This blog post is an encouragement to ignore any and all painting tutorials.

Throw away the box, ignore the box art, ignore each and every YouTuber telling you exactly which Two Thin Army Painter Tone Pro Acryl paints to use for each body part.

Fuck. All. That.

Assemble the mini. And find out how the mini should look while you’re painting it.

If you feel burned out by your hobby (you definitely shouldn’t, it’s a hobby), then this might be a simple way to get some joy back into it. It worked for me, at least.

Recently I painted my Charnel Throne for my Flesh-Eater Courts, and it was so much fun, simply because I primed this thing, put it on my desk, filled up my wet palette with water and then … just started. One idea after the other, and with each step I either made a fun new discovery or had a happy accident. It was a few hours full of experiments and a result I am very proud of.

The important thing is, I also made plenty of mistakes, and that’s okay! It’s just paint on plastic, not open-heart surgery. I understand that people can be very precious with their (very expensive) GW miniatures, or any miniatures for that matter, but mistakes are correctable, and they are the only way to learn.

So let’s have a look at the process:

Priming was a simple white on black, heavy zenithal, not leaving too much shadow, as I would reinforce the deepest shadows with various washes anyway. But it left a bit of shadow in certain areas and kept them a slightly darker hue.

Then I went to town with colours for the stone. When you observe old stone structures in nature, you see that their colours go way beyond “dark-grey-then-drybrush-with-light-grey”. Sure, the latter would be a quick fix, but it’s also very boring. Aged stone structures have browns and yellows and greens of all kinds. Below, you can see my wet palette during the process. I think you get the point.

I also experimented with Dirty Down Rust. Lukas (@chewie_painting ) has been showcasing a technique (I think he originally called it “ghetto chipping”, but has since settled on a more serious name :D). Since Dirty Down is water-based, it gets reactivated when you paint over it with a wet brush and new acrylic paints.

The outcomes are unpredictable but very often simply amazing happy accidents, and since I wanted to give the stone a weathered look, this was exactly what I was aiming for.

Then I took out the oil paints: some shades of green, some shades of yellow, ochre. I took a rather dry, stiff brush, put a tiny bit into the oil paint and simply dabbed it into corners where I could see moss growing and dirt accumulating. No plan, just vibes. Oil paints also come with extremely high pigmentation, so these corners would pop and shine brightly.

Then came my first big mistake.

I did an oil wash, and of course I totally forgot that a thinned-down grey-brown oil paint (with mineral spirits) would also wash away all my oily moss experiments. Which is exactly what happened.

Doesn’t matter. I wiped away all the excess oil from the wash, sealed my work with matte varnish and repeated my steps. Then I matte-varnished again over the areas I’d just picked out with oils.

By now the Dirty Down had also reactivated a few times and, with the matte varnish, remained trapped as reddish-brown cracks in the stone. Beautiful.

The throne itself was my usual bone-painting process: I start with a darker bone colour, drybrush with a lighter bone colour, sometimes reinforce the shadows with a sepia wash, then edge-highlight with a very light bone-to-ivory colour and do tippy-toppy highlights with pure white.

I decided to paint the ornate floor tiles very carefully, showing the remains of some rich palace or similar, which has been overtaken by crazed cannibals … I mean noble knights, who deserve to walk over such well-crafted stones. I liked the flower motif in yellow, but would weather it down with some brownish washes, and if it turned out too dark, paint it lighter again. The cracks were filled with bones, but at some point I flooded them with thinned-down technical blood paint, so it looked like dried, crusted blood caught in the seams of the stones.

Then I drybrushed some stone edges with an ivory-white colour, took out a collection of greenish and yellowish washes again and dabbed them on top of the highlighted edges – just to add more and more colour.

And this is it.

It was simply a meditation – discover a corner where I thought, “Uh, it might look good with some colour. Let’s pick one” – and then just execute. If I didn’t like it, I’d paint something neutral over it and try again.

At some point I was satisfied and done, so have a look at the final result: