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Looking Back on it all A friend of mine, who is a very accomplished painter, keeps some of his oldest miniatures, still in their original paint scheme. He says that he does this to show other people how poor his painting skills used to be and how much they can improve. Along the same lines, I present this painting retrospective, with various models from different times in my painting skill development. Although my Gallery page currently uses thumbnails, I omitted them for this retrospective so that you can more easily compare the models. 
Wow! Although this is an impressive figure, at the time I hadn't realized how badly painted my original Tyranids were. My painting has made huge leaps since then, and this model really shows where I started. The six-legged conversion followed from my work on the next model. Once I'd done 32 Gaunts this way, all the Monstrous Creatures looked out of place, so I had to redo them in the same fashion. 
This was probably my first major conversion. This is one of my original "spidery" gaunts. While I love the conversion, making 5 scything talons for every one of these 32 guys was too much work. 
My Dark Eldar were my first army, but I retouched them and made them a lot cleaner than my original Tyranids. I chose this Raider to show one of my conversions. I really like the look of the simple Raider with no running boards, it makes it look more sleek. Once I did the math and figured out that (if they could sit down) you could fit at least 8 Warriors in a Raider without using running boards. I also like the banking effect I got with this one, though I don't like that the pilot seems to have lost his head! Ah, battle damage, you've gotta love it! 
Another Raider conversion, alongside Dracon El T'taes (mini-me!) and a Reaver with Blaster. Note the Agonizer conversion. I felt that the PowerClaw arm just wasn't Dark Eldary enough, so I redid it. I took some bayonets and knives from the DE sprues and glued them along a Warrior arm, then put it on mini-me in place of the old, clunky powerclaw. 
Ah, my reworked Hive Tyrant. This was the second iteration of my Tyranid army, and it marks the next step in improving my painting. I did a little more detail on these, but the painting was also cleaner and they got a wash that made their details stand out more. This model got a lot of compliments at the Seattle GT I went to, and at least one opponent said he'd have nightmares about it. :) The straight wings were a last minute add-on, when the second set of fly wings went missing. On the other hand, I do kind of like the look, it's very reminiscent of certain flying beetles. 
Well, these are the ones that were originally destined to become Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Warband. Although I have relegated that to the far distant future, if not another army entirely, I do like the Doom Eagles paint scheme I chose for them, as it is fairly different from most Marines. In this army, I painted more details and took more care in my painting. 
These are slightly newer versions of the Tyranids that I originally brought to the Seattle GT. They fit in with the same scheme, but it's slightly nicer, with a little more detail, as you can see in the holes for the Devourer on the tail. 
Next up is my Tau army. I've gotten a little more detailed and a little crisper in my painting. (Note that the central figure was a work in progress at the time, with a finished model being held up next to it as an example. 
My current DeathWing army isn't much of a step from the Tau. The painting is clean, but I haven't really broken any new ground. While I experimented with various Non-Metallic Metal techniques, I didn't achieve them enough to do on an entire army, so I decided to choose simplicity and actually get the army finished. I may go back and add more touches to them (Blacklining and possibly gold banding around some of the armor edges) in the future if I decide they don't look good enough. If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know |