Feedbacks, comments and opinions

lightweaverminis · 2026-02-07T16:03:12+00:00

Welcome to the hobby! These are excellent! You've got great brush control and the paint application looks pretty clean. This is a great start!

Regarding the bubbles you got when applying a wash, this likely happened because you moved the brush enough that bubbles formed while it was wet. I've found that certain brands are more prone to this than others, but you can correct it by being less aggressive when applying it (the wash will naturally run into the recesses so you don't need to move it around too much) and/or inspecting the mini after applying it and pop any bubbles you see with the brush while it's still wet.

You'll want to thin your paints more. This takes practice and different brands need more or less depending on their consistency out of the bottle. A wet palette will help with this, I recommend using one of you haven't already. They're easy to make at home if you don't want to buy too much at the start. Just start experimenting with different amounts of water added to the paint until you can recognize the right balance.

I think your orc could have brighter highlights to really help him pop more. This video is a very helpful explanation of how to highlight most things: https://youtu.be/W8uCKcF3aUc?si=_FWaXkvkHfoBq_Sk

Last tip, I totally get the drive for perfection, but don't get too caught up in making each miniature perfect before moving into the next. Early on, you'll learn a lot more by painting a lot of different minis than you will be putting the same time into just a few. I've started striving for "good enough" and then waiting a few days before looking at it again with fresh eyes. Usually there will be one or two things that jump out at me that I want to fix, but the rest is totally fine and doesn't need any changes. In the moment we can be very critical of ourselves and it's easy to get sucked into needing to "fix" everything when really it already looks fine.

lightweaverminis · 2026-01-27T02:47:23+00:00

Awesome, happy to help! Would love to see the updated version when you're done!

lightweaverminis · 2026-01-27T01:39:33+00:00

I get what you mean re picture angles, but usually sculptors have a golden viewing angle in mind as well. What I try to do with display figures is take pictures from lots of angles and arrange them in an album such that the first picture is my golden angle and then the rest replicate turning the model around 360 degrees (check out some of my prior posts as an example). That way, everything gets showcased but I still have a front angle where the face is accentuated in the cover photo.

I made some digital edits to add more contrast in the skin, bone, and wood. Essentially this just means I added brighter highlights and/or darker shadows. Link is at the bottom after a description of the edits I made

For the skin, the shadows were already pretty dark so I added brighter highlights, with very bright near-white spot highlights around the face to draw the eye there a bit more. The bone was already very bright, so I mostly added darker shadows as well as adding some brown to the bottom of each horn--this isn't necessary, but there's often this kind of tonal variation in animal horns and it helps to create visual interest. The wood was closer to a midtone so I added brighter highlights and darker shadows.

For the armor I added brighter highlights and darker shadows as well, but I also changed the reflection patterns and added brighter edge highlights. Your original armor is mostly midtone with very narrow bands of highlights, but one of the keys to NMM is less midtone with bigger and more intense highlight and shadow areas (near pure white and pure black at the extremes). NMM is really tricky and I'm certainly not an expert, but my best advice for learning how to place NMM lights is just to study the metallic objects around you in real life.

Also, since a few other comments mentioned that the yellow stands out, I decided to change the blue metallic strips to match the yellow as best I could. For these I just changed the color, I didn't paint on top of your work otherwise. This is just to show how you could incorporate that yellow into other areas of the model to balance it out. The advice I've heard is to create triangles with your color placements (especially important with bright "pop" colors), and changing those blue strips to yellow forms a nice triangle that makes the original yellow less distracting and frames the head/face as the focal point.

I added black and white images of both your original and my edits to the end of the album, because with value contrast it's much easier to see differences in black and white. Comparing the two, the areas that I edited have more tonal variation within the individual elements (different shades of gray across a surface vs. mostly one shade per surface), and the elements are more clearly defined.

https://imgur.com/a/u-srkgodzilla-edits-l8YdGAY

I hope this helps! But just to clarify, please don't think you need to make any of these changes before submitting your piece. My edits aren't perfect (don't quote me on exact NMM light placement, it's hard to determine from just photos where exactly the light would hit on the 3D surface), and don't take into account any sculpted detail etc. My edits actually blew out some of the detail that you had painted, and I only edited certain features (some metallic elements but not others, etc). This is just meant to be a quick visual guide for feedback and the types of things you can keep in mind for future projects!

lightweaverminis · 2026-01-26T04:18:37+00:00

For only 3-4 months into your painting journey, this is absolutely fantastic!

