No painting for me again today. I was pretty darn tired after work, and spent most of the day hanging out with the wife and dogs. We did our grocery shopping for the week, and I cleaned house a bit while she made dinner. It doesn't make for a very exciting blog post, but that's how it goes sometimes.

I have been doing some internet research on painting, as I know what I want my Orcs to look like but I just can't get my brush to get the look I'm going for. I think most of my problems lie in the areas of brush control and not being courageous enough with my highlights and shadows. I really like the look of these Holger Schmidt minis, and you can see that he uses a large range of colors across the spectrum to get the highlighting right. Just in the cloak on the vampire at the top of the page I can see black, white, purple, and maybe some pink. Of course, these are single character miniatures by a Golden Demon-winning painter as opposed to my mass-painted army, but I think I could make the colors "pop" a lot more if I just paid more attention to where the light hits various features and had a little less fear when it comes to going really bright or really dark on the highlights and shading. He has a good tutorial for painting a Dark Elf Rider figure on the site, and I'm going to have to look at that a little harder to see what I can pick up from it.

Another source for me as far as painting advice is the Games Workshop website and White Dwarf magazine, which is the magazine Games Workshop puts out to advertise their games. In just about every issue they have one or two painting articles or step-by-step tutorials, which I find helpful. Even if I'm not painting the exact figure they show, the techniques and color combinations apply universally. I also use the painting guides on the website as a start for building a new unit. I find the advice for painting skin and fur tones for the various races especially useful.

Another topic on my mind lately is the question, "Why does the idea of bringing an unpainted army to a game offend me?" I think there are a lot of reasons ranging from aesthetics to a lack of respect for your opponent's efforts to paint his army before showing up, but I don't really want to turn on my rant mode at the moment so I'll leave it at that.