to an end, inspiration and motivation are returning. I decided to gently get back in the flow by continuing The Hobbit set. Working on the second batch of gobling warriors and some of the characters, including the Goblin King.

With some painting competitions coming up in the near future I also started working on a new showcase project, but that's something for the next blog post :)

Just finished the Wiz-War figures and waiting for some miniatures for a commission to arrive, good excuse to continue painting on The Hobbit miniatures :)

The scenery is also 80% painted (no pictures yet), after that I'll have to do two other dwarves (Oin and Fili) and a Goblin character and then I'm ready for the first game :)

In this video I will show you my recipe for a simple neutral skintone, mainly for gaming miniatures. In the video below I'm painting up Gloin the dwarf from The Hobbit starter set.

Please switch to HD and full screen for the best viewing experience :)

The last couple of days I spent a few hours in the wonderful world of army painting. The Hobbit box contains two sprues of goblins, each containing 18 figures. My goal is to get the figures for the first scenario finished as soon as possible: 12 goblins and a goblin character, 4 dwarfs and of course the scenery.

A batch of 18 figures of course means some sacrifices on the level of quality. On the other hand I have set some rules to ensure a good level of quality and contrast, for example I want to stay away from techniques like drybrushing and washing. Instead of edge-highlighting I'm trying to do zenithal highlighting as well. Actually the technique to paint these resembles my technique to paint showcase level miniatures a lot. Only the paint is less thin, there are less layers, the brush strokes are a lot less precise, etc.

At this point I have spent about 5-6 hours painting them. This means somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes per figure.

Some close-ups.

This was the last post of this year. Enjoy your holidays and see you in 2013!