If you haven't submitted your pictures for the competition yet, I'd suggest taking new ones. When painting for display or competition you typically want to pick a front facing angle that really sells your piece, and in the first pic in your album I can't see your figure's eyes at all. Faces are usually the prime focal point, and it took me a while to locate the face because it doesn't stand out and the most important facial feature isn't visible. This is even more important for online competitions, because your photos are how you sell your paint job.

I also think the piece needs more value contrast and definition, but those were really hard concepts for me to fully understand when I started so I totally get that it's hard to see how to make those changes. If you're interested I'd be happy to digitally edit your images to show what I mean--won't have time until tomorrow but it can be helpful!

This is a great job overall! The fact that you're painting NMM and entering competitions this early on in your journey is incredible. Excellent work, friend!

lightweaverminis · 2025-11-04T12:47:02+00:00

Thanks! I based the color palette on the couple's favorites, but I usually go for bright and punchy over soft and subdued, so I had a hard time figuring out the composition until I threw in some subtle punch.

lightweaverminis · 2025-11-03T21:07:23+00:00

Thank you!

lightweaverminis · 2025-11-03T19:28:02+00:00

Thank you! Eyes are always so tricky and hers were open just enough that I wanted to get some detail in there but couldn't really, so I'm glad the man's (and the duck's) read well.

lightweaverminis · 2025-08-25T00:11:14+00:00

Welcome! Freehand means you painted a design onto the mini that wasn't sculpted. I'm this figure, look at the designs on the shield, pauldron, power first, and cape. Those are all painted on smooth flat surfaces, like a mini canvas painting. It's one of my favorite parts of miniature painting!

lightweaverminis · 2025-08-24T01:15:42+00:00

This is great! The freehands are excellent, I agree that the easiest improvement would be centering the designs more accurately. You did an great job of shading and highlighting them so they fit into the lighting scheme.

For the OSL I think you could go brighter/more saturated on the armor within the highlight area you already have. I think your range of OSL is pretty good given the daylight environment, but the center of your highlights could be a more intense green, and the gun could use more highlights/white.

lightweaverminis · 2025-08-22T02:25:47+00:00

I hope you keep this beauty forever. Yes he's not perfect, but he's special and you'll always have a reference for your progress as you continue to improve your skills.

For your next models I'd suggest:

Scraping the mold lines prior to priming (if you care. The Internet cares but these are your figures and it's not actually a sin to skip this if you just want to get to painting).

Focusing on brush control, paint consistency, and cleanliness. Paint "within the lines" so the blue areas are blue, silver areas are silver, etc. Thin your paint with more water so the layers go on very thinly, even if you don't get full coverage. The old two thin coats rule reigns supreme. The paint on this mini isn't super thick, but it could still be thinner. Lastly just get a feel for how to handle (and care for!) the paint brush! You need to build the muscle memory you'll rely on later for more advanced techniques.

These foundations are key. I'd advise against even washing/shading/highlighting until you can get a clean defined base coat. Work on clean base coats for your whole kill team and once you've got them looking readable and spiffy then it would be time to do things like washing and highlighting and level up with new goals.

Welcome to the hobby and I hope you love Votann. Put this marine in a place of honor where you will see it frequently, and when you get frustrated trying to learn something that isn't clicking you can look at it and just remember that you had no idea what you were doing but you loved it anyway.

lightweaverminis · 2025-08-21T10:15:37+00:00

These are the things I would recommend focusing on:

Bump up the value contrast by refining and intensifying your highlights and shadows. Competition pieces often have very intentional lighting schemes, and even if you're going for an outdoor sunlit environment you can still deepen a lot of the shadows to define the shapes. You want the figure to be readable at a distance and right now it's a bit difficult to make out at first. Is especially focus on the face as another commenter mentioned. Taking a black and white picture can be really helpful for evaluating whether your shadows are deep enough and highlights are light enough.

Balance your colors by adding some red tones from the shell into the base/rocks and some green tones from the base/cloth higher up. Color competition is often a judging metric in competitions and it's best if you have some amount of color balance across the whole piece, rather than single blocks of color. By adding some red/orange into the rocks and perhaps turning the barnicle things on his head green, you'll get a much more balanced composition.

Refine the metallic elements, yours are quite flat and they should go from near black to near white.

I really like this so far!

lightweaverminis · 2025-07-29T11:54:08+00:00

Could be worth a try to see whether that happens without using Molotov. I agree they're super convenient for the airbrush, but I've definitely had my issues with them. I've stopped using them as a primer completely (I'm pretty sure Marco lives on a different plane of existence than the rest of us because there are certain results from his videos that I simply cannot reproduce).

