Back to Basics: My return to paining minis

When I first started playing tabletop RPGs, I was hugely into painting my own minis.  It was cathartic, it was something for my D&D group to do when we weren't rolling dice, and it probably helped that my mom family had recently gone through a pretty obsessive ceramics phase which left us with lots of paint and brushes.

When I discovered girls, however, I put down my brush and it's been about fourteen years since I've put paint to primer.  However, I never really stopped thinking about it -- I guess that you kind of stick with the things you know you liked, even if you're not actually doing them.

But that all changed, thanks to...

• a friend gifting me two boxes of pre-painted D&D minis (the plastic ones from Wizards), which happened to include the last two metal minis he had from his own hobby phase
• the infamous Reaper Kickstarter and the extra $100 I had burning a hole in my wallet
• my new found obsession interest in Warhammer 40k.

So, I'm back at it, and in the picture, above, you can see my first venture back into it.

This is my demon, in all his sloppy base-coated glory.

After a cleaning up the model with an old toothbrush (I may have used whitening toothpaste, too) and a blast of cheap Krylon / Rust-Oleum primer (which I can't find, right now, to verify the brand) I started with Liquitex Basic Red for his eyes, thanks to this article's advice (though I didn't worry about anything beyond just the red basecoat, because I knew going in I wasn't ready for irises and pupils), and a full base coat of Liquitex Neutral Grey Value 5.

For full disclosure, when I first got the mini, he was painted a single color of purply-gray, which had me thinking he was a gargoyle, so I started going that direction at first.

I realize my coverage is spotty, at best -- the Liquitex Basics paints you seen in the background are incredibly thick, so I'm trying to find a good mix of water (with a single drop of dish soap in the bottle) and paint to give me a decent amount of coverage without being too thick.  Also, I wouldn't be surprised if I caused that spot on his wing when I was trying to get a good picture.

Now that I've realized he's a demon, I'm going to attempt to paint over the grey basecoat with something that will eventually become a rusty brown -- if I'm lucky, the grey will only help, but I'm not holding my breath.