Putting the art in Artefacters

My first crew is now fully painted. Which means I can now put them on the table without that little voice inside my head screaming “paint your shit”. 

I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a paint... not snob we’ll say enthusiast. If I’m going to use models I want them to be painted, and I’ll happily build a list based on what’s painted instead of what’s most useful. 
This is partly because because I’m a lot better at painting than I am at gaming (this isn’t saying much I’m terrible at gaming) also because I really enjoy painting, that’s my hobby and rolling dice is just a bonus.

Now I try not to inflict my own hobby hang ups on to other players, if you like to paint then paint but I’ll always encourage painting especially at events. (This is a whole different argument that I’ve had many times).




So back to my painting, the Artefacters are a great looking crew and at first look I was a bit stuck for how to paint them outside of the fact I wanted Sage’s lizard friend to pop. (On that note I’m using all my imaginary internet power to state now that the lizards name is “officially” Liz, any official correction of this by TDE overlords is to be ignored) Wasting time starring at Facebook reminded me of the cool work Mike at epicduck has done with comic book style minis. (Check our his streams and stuff great work). I thought it would be a good fit, so with a bit of reading and a Pinterest board full of comic book ideas I sat down to paint.

The basic idea for the comicbook style, at least in the way I approached it, is all about big bold colour and lines. 
So normally I would paint Midtone base - shadow - highlight or some variation there of. With this I went high mid tone - highlight - extreme highlight (not enough of this looking back) and the black line any joins or extreme shadow. 

The placing and style of the lines is key and something I struggled with all the way through, the black lines are what give it depth and character, but hard to keep it clean as I'm a bit heavy handed at times.

Just a short post and some picture today, as I'm far from an expert. If you want to see this style properly go check out epicduck's work. If you just want to chat about TDE or painting come say hi on twitter.