Another Toby-vision session

There was a favourable response to the first of Toby’s painting videos that I shared here, so here’s the latest one which you may find of interest. This time, Toby applies his masterly brush to a Victrix plastic British foot artilleryman:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

As with the last video, there are a number of points worthy of note. Some of the paint choices are interesting, especially the use of a Vallejo Air range metallic paint with a brush – I’d never thought of doing that before. Toby also gives a quick demo of the consistency to which he dilutes paint and he also shares a couple of his custom home-made mixes for blues and very light greys. Plus, as a bonus prize at the end, Toby shares some of his triads for painting horses. There’s a more complete list of the triads he uses on his blog.

Toby-vision

You may already have come across the Artmaster Studio series of occasional live video recordings of miniature painting sessions recorded by Toby Thorton. Me too but I haven’t really had the time to sit down and watch any of them. Well, that changed this week when I spotted that he’d recorded a video of how he painted a Perry Brunswick artilleryman. To save you trolling off elsewhere to track it down, I’ve embedded it below:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Now, watching somebody else paint for 70+ minutes sounds like it requires a massive attention span but this was actually pretty easy viewing. But I suppose it helps if you have some sort of paint-related OCD like me! In general I was struck by the simiarities between Toby’s approach and my own. After the first couple of minutes, I hit the pause button so that I could type a few notes along the way as I watched. I thought I’d share them with you here…

• Toby saved viewing time by starting from a point where the black undercoat was already done. Sensible lad.
• He mostly uses Vallejo acylics and thins them with water. He even shows a couple of helpful shots of his palette so we can see the paint consistency he works with.
• His order of painting interesting. He started with flesh basecoat and then switched to another part of the model before returning to the next flesh layer later. I suppose this was a way to save time and make progress while the flesh basecoat was drying.
• He did cuffs basecoat as first clothing item like I often do but, again, switched to working on another area of the figure while this dried.
• Wonder what brush size he uses? It looks smaller than an O. Later he reveals that it’s an Army Painter Wargames Character sable brush. This range of brushes doesn’t appear to be rated by conventional sizes. It just serves to remind everybody how crucial a good brush point is.
• Quite swishy brush strokes/style – I’m much more deliberate (AKA slow).
• Hmmm. Vallejo Field Blue is an interesting colour. The palette he uses for the cuffs and collar is Field Blue / Grey Blue / Pastel Blue and it seems to work well.
• Not much mixing of his own shades. Of course, the minute I noted that, he started adding white to dark grey for “sharp highlights”.
• A unit of 24-30 Brunswick foot figures in one day. Flamin’ Nora, that’s fast!
• Lots of almost throw away tips along the way – e.g. tonally different blacks/greys for different areas. I notice the Panzer Aces range is deployed. More food for thought there…
• Metallics – uses a mixture of GW and Vallejo paints along with Citadel washes.

That was, I have to say, a fascinating experience. And it really rammed home to me how lucky we are to be living in a time when technology provides the means for us to share our tips, tricks and tutorials with each other in such illustrative ways. Now this was Toby with minimal lighting, a fixed camera position, a relatively inexpensive set-up and recording live with (as far as I can tell) no post-production work. In other words, apart from the outlay for the video camera and his own time, it cost Toby next-to-nothing to produce this.

Somebody is surely going to latch on to this is a more commercial way. If Toby can make something this useful, imagine what could be done if a bit more money was thrown at the idea by, for instance, a company wishing to set up in competition with the modelling and wargaming print magazines. Done well, such a venture could really be a paradigm shift that could undermine their whole business model. No print, paper and distribution costs to worry about; opportunities for revenue from advertising and sponsorship; instant viewer gratification with 24×7 global reach and the option for charging for subscription access.

In fact, what’s more likely is that individual well-known figures in our hobby will do more of this on their own Web sites and blogs. Heck, I might even do it myself one day!

All thawed out

At last, all the snow that’s hit Wiltshire over the last week or two has melted away at the study here at BfK HQ is warm enough to work in again. And that means it’s been time to start my assault on some of Peter F’s finest figures with the putty and sculpting tools. So far I’ve picked out some figures that look well-suited to modifications and made a list of the painful indignities I’m going to inflict on them. Better still, a couple have already been on the operating table. Once I’ve got a critical mass of work completed, I’ll take some snaps and share more details with you.

While I’ve been shivering lately, I’ve also hoovered up links to a few more interesting and useful sites.

The first of these is Clarence Harrison’s new blog where he plans to recount the tale of building his collection of figures for playing the Republic to Empire ruleset. Clarence did the artwork and design layout for the rulebook so if anybody’s collection is worth watching grow, it’ll be his.

Next up is another painting blog, this time that belonging to Toby Thornton who paints for Artmaster Studio. Now that’s a commercial painting service so I have to quickly clarify that this isn’t a product endorsement slot. Rather, I like the cut of Toby’s painting jib and if you scroll down a few postings you’ll find some Foundry French artillery figures that he’s done very nicely. The only thing I’ve found a bit odd is his choice of the Foundry figures. If he can do such a good job, I wonder why he didn’t opt for more modern sculpts from the Perrys. Still, there’s a little nostalgia there for me because some of those French artillery crew figures were among the first I purchased when I returned to the hobby about ten years ago.

Lastly, we travel to Spain for another commercial painter with a wide range of tastes in different periods and scales. “Archiduque” Rafa is another painter who works commercially and looking at his work I can see a definite Spanish school emerging with notable stylistic similarities to my online friend Javi Gomez.

All three sites are well worth a browse for eye-candy and painting inspiriation and I’ll add them to the links in the right hand column when I get a spare moment or three. And talking of having time to post more – I’ve just acquired a copy of a secondhand book I’ve been hunting down for ages. It’s the Arms and Armour Press version of the Blandford title Uniforms of the Retreat from Moscow. Over the weekend I’ll aim to say more about this acquisition and, in particular, why I prize this paperback edition more highly than the original Blandford hardback.

And I’ll leave you tonight with a stop press announcement from Alan Perry, in case you haven’t seen it yet.