Crazyredcoat's Crazy Compendium of Collected Creativity

And so, after much time, the Umber Berserkers are finished, and what have I learned?

The first, and most important, is to NOT rush! My excitement to get this unit, and my ASoIaF minis led me to rushing to get paint on them that made me miss all sorts of little details that I’d normally get to in the model prep. This is most obvious with mould lines as you can almost certainly find all over these chaps. With other minis I’ve dealt with these with a nice sharp blade and the GW scraper tool (other scraping tools are available), but I just had a quick look these chaps and thought ‘good enough’. This was not the case.

Second is the painting issues I had along the way. One of the main reasons these chaps took so long is frustration of the shininess of several stages of paint work. I am still unsure as to why certain stages decided to go shiny, but such is life. The lesson here is that it never really hurts to have some way of matting down paints or even some matte varnish for an after coat (something that I will be doing later for these chaps).

A final note is playing to your strengths. While I know many people can paint in batches of 10 or more, I’m just not that good. I am better at individual minis and it’s actually quite tricky for me to paint another way. I originally wanted to do all 12 at once, then realised that I wanted to do the banner separately, then very quickly got bored of painting 11 minis colour by colour as time when by. This might not be a problem for everyone, but I am one of those people that once I’m bored I’m done for the day. In the end I painted them by rank which worked quite well or me and meant that I could stick to a schedule while still playing to my strengths as a painter. Hopefully they have turned out alright and while I am not 100% happy with them, the fact that they are a bit rough and ready, as an aesthetic, works nicely in my favour.