Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love painted minis and greatly prefer them over bare metal or a coat of primer. However, despite my best efforts I just don't enjoy doing that painting myself. While spending two days this past weekend producing a total of 14 sub-mediocre paint jobs, I had lots of time to think about this, and I've come up with the following problems:
1. Time: I still haven't figured out how to paint minis quickly, and it takes me the better part of a day to do 6-8 mechs, assuming they are already assembled, on bases, and primed. I use brushes exclusively as I've always been hesitant to spend money on an airbrush for something I don't particularly like doing in the first place. I don't know if I'm being too picky for my skill level in terms of cleaning up mistakes or trying to paint greeble/details, but an hour a mech is about as fast as I've been able to go. If I could crank out a mediocre mini in 10-15 minutes I might not mind, but spending at least an hour for mediocre is not how I want to spend my time.
2. Quality: I suck. No two ways about it, I am not a good painter. My hands are moderately steady, but they cramp up trying to manage fine details. I tend either put on paint that is too thick and lose details, or it is too thin and looks splotchy or has bubbles in it. I can do an edge highlight on a sharp, protruding edge, but a ridge in the middle of a panel? Yeah, Imma just leave a lake of paint somewhere if I try that. I'm also not great at managing the opacity of paints. My highlights end up too bright, my washes end up making things too dark and dirty looking. I've got a magnifier I wear to help me see what I am doing on smaller details, but I'm just not good at controlling a brush.
3. Equipment: I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I can't seem to get a brush to come to a decent point. I have a variety of different brushes for details, and I'd say 80% of them either the bristles curl at the tip, the tip wants to split into two parts, or it just turns into a fuzzed-out mess. I do have one No.1 DaVinci that works better than the rest, but even that one I can't always get to work the way I want. If I use my larger brushes to base coat or wash, they seem to create a bunch of bubbles in the paint once I thin it down enough to not fill in all the details. Plus, I still seem to end up with lots of areas I missed or have pin-holes in. Dry-brushing?...yeah, I've got no clue how to do that decently. I either end up leaving almost no paint on the model, or end up with dust smears of the highlight color on large panels. I've tried different kinds of brush (maybe not the right kind?) but dry brushing always seems much harder for me than anyone slapping together a 10-minute paint job on YouTube. I know that most of the time it's the Indian, not the bow that's the problem, but I still feel like my equipment doesn't work the way everyone says it should! I'm worried an air brush would just be more of the same, but at a higher price.
4. Decals: I just don't like messing with water-slide decals. I have a ton of them, but I hate cutting them out and trying not to turn them into a little ball of plastic. I've got Micro-Sol, and I've got Micro-Set, but it just Micro-Sucks to work with decals. I wish I could use more of the decals that I own (FPG makes some very nice ones), but I'm not the person to put them on.
Anyway, I'm not sure what the point of this post is. Not sure if I am venting, asking for help on my painting, looking for people who paint BT minis semi-professionally, or what. I just spent two days working on painting, and at the end of the process, I loved that I had some more minis painted, but I wasn't sure it was worth the time I spent. It made me realize that I wasn't having fun painting, but that I felt like I needed to do it, like washing dishes or pulling weeds. I still think I want painted minis, but I'm also pretty sure I don't want to paint them. I enjoy assembling and modding minis, and I certainly like playing with them, but I just don't enjoy the painting part one bit.
If you made it this far, thanks for listening! I think I just needed to get this off my chest! Maybe I'll snap some pics of the minis I was working on later this week. I'm not proud of the paint jobs, but I am proud of the mods on some of them. I especially think the Arrow IV Legionnaire mod turned out well.