Skip to main content

Car Wars Minis, Second Batch

They say it's a poor craftsman who blames their tools. Is it a poor craftsman who gives them credit when things work out? If so, I am that craftsman.


After my first round of not-great miniature painting, I ran off some more CW minis and tried more painting, this time digging up my well-hidden actually-for-minis paints (as opposed to the standard craft store acrylics I used the first time around), which I had more than I thought I did, and limited myself to my tiniest brushes. I also watched a few more YouTube videos about painting minis just to get a better feel for what it looked like when people did that. How did it come out? Still not great, but better.

The first of batch #2 and by a considerable margin the worst. Involved some ill-advised dry brushing and the metallic paint I used for the weapons and I didn't thin the metallic paint I used on the weapons and side windows, losing all the detail in the process.

This one...is actually OK. The thinned blue and purple paints give a nice shading effect from how they pooled a bit, and I got the dry brushing right on the windshield.

Still having issues with the very fine details, but works OK. Would not be ashamed to put it on the table.

Even worse, but still not as bad as the first one. I think my main problem here is figuring out a good mix of colors to used with a yellow base.

Another not bad one, but I was too aggressive putting on a blue wash or perhaps just didn't let it dry long enough, because it pulled some of the paint off of the primed layer, letting some white show through.

And another not great but not bad one. Need to come up with a way of getting color on the grille, still mostly primer gray here, without messing up the main color.

 

So, then, just using the right materials for the job made for a significant improvement. I'm starting to print yet another round of minis where I'll continue practicing the techniques I used here and maybe try some new ones.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Spaced Out Rides

(This is the kind of thing I'd have sent into Pyramid   back in the day, but that's not an option now, so here we are.)   The GURPS Action series is the gift that keeps on giving for a lot of modern-and-later gaming. GURPS Action 2: Exploits has rules for sneaking around, running away, and all kinds of other activities which can be easily transplanted to cyberpunk and other high-tech settings. GURPS Action 6: Tricked-Out Rides provides more of the same for its topic, giving an easy framework for describing and even designing common types of vehicles without all the math and paralysis-by-analysis of GURPS Vehicles. Pick a standardized vehicle type (van, compact car, etc.) and apply modifiers (rugged, tinted windows). But, of course, it’s limited. It’s just ten pages, after all, so it’s great for common passenger vehicles for the modern(ish) era. But higher-tech vehic...

G$ --> DND GP

A GURPS $ is worth 1.27 D&D 5e SP, which is interesting because in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the typical $1 coin is a silver piece. And a D&D GP is worth about $7.87 in GURPS. So, where does that come from? A while back, I cautioned someone considering using (among other things) GURPS Renaissance Venice: Merchants of Venice  in a non-GURPS game that prices listed in the extensive lists of trade goods were expressed in GURPS $, which might not have obvious conversions into other game systems. But if one wanted to convert GURPS prices into D&D or vice versa, how would that work? It crossed my mind to take a "basket of goods" approach. Economists measure inflation not by picking a single commodity, like the price of gold or oil or wheat, and seeing how that changes over time, but by taking the combined value of a set of common commodities. This provides a more comprehensive picture of the cost of living. Perhaps gas becomes less expensive while the price of whe...

2020 GURPS Challenge PDFs: Incense Trail prices

Over on the forum, somebody asked me how much frankincense and myrrh cost in antiquity. Well, we don't know. We never get as much price information as we like out of history. There's the occasional mention of this or that product being worth its weight in silver or gold, but we can reasonably believe that those are descriptions written by political, cultural, or philosophical commentators trying to give an idea of how expensive things are, not people who have actually done an economic analysis and discovered that the material in question is, by coincidence, exactly the same value as silver or gold and not, say, one and a half times the price of silver or three quarters of the price of gold. We know it was valuable, but not how valuable on the level of individual purchases. But for the convenience of the GM, we can use those comparisons to establish some ballpark figures. Mind you, this is based largely on GURPS rather than historical sources, so it's not something I would h...