The Wildhearts

I was really enjoying taking on this project. I got to listen to a load of tracks I hadn’t heard since I was a much younger lad (The Wildhearts are regularly on my playlist but some of the early 4-track singles don’t appear in online streaming services, so often get skipped) and reminisced about how good a lot of the music in the 90s actually was.

I was also trying to embrace my “cartoon-y” style of painting.

It’s not a style I particularly wanted to develop, and I much prefer the more realistic look that other people acheive. But it’s almost like I can’t help the way the paint comes out of the brush. So I’ve stopped fighting it, and just accepted that a lot of my minis are going to look a bit “old school” cartoon-y.

Look, the long and short of it is… I forgot to take photos while painting.

I tried to treat the band as a “unit” of soldiers, and tried a sort of batch-painting approach. This meant slapping on contrast paint to block in the colours (this is my preferred method of painting now) then picking out the high points in a brighter colour.

A bit of black-lining where two simliar-looking colours meet and a bit of dry-brushing to pick out the tiny details like guitar strings.

To be honest, it felt a bit creepy and stalker-y trawling the internet looking for photos a bunch of gnarly-looking hairy blokes – and on more than one occasion, Mrs Blinky asked if maybe I was taking my love of the music that one particular band makes just a little too far?

She might have a point.

But at the same time, I can’t help but feel a little bit pleased with myself that the tiny 28mm dude on the tabletop has the same type of tatoos as the big 6ft reprobate it was based on. (I had to use a bit of artistic licence painting the tattoos a blue-green colour rather than black, which just looked too “stark” at 28mm scale.)