Lost an eye a coupla years ago and haven’t done much painting because the lack of depth perception adds another layer of difficulty to an already challenging process. It can be fixed, and I see no reason to waste my time relearning how to paint, if no sooner than I figure it out, the eye gets fixed and I have to rerelearn the process.
But the urge remains, and the hands and the spirit get hungry to hold those little toy soldiers and bring them to life with a splash of color.
If you can’t be good, you better be clever.
Instead of learning a whole new suite of tactics, I decided to adopt a whole new strategy. A riot of colors carefully placed is out of the question. So step back, and figure out what sort of painting is achievable, and build the table around that.
Here’s my solution:
The miniature war games we play are already fancy versions of chess. Why not lean into that? Build two opposing forces, one light and one dark. Or in my case one marble and one bronze. These would suggest the statues of antiquity. So that’s what we’re going with.
The bad news is, these figures won’t mesh with the rest of my figures at all. Oh, I suppose they could be useful as terrain items, given that they already look like statuary.
On the other hand, we’re going to need some terrain to go with these guys. Instead of having statues clumping around a normal terrain set, we can use the same marbling techniques on ancient ruins that fit the figures. The ruins will also look great with normal, full technicolor miniatures.
These two forces are primed, washed, and highlighted to bring out the texture and help identify key WYSIWYG features like weapons and armor. Two simple full-figure painting methods can add enough depth and personality to your little men, and even as a member of the handicapable crowd you can whip out a batch pretty easily.
As for me, I pulled a bunch of Greco-mythic monsters off the Splintered Light shelf, added some Xyston troops, and a handful of resin ruins, and the whole kit cost less than a hundred bucks. It’s nice to have a fantasy themed table that isn’t just Western European Dark/Middle Ages for a change of pace.