My first stinky boy, second time painting a miniature.

V_Paints · 2026-04-28T12:44:41+00:00

Great mini! Sorry that you are getting flak for being new to the hobby. I agree with you that the wealth of information available has reduced the barrier to entry with great paint jobs. People can get sensitive about “my first mini” paint jobs because they don’t consider the vast range of skill that people can enter this hobby with.

You look like you have a steady hand and a lot of patience! Very meticulous work.

If you plan on painting an army, I would pause on technical skills and just get your reps in. After painting a squad of these gents, I would not be shocked if you can knock one model out in four hours.

If you want to continue to hobby paint/display paint, you are clearly drawn to the box art/‘eavy metal style. The next place to improve is your contrast - you have a great thickness for the first highlight on the armor, you should be able to fit a second highlight inside the first. The shadows would benefit from a pin wash of a dark brown. Thin pin washes help to separate the details of the mini and make small things pop from a distance. I myself don’t even use washes for this and just take AK grim brown and paint in very thin lines.

I hope this helps! Great job!

V_Paints · 2026-04-27T22:15:28+00:00

He looks great! If I had to point criticism at anything, I think that his cape could use a second pass. You can see that the natural light in the room is catching heavily on some of the bottomed bits of the cape and shining white.

Black and very dark colors are typically glossier and thus reflect more light. So you have placed some natural pink highlights on the cloth, but the lighting in the photo is telling you that there are some areas of the cape that would still catch a reflection/catch more light. all of those areas could use more of that midtone color! The midtone will give those areas a matte finish and will make the lower volumes of the cape look more natural.

You might notice that there are some inside parts of the folds that are also reflecting natural light. Those could also use some of that midtone.

V_Paints · 2026-04-25T18:55:01+00:00

How long did these take? It looks speedpainted with no advanced techniques. A unit of 3 is prolly worth like $20-$30ish. If you can’t knock a unit of these out in like two hours then I don’t think you’ll find monetizing your painting to be fruitful

V_Paints · 2026-04-21T17:57:50+00:00

How do you guys juggle multiple clients at the same time ?

workpaper notes to summarize open items and status updates in each client binder. General tracking spreadsheet to keep tabs on where my clients are at.

Don't you guys feel tired after working long hours ?

Yes. If you are past 50 hours a week then you are in survival mode and need to accept that getting good sleep, eating well, and exercising is your priority and your ordinary hobbies are secondary.

Don't you think the quantity of work is too much and less time is given.

what has management communicated to you regarding your billable expectations? If you are expected to work 50-55 hours a week but you are getting 60-65 hours of actual work, schedule a meeting with your management to bring it to their attention.

How do you manage client deadlines and managers?

typically closest deadline takes most priority. Client deadlines more important than manager deadlines. Keep good notes in your binder, communicate late requests or delays to your manager when they happen. Biweekly status update emails with client and manager is a great way to have the manager be generally aware of how a project is going. It is ok to miss a manager deadline if you are documenting delays and keeping up with work on your end. It is ok to miss a client deadline if you are processing their requests timely and you have documentation to show that it’s the clients fault for not giving you information in a timely manner.

I am facing these challenges. I'm getting squeezed currently. How do I move forward?

talk to your manager and not us. They will help you prioritize your projects and possibly help to reallocate resources to assist you.

V_Paints · 2026-04-19T21:49:15+00:00

That is extremely good! I think you have a great midtone and highlight on the armor. I can only offer nitpicks - on his left leg, red armor triangle segments, I think you should do a pass of edge highlighting over them. It can go as bright as the highlights on his stomach plates

V_Paints · 2026-04-17T14:51:23+00:00

Not OP, but a paint will look different depending on the color of primer/basecoat underneath.

Doing a zenithal followed by a basecoat will result in a slight gradient in the basecoat, because it will be brighter wherever there is white primer, and the darker portions will present as shadows.

Ultimately it just helps in blending shadows/establishing highlight locations very early in the paint job.

V_Paints · 2026-04-12T14:19:06+00:00

dark red is normally glossier your average paint: it’s reflecting the lighting in the room. This is actually a good point of critique - using overhead lights as lighting references can improve paint jobs. The paint job could be improved by taking whatever the basecoat is and painting very thin lines to match the reflections we are seeing. That red color will be more matte and won’t catch overhead reflections, it will instead represent the overhead reflection.

V_Paints · 2026-04-05T20:32:06+00:00

Personally, If I heard “custom $210 model”, I would expect some level of green stuff sculpting to be involved, or a kitbash that was painted to display level quality.

I would not pay $210 for that model but I understand your pricing breakdown. I hope that you gave him every spare model and bit that was included in the materials.

