Beastclaw Raiders

I've always wanted to dipp my toes into the hobby of painting miniatures, and once upon a time I actually had a go at it. I think I was like 13-14 years old when I bought some Skinks from the Lizardmen army and I totally drowned them in paint. Me being young and not much money over for this kind of hobbies I only bought two paints and yeah... the results was just not really presentable... at all.

So now, 12-13 years later I wanted to do another attempt at painting up some sick looking minis. Did I succeed? Well.. mistakes was made here for sure. My first and biggest mistake was my choice of miniatures. After browsing around on the games workshops page for hours and hours I decided to go with the Start Collecting Bestclaw Raiders pack. The looks of these miniatures is just awesome. Lots of details and the winter theme was very appealing to me. But they are big and since the goal was sick looking minis - painting was slow. This ended up with me painting for three months and then having to take a six months break before I finally surrendered to the unfinished models staring at me, begging to be painted.

Now, I know a lot of people say that you cant expect your first models to be perfect, and although that is certainly true, trying hard is what gives me motivation in a project like this. I have to try hard to be able to look forward to the end result. And knowing that I have been trying my best throughout the project helps me finish it when I get closer to the end. So in my mind it's not the fact that I tried to paint everything as neat as I could or that I spend hours and hours watching tutorials on what colors I should use that made me take that break that ended up being half a year long. But the fact that the quantity of models to paint was just to great. And for no good reason either. Again, the goal was to paint sick looking models, not to be able to play a game of warhammer next weekend. So I definitely didn't have to start of with this many models.

The reason to why I did that though kinda comes back to me trying so hard. See, I really wanted to paint something that looked decent. A simple base coat with a wash on top of it wouldn't cut it for me. So I bought a lot of colors, probably way more then anyone would do for their first miniatures. And since I had all these colors, and they were all picked out to paint these specific models, I figured well... I might just as well buy a bigger pack of models so that I can make use of all my paints.

In the end though, I am very happy about these models. Sure, I let tutorials do all the hard work when I decided what colors to use. In fact, even though I swapped out some here and there this was more of a "paint by color" project then anything else. But I learned a ton! I now know more about the paints, how they work and what certain paints are made for. And the making of the base was just a blast. This was the only part where I actually went a bit out of the box and used a mixture of Woodland Scenics - Soft Flake snow and Mod Podge matt. And that wet snow turned out to be all that I hoped for.