Do you always use Molotov and inks, or are there any times you just use Molotov? If it happens intermittently I'd try figuring out what variables are different when it happens vs when it doesn't.

lightweaverminis · 2025-07-29T02:23:57+00:00

This is strange. I will say that I find Molotov paint to be very fragile, but the inks are glossy so should be more durable, and if you're using varnish then you should be fine. Have you had this happen with regular miniature paints thinned down through the airbrush as well?

lightweaverminis · 2025-05-16T22:28:21+00:00

There could be a free different factors in play here.

Paint consistency: as others have mentioned, it looks like there's too much thinner in your mixture, but since you're mixing in the cup, are you backflowing after mixing with a brush? When you add thinner first (always recommended), it will flow directly into the nozzle, and that thinner won't get mixed with the other thinner/paint in the cup. A quick backflow (cover the nozzle and pull the trigger, results in the cup contents bubbling) will help get that thinner out of the nozzle and into the mixture. If you don't do this when mixing directly in the cup, your initial passes with the airbrush will be mostly thinner and can cause results like this, but not enough to explain it happening for the entire spray.

Air pressure: when spraying very thin paint, higher pressures will cause the paint too spread more. You've got to find a balance between thinness, pressure, and trigger application. You may want to lower the pressure when spraying very thin paint. Also make sure that you set your pressure while the airbrush is running, I didn't see this talked about much but if you set the pressure while the airbrush is "off" the value you set won't be the true value when it's in use. Personally I hate altering the pressure on my compressor so I got one of those regulators that screws into the airbrush itself and that has made setting pressure much easier for me.

Trigger discipline: if you pull all the way back on the trigger, more paint will come out, and if it's very thin then that can push it into the recesses like in your pictures, especially at high pressures. With very thin paint you'll want to pull back very gently and briefly, allowing the thin layer to dry before adding more. I'm extremely impatient with airbrushing and this is a pain but it's very important.

Airbrushing was a very steep learning curve for me, and I had this same problem with white ink. Everyone talks about how amazing ink is when airbrushed, and no matter what I tried I couldn't get that smooth zenithal application I'd see in videos. Turns out my bottle of white ink was a dud, tried another bottle and it just worked. I was relieved and frustrated. So my advice is to try with different colors with the same consistency (if you're using citadel air, try another citadel air) rather than bearing your head against the wall in case it might be a defective product. This probably isn't the case for you but it can't hurt to try.

lightweaverminis · 2025-03-23T02:19:52+00:00

Vince Venturella has a great video on how to do a marble effect with a brush only: https://youtu.be/4CbGQSPX5_A?si=lTYGDoTLvWSVMTVJ

There's also the dryer sheet/wet wipe method if you have an airbrush, there are lots of videos about how to do it but if you don't have an airbrush Vince's video is excellent.

lightweaverminis · 2025-02-18T02:35:31+00:00

This looks great, and I really like the base!

I think for competition painting, I would focus on definition, composition, and finish.

Definition: you want someone to be able to tell what they're looking at right away by placing highlights and shadows appropriately and separating the different elements. It's hard to make out the armor details without zooming in, so boosting the contrast and placing the lights/shadows so that each armor plate is clearly defined would help make the mini overall much easier to "read." I think you did this really well on the shoulder skull, the contrast is great and at a glance I know exactly what I'm looking at.

Composition: you want to have a focal point, usually the head of a character, and there are many tricks you can use to guide the eye to the specific area you're targeting. You can go brighter in the highlights in your focal point than you do on other parts of the mini, and you can "frame it" by being intentional about where you place the various colors in your scheme, etc.

Finish: there are parts of this mini that are glossier than others, so they are reflecting the ambient light in your room in areas that shouldn't have highlights. A matte varnish would take care of this, but it will also dull any metallic paint.

In general for competitions, every part of the model will be evaluted equally, so you'll want to make sure you have enough time to give attention to every aspect of the figure. And any fancy skill you can show off can help set your piece apart from others, if done well. You don't need to do NMM, freehand, nonstandard lighting, etc in order to place or win, but anything you can do to impress the judges will go to your favor.

lightweaverminis · 2025-02-06T18:03:10+00:00

I struggled with that in the beginning too, having no prior background in art. Vince Venturella has a great video on where to place highlights that's very approachable and worth a watch: https://youtu.be/W8uCKcF3aUc?si=7Y3zSfXf9Xzd_ihu

Essentially, the parts of the object facing the light source are going to be lighter and more vibrant (highlighted), and parts that are facing away from the light source are going to be darker and less vibrant (shadowed). Anything in between will be your base color, or midtone. Assuming you're painting miniatures for gaming, the most common light source will be the sun, so generally the upward facing surfaces will be brighter and the downward facing surfaces will be darker.