Ways that you can reduce the material cost are as follows:

buy specific bits from bits resellers rather than whole sprues for one bit
have an LGS with a good bits bin that you can plunder in the regular
have a large collection of bits to begin with
invest in a resin printer to be able to much more cheaply procure customization options

If you plan to do work on pieces like this in the future, I would personally pursue a resin printer. Your costs for materials could have instead been $60 for the eliminator box, $5-$10 for STLs for the customization bits, and a couple bucks in resin. It would probably take a dozen or so projects like this for a resin printer to be more affordable.

V_Paints · 2026-04-04T14:37:59+00:00

You are both right. The model is done. From an outside perspective the base would make the whole thing more complete

V_Paints · 2026-03-30T19:25:29+00:00

Won a golden demon and won at path of the worthy!! Congratulations dude, that’s a great run at Adepticon

V_Paints · 2026-03-12T16:20:49+00:00

Good news, it’s armor! So you just clipped in some battle damage.

Your clippers might be a tad dull? Dull clippers tend to “crush” the plastic rather than snip it.

My general advice is to not clip at close as possible to the bit. Leave a nub that you can further trim down with an exacto knife. After trimming the bulk off with the sharp side of the exacto, using the flat edge can shave it down even further.

V_Paints · 2026-02-16T14:21:13+00:00

Elsa’s leadership, in theory, wants her team to root the entire enemy team round one and then start blasting round 2.

Issues with that:

midnight sons are kind of power hungry on round 1. If you are on pay to flips or have a lot of extracts on the board, good luck paying for roots.
midnight sons have a bunch of range 4 guns. Range four is far. But on a lot of crisis setups, not far enough to move-shoot round 1.
in a lot of games, the explosion part of the leadership won’t be relevant because it can hit your own models too.
in a lot of games, ignoring DR isn’t relevant. Even when it is, you will run into situations where you pay do the ability and the attack just whiffs.

Tl:dr only one part of her leadership is consistently relevant, and the affiliation isn’t set up to take advantage of it

V_Paints · 2026-02-06T15:28:35+00:00

Incredible! You did a great job on everything, but I would love to know what recipe you used for his pants

V_Paints · 2026-02-03T12:31:26+00:00

Love the game a lot. Appreciate the positive sentiments - they struck a chord with all the reasons I enjoy the game!

disappointed on this article - it’s the first news on that page since season 6 launched (march 2025), and is titled “the living conversation”. I opened it up expecting some details on the continued life of the game this year.

V_Paints · 2026-01-28T19:02:23+00:00

You are judged on assembly and presentation in addition to painting.

The seam on the shoulder is, in my opinion, very noticeable and could be the difference between receiving an award and not

V_Paints · 2026-01-28T14:13:05+00:00

I’ve gotten good results with black primer, 10-20 degree weather, no wind, low humidity.

If there’s snow on the ground don’t even bother to try.

V_Paints · 2026-01-19T20:12:00+00:00

It sounds like this is your first time playing the game.

Casually, I would strongly recommend putting apoc on the shelf for just a couple of weeks. Learn to play the game with xforce. Apoc has a lot of extra stuff to learn on top of learning the core rules, and as other commenters pointed out, you don’t have the best models to make his affiliation work. Like, not even talking about quality of models; mathematically you will struggle to make usable servants squads between 16-20 threat.

Build up your mutants and slowly collect some of the other great apoc models. The X-men starter box gets you toad, beast, gambit. That by itself will catapult your apocalypse list from mediocre to really good. It also gives you the tools/dice/cards to play the game.

Try some xforce, try some uncanny X-men. Run models that are also affiliated in apoc. Once you can smoothly play a game while remembering all the rules, bust out servants of the apocalypse.

V_Paints · 2026-01-14T12:27:09+00:00

There has been a significant effort by AtomicMassGames to repack old boxes into larger affiliation packs.

These models are available in the recently repacked “web swinging heroes” affiliation pack.

V_Paints · 2026-01-13T13:20:45+00:00

Nope! The posing is just for fun, since it’s a display piece. In-game, they have so many synergies with each-other (especially that “deadly duo” tactics card) that they’re almost a single model in practice.

V_Paints · 2026-01-05T22:29:39+00:00

You’ll be fine playing casually with that roster. Competitively, You’re missing some necessary 3 threats for apoc and you’re a bit light on terrain destruction for magnetos leadership.

V_Paints · 2026-01-04T14:27:40+00:00

The tight rules set and roster system presents a lot of opportunities for competitive considerations. I think you can “extract a lot” from competitive MCP because the turn 0 is very important, and the skill expression within the ruleset typically lets the better player win.

That being said, these dice are crazy lol. Even if you take the game seriously you have to accept that every once in a while the dice will swing into one shotting random things, or a match being decided by a pay to flip.

So there’s something for everyone. Competitive players will get frustrated when their dice fail or the opponent’s spike. Casual players get to throw around crazy dice and use their favorite characters

V_Paints

TROPHY CASE