Ye Olde Inn

Alrighty, folks, I have assembled a decent toolset, watched videos on YouTube, poked, prodded, drilled holes, glued stuff, played with green stuff, and done other stuff too, I'm sure.
So, I haven't painted since I was 13, I'm 40 now, and I wasn't really good back then anyway...
But, I'm going for it.
So... here's my humble beginnings, so far we have:

My attempt at some modding. The goblin on the left is seriously my 1st ever attempted sculpt of anything. Not bad for 1st time, I suppose, but it doesn't look terribly impressive to me. The goblin on the right is going to end up with a sword sculpt going over the support paperclip, that'll be my 2nd ever sculpt. Then I'll have a goblin with a really big polearm-ish axe thing and a dual-wielding goblin, should be fun! My sculpts are extremely entry level at the moment, but.... the goblins don't care. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're thrilled with the upgrade.

I've also started painting (sort of). I've done my best to remove mold lines, which took forever and wasn't still entirely successful. Then I tried my hand at some zenithal priming using rustoleum spray cans (I know, I know... I'm learning, okay?). The first time came out so bad I had to throw them in some superclean to start over. After a bit more research, which basically amounted to don't use cold cans my next attempt yielded the following:

My 2-yr old daughter played with them a little bit, so they've lost a bit of white here and there. I figured I'll chalk it up to goblin battle scars. Other than that, I think I'm ready to try and stick some color on 'em!
I know we've got quite a collection of pros here at the Inn, so feel free to steer me in the right direction with my ongoing attempts.
... because ...

Here I Go!

Yayyyyy! Epic epic epic! Love that spirit!!! The mods and primed goblins look great!

One piece of advice I wished I would have had when I started with is, get some jewelers headband magnyfication glasses. They are really helpful for detailwork and not many talk about using them.

Krautscientist has an excellent thread with his painted miniatures on here. I learned a lot from him and his advice in his thread, It was my first painting attempts as well and I bombarded the thread with questions and he kindly explained a lot!

viewtopic.php?f=56&t=4504&p=93493&hilit=step+1+painting#p93493

There are many more great painters on here.

The other day I put together a few links with really cool mini painting advice I found, maybe you find something useful in it!

http://forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=201&t=5612#p108828

Anyway, big congrats for starting and keep posting your progress here!

Very cool that you're customizing these! I wish you great success with painting, too. I think for minis I'm going to like the idea of using mostly washes like that video I posted yesterday, but I still don't know if I'll be able to paint really at all beyond Kurgan's method of dunking a 3D print in the appropriate bucket of paint to give it the original plastic color.

I do have to admit that method DOES have simplistic (and ) charm.

To be fair I do use a dry brush to remove the excess paint, but basically yeah, it's a great place to start.

I like that big axe in the first photo!
I'll follow to see more of your stuff

Kurgan wrote:To be fair I do use a dry brush to remove the excess paint, but basically yeah, it's a great place to start.

"The best thing about the new HeroQuest is painting new miniatures!"
*places orc bard on a stick*
*dunks stick in thick, heavy house paint bucket*
*throws mini, stick and all, into the garbage*
*big sh*t eating grin, with tooth sparkle*

(Actually, if one was smart, one would save that mini in pristine condition because it's going to get mangled, customized, altered, run over with a truck, and anything but taken care of as a useful and beloved gamepiece.)

We should have everyone donate their unwanted Orc Bard figures, and we can have one person do a fake unboxing where it's just full of Orc Bards. You could pause the footage and loop it so it looks like the box is pouring out endless bard figures.

That would be a meme for the ages!

Borrowing that many for the memes would be great!

Check out my noob skills. First goblin I painted in 27 years. I remember painting being much easier back when I had no idea what washes, highlights, shading, and all those other mini painting terms meant. Now that I know what they are (sorta), I've discovered I mostly suck at them
I've also discovered that trying to do NMM is hard! I gave it a shot, and ended up still slapping some silver on the edges after it came out looking not so great.
In any case, I still gotta paint the base but the lil fella is otherwise all done.

Look how you brought out that evil grin! That's what I love about the HQ Orcs and Goblins, they are just so overjoyed to be there to deal some pain to the Heroes, gleeful in their evilness despite being very often the pure fodder.