Painting Guide: Sorylian Fleet

This article first appeared as part of the HoP Idol Contest but I've since had a few people send me emails and ask me to put it up on my blog, with bigger picture files so they can take a closer look... so I hope this works or its pointless!!! By the way voting is now live in the contest and you can vote for me here. Thanks

Right I need to get this out of the way fairly rapidly before anyone gets a snide dig in and says I'm shit at painting and shouldn't be doing any painting guides... I know I'm no where near as good as many of the painting bloggers out there. I never will be so I'm not going to pretend I am. However I do have a few tricks up my sleeves and various people have asked if I'd consider doing some painting guides, but I'm doing this one for the HoP Idol contest. So against my better judgement here's my first full on painting guide, and to ease myself into this its an easy one, I'm just painting my Sorylians from Firestorm Armada. Given though that people have asked me to be specific about what I do to the mini's I'm putting a lot of detail into this painting guide and as such it's a damn hefty beast.

Get the painting area right

I think its fair to say the first thing most people get wrong from the get go is their panting area. There are a few essential items I think you must have:

• Comfy chair
• Dedicated painting table / desk
• A place to store you paints within easy reach
• Ceramic tile / mixing palette (also, or instead a wet palette)
• A pot for cleaning your brushes of paint as you go (dirty water)
• A pot for watering down and mixing your paints (clean water)
• A roll of kitchen towel
• A good lamp with a daylight bulb, or if you can afford it two.
• Two jugs, one empty to pour dirty water into and one full of clean (preferably filtered) water.

I might return to a few of my tips or things I have / do when painting like airbrush and paintbrush care etc. at a later date, but for now I'll leave it at that.

The concept

Right, you have to start somewhere and my rough concept for these guys was to simply paint them predominantly red hulls with white accents. The guns engines etc were to be painted in metallic colours, but at this early stage I wasn't sure what sort of metallics, gold, brassy or a gunmetal type colours or indeed if I would use metallic paints or try None Metallic Metal (NMM) technique. However I did not want my ships to look like they were newly out of the space ship yard... no I wanted them to have a 'lived in' look so I was going to attempting a few weathering techniques, but more on those later.

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