Hobby Goals and Aspirations
Filed Under: Hobby
Last year I went hard into miniatures; the hobby grabbed me and just would not let go. I painted a tonne of stuff! And this year I’m going to try to paint just as much, if not more. Yet, my actual goals for the year aren’t to paint X amount of minis or a list of certain things1, they’re all about gaining confidence with techniques I haven’t gotten the handle of.
My main aspiration is to get to grips with the process of painting minis by first doing a zenithal highlight, and then using glazes and washes to paint stuff fast. Vince has a good tutorial on this system:
The zenithal highlighting stage consists of painting the model black (or the shadow colour of your choice), then applying a mid-tone grey from about 45 degrees, then the lightest colour (white) from directly above. You can do this with rattlecans, or airbrush, or even by drybrushing. See also: value sketching. I’m confident enough with my airbrush now to use it for this kind of thing. It’s glazing that I’m still figuring out.
The idea with glazing is to apply a layer of paint that is so thin as to be partially/mostly transparent2. In the video he uses an airbrush to apply the glaze, but it can be done with a normcore brush.
My next goal is to up my airbrush skills. At the moment I can just about get a miniature primed and zenithal highlighted, but I want to be able to actually get some of the base colours down on larger areas to avoid needing to do painstaking multi-coat brush application.
Other than that, I’d like to be able to wet blend, magnetize parts of miniatures for easy weapon-swapping3, and take better photos of my minis. And spread my disease around by trying to get more of my friends into the hobby.
What I’m not going to do is devote much time to learning how to make terrain, much as it fascinates me. I’ll leave that for 2020.
Oh, and, final resolution: No buying new stuff until I’ve cleared most of my backlog!
What are your hobby goals for this year?