A Year in Miniatures 5: Goliath Barbarian

I’m going to be honest, I honestly don’t remember what I had in mind when I bought this model. I know there was a plan, but whatever it might have been is lost to the mists of my brain. I got as far as texturing the base, priming the model, and basecoating the skin, but that must have been close to a year ago and she has languished in the pile of shame potential ever since. Rather than try to think up a narrative for this miniature to fit into, I decided to just make it up as I went along and see where we ended up. And where we ended up is, well, here…

Somewhat inevitably for a colour scheme with no particular plan, I ended up trying out a bunch of ideas that I had in mind for other models. The stippled NMM of the shield and warpick was instrumental in perfecting an very particular effect I want for some chaos space marines (you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks before meeting them though…); the purple-shaded scalemail uses a palette that I’m trying out for NMM silver; and the base features my first attempt at an oil wash! I’m definitely unfamiliar with using oils, so there will definitely be more experimentation in that direction!

I would actually strongly recommend doing a “make it up as you go along” paintjob as a brilliant way of a) getting to play around with ideas you wan’t to try, and b) highlighting what your ‘defaults’ are. For example, I realised very early that I was unthinkingly painting as if the light source was above and to the right of the model from the point of view of the observer, so I purposefully switched to above and left (luckily it wasn’t too far into the paintjob), which was actually more of a challenge than I expected! Slightly less comfortably, I also realised that Fabius Bile notwithstanding I actually very rarely paint skin, and that when I do I seem to default to Caucasian. So I’m definitely going to be challenging that one going forward!

This was actually a very fast paint by my standards, clocking in at around 5 hours total. Being a complete shot in the dark experiment it was never going to be up to my usual standard, but while I can definitely see some flaws (why oh why didn’t I fix those mould lines) I’d be perfectly happy to have this miniature on the tabletop. The much faster painting time also freed up some of my hobby time to work on some larger projects, which would otherwise have taken multiple weeks to finish.

Next week: something completely different!

07/02/22
Weeks Elapsed: 5
Miniatures Finished: 7