Stocking Up

 Since I got back into painting a couple months back, I've been slowly but surely updating my set up for it. I used to paint on a fold-up dining table which was a bit wobbly and hardly ideal. That is now down in the lounge and I've replaced it with a rather more sturdy wooden table that I bought at the British Heart Foundation's furniture shop, and then enlisted Tony's help to carry it the short distance back to the house. That was the easy part really compared to the far larger task of sorting out my paints & tools.

 I use paints by Games Workshop as they are the most readily availiable to me (Krackers Games Store that sell them is only a 3 min walk from my house after all). They are not the best paints, and most of the best painters whose work I admire, use other ranges such as those by Vallejo or Reaper instead. Maybe someday I'll consider such a change myself, but for the time being at least GW's range suits me fine.

Back when I began painting at the tender age of 12, GW used to sell their paints in themed box sets. Each box had 9 different paints in and the boxes were named for the figures they were best designed for (Colour being the basic set and then from there, there were others like Monster, Creature, Space Marine, Metallics etc etc). They were good paints, and each time I'd lose interest in painting I'd pack them away and keep them safe until whenever my interest returned and I'd unpack them and they'd be used again. As time went by though, they got thicker and thicker and one by one they turned solid and became useless.

This time when I set about unpacking them again, I stopped and instead made myself go through every box, testing each and every paint in them and I finally binned all the useless ones, destroying the old boxes as each was emptied. I was able to keep a fairly impressive number of paints, many of which are long since unavaliable such as the metallic blue, green and purple paints I have, and the shocking pink. But my collection is left with some pretty massive gaps in it too and so each pay day I've been getting a few more paints to fill out the range. Today I added Bronze, a dark shade of Gold, a dark Flesh and a black wash to my growing collection to plug gaps that I've noticed over the past couple weeks whilst painting the figures I'm currently working on.

I've also had to take a look at the tools I use. I know now that I need a new set of paintbrushes as the ones I have are cheap and don't hold a good point (the tip always curves into a claw, which while sometimes useful is annoying too). My modelling knife needs replacing and if I don't want my table top getting scored up I need a decent cutting mat too. The biggest issue that I've found I need to resolve though is lighting, and for that I'm going to need to go hunt for a good angle-poise light, as the light from my rooms central bulb is simply not sufficient, and I refuse to allow my painting times to be dictated to me by the hours of daylight.

I've also bought a supply of materials to decorate the bases of my figures, namely a couple types of sand, small pebbles and clumps of fake grass. I'm a long way from being able to craft some of truly stunning bases I've seen made for miniatures on Cool Mini Or Not, but even these basic materials will be a great leap forward from simply coating the base with green paint and dipping it in flock as I've always done in the past.