Rather than showing any recent miniatures or plans, I thought it would be nice to show off one of the Freebooter’s Fate models that I used as part of a painting challenge a few years ago. While it’s far from a properly finished model, I’d like to at least break down how my previous attempts to paint a bunch of Freebooter’s Fate models started, why that may have failed, and how I’m changing my approach this time around. You’re already seeing one part of how I’m changed the approach just per the existence of this blog, but I think some formal discussion is good.

To illustrate this (as well as have an excuse to post an old painted model that I feel needs a lot of improvement), here’s the ELTC’s own Leader model, Don Pavo.

Don Pavo: Our Swashbuckling hero(?)

I’d like to preface this by explaining the painting challenge that led me to originally paint this model: I had been interested in learning proper color mixing and theory on and off over the years, but because I was a somewhat sporadic painter, I didn’t know if I would stick with it. As such, I asked a friend/extremely skilled painter what might be interesting, and I was told to try working on a model using heavy-body paints and mixing all the colors myself, as inspired by an excellent video by Marco Frisoni explaining the exercise.

To explain a bit more – this model was painted using only primary colors in the form of cyan, magenta, and yellow, along with black and white. I chose to use heavy-body acrylics by Vallejo, because that’s what I had on hand, but I expect other people have preferences on paints and such.

To start with the good – I think that the overall scheme looks fairly good. The colors all fit well, there are some fine highlights and tonal variations in places, and some textures and parts of the gold NMM are starting to work. However, that’s about all that’s going well on this miniature. There’s some pretty obvious unpainted areas, the clothing textures are completely undeveloped, the shadows are too stark, and the NMM on the sword’s blade is just tragic.

As an exercise, I think this was a success back then – it helped me to get back into painting, although it was the last Freebooter’s Fate miniature I’d paint until I started painting models again this year. It also helps me look back and see what I was doing wrong, as well as how to improve it for the future. I can see this model and note how much I’ve changed my approach in painting over the years, as well as what I might need to change as I continue to learn.

I’m going to be working on bringing this model up to my current level of painting when I next have time to work on it. Given how much of a mess some areas are, this is going to be a long process. I’m planning on focusing on the following:

• Clothing Cleanup: There’s a relatively flat quality to a lot of his clothing. I think adding some additional highlights and deeper shadows (including adding some color to them) will improve the model tremendously. I think adding more material distinctions will help a lot – getting the fancy outfit to look more like silk or another rich fabric, while keeping the interior of the cloak as a more tanned and well-worn leather is going to majorly improve this mini.
• Skin and eyes: His eyes aren’t painted, and the small amount of skin showing is relatively flat. I think it’s definitely an “add more depth” kind of fix. Eyes and hair need some actual work.
• NMM: There’s several areas where I didn’t even start on the NMM (boot buckles, belt, some of the weapon dressings) and that needs to change. The sword might need to be completely stripped and repainted – it’s really that bad right now, as there’s a lot of texture and buildup on it right now.
• Unpainted Elements: The band on the hat, the belt, and a lot of the trim on his clothing is completely unpainted. His left hand is also barely visible – it just got a basecoat of the cloak’s initial shadow color, which has it really fade into the background. They’re important to catch once I’ve got the main lighting and materials worked out.
• Peacock Feathers: The cloak is a gigantic part of the mini, and I feel like it needs at least 2-3 more levels of highlighting to really read correctly. I think the red in the “eyes” work pretty well, but it might be worth trying to make it look like a regular peacock feather.

There’s a lot of work here, but for a mini that was intended as a painting exercise, I think he’s in a good place to work on.

I’ll talk about how he plays in the game itself as soon as I finish updating his paint job – it’d be a disservice to the genius that is ELTC’s first Leader model to give him anything but a featured post once he’s painted well.

Why Did I Stop Painting Freebooter’s Fate Miniatures?

I stopped painting in part because I saw that there was an edition change coming up. As I didn’t have any other people who were at all interested in joining me for the weird pirate skirmish game, much less learning changing rules, I found myself thinking that it wouldn’t really be worth my time. That sort of thinking tended to hit me whenever I wanted to try playing a more interesting kind of miniatures game – it was GW or nothing in my area. This continued for quite a while, which led me to resign myself to just reading for personal projects, painting and sculpting minis for games I’d never actually play, and playing the few GW games I could still enjoy, like Blood Bowl.

My first brush with someone building a community came from a good friend deciding he’d wanted to start playing Fantasy again after he quit a life-destroying job. He ended up landing on Kings of War as the game he decided to play given how he wanted proper rank and flank, and – from absolutely nothing more than some people he knew who used to enjoy WHFB and other new gamers – built up a community of regular players. He had experience in organizing games before, but watching the process of community building was a great inspiration that I thought was something I could never do.

Then, I ended up playing Infinity with a friend after first meeting them through a Mordheim/indie game evening. They’ve since stopped playing due to life circumstances, but their willingness to teach and build a community really inspired me. It wasn’t a one-off kind of thing, but rather a function of talking to people, making the game accessible to people, and being a champion of a game, even if it’s hard to get models for. I’m fine being the person with all the painted crews, to be honest – I love painting these models, even if I get a little tired of continuous painting.

This time around, my goal is sustainability for myself. I won’t do any demos until I’m confident I have enough painted models ready to properly teach. I’ll limit my demo offerings to people I know, rather than simply trying to attract random people. I’ll work on playing the game I want to play, rather than trying to mimic the GW mindset of ‘matched play only on generic boards’ that I’ve fallen into over the years.

Hobby Progress

I did a little work last night, but I’m finding that I’m taking a bit more time to work on a few models now. Part of it is the vast, vast material differences and styles of Shadows and Goblin Pirates – I have to completely change my mindset as soon as I start working on one category or the other. To sidestep, I may do more like today – working on models that aren’t really related to the Demo Crew project so that I don’t burn out.

I’ve also been very introspective on my own goals with this game: my biggest hope is that I can build a small community of people who will get together at times to play. Rather than trying to do everything at once, I’m trying to work incrementally on little projects. I’m also doing a daily blog out of stubbornness; I accidentally started posting daily updates, so now I’m going to keep it going as long as I can.