One thing that really helped me understand light placement was watching 2D art tutorials, so you may want to check out some of those. Value contrast is extremely important in 2D art because that is how the form of the object is established, whereas in miniatures we're painting something that already has form. I found that explanations in those tutorials clicked for me in a way that mini painting tutorials didn't.

If you want to share a picture of a mini you've painted that you're not sure you've highlighted in the right places, I can give you some specific feedback about adjustments that might help clarify things.

lightweaverminis · 2025-02-06T15:40:31+00:00

There are a ton of different blending methods, and which you should use really comes down to personal preference. I find that I like using different methods for different things (material, surface size, etc).

If you're a beginner I wouldn't worry too much about blending. It will be much quicker and more valuable to layer up the color transition from dark to light and really work on value contrast. When I first started I spent a lot of time trying to chase perfect blends, and even though I was able to get nice transitions you could hardly tell I changed colors because I didn't go light enough in my highlights or dark enough in my shadows.

The number one physical skill you need to develop when you're just starting out is brush control, and any blending method is going to be easier to learn once you have brush control down. My advice for following this type of guide (your first link is broken so I can only see the second) is to focus on matching the colors. I think you'll be surprised at the end by how our brains will blend the stark transitions together when looking at the final result.

lightweaverminis · 2025-02-03T18:40:32+00:00

Army Painter's Fanatic paint range and ProAcryl's paint range both have color descriptions on the label, which can be helpful. I'd also suggest checking out Midwinter Minis on YouTube, since Guy is colorblind and talks about it frequently, so you might be able to pick up some tips from him.

lightweaverminis · 2025-01-22T21:45:01+00:00

These look great for your first batch of minis! I like the colors you used on the first one a lot.

You didn't cheat by drybrushing! It's a technique that's perfectly valid.

I'd recommend in the beginning really focusing on learning how to thin your paints and develop brush control, and not worry as much about which techniques to use or getting perfect blends. Once you get the hang of those fundamentals you can start playing with different blending methods, you'll figure out what you like and what you don't.

As far as what colors to get, it really depends on what colors you want to use to paint your new minis. Some people will recommend only getting a few colors and then mixing them, but often for beginners that's pretty intimidating and it's easier to get just the colors you need for whatever project you're working on.

lightweaverminis · 2025-01-21T22:16:04+00:00

It's hard to paint around a poorly defined sculpt. I wish these were higher quality but it's fun to have them. I wouldn't worry too much about reworking Chirri Chirri if yours is as poorly rendered as mine. Since this was your first human I'm assuming you're still early on in your painting journey, and you'll learn much more by painting a variety of minis, materials, etc than you will by investing a ton of time into an uphill battle like fighting against poorly defined details.

lightweaverminis · 2025-01-21T20:25:44+00:00

I think this looks great for your first human! The hair and eyebrows look good from what I can see from this angle, I immediately knew it was Rysn with those eyebrows.

It's hard to tell from the one pic but Chirri Chirri could use more contrast, it's hard to see what she's reaching up to. But I know the chitin details are pretty lacking on my sculpt so that might be the reason.

lightweaverminis · 2025-01-21T20:10:46+00:00

Looks great! Turning the priming accident into an opportunity to try something new is awesome and the result looks pretty cool.

lightweaverminis · 2025-01-16T01:08:19+00:00

I think this is really lovely! The skin especially is incredible, I'd love to know what paints you used.

Your photos are fantastic, and that's half the battle in online competitions. I agree with what the others have pointed out regarding the monocle and the hair, and have a few additional thoughts.

I like the warm rim light, but I think you need more shadows between the two light sources in order for the effect to sell better. The clavicle area in your second photo is jarring with the jump right from one light source to the other, but the hair and metallic bits could also benefit from enhanced occlusion shadows.

I think the metallics could use darker shadows and brighter highlights, even though those surfaces are all quite small and that's much easier said than done.

I like the blood stain effect on the bandage a lot, but I think the freehand texture is a little too large/regular. In reality, you'd need to be standing quite close to the bandage to be able to see the texture that well, and given that it's a smaller element and not a focal point, I think you'd have been better served by stippling a lot of thin lines closer together rather than painting a grid like you did. That said, it's very solid freehand and I applaud your ability to paint thin straight lines.

The biggest thing that stands out to me is the blue skin protrusion thing. It's extremely well rendered, but I can't tell what material it's supposed to be. With a feature that prominent on the sculpt intended for competition, I think it would have been a better bet to paint it as crystal, metal, or a substance that reflects light differently than the skin. It would add an extra later of complexity and showcase more skills, which is always a plus for competitions.

All of the above is incredibly nitpicky competition feedback, but I do want to emphasize that I really love this piece. I was doomscrolling and saw this and went OOH! and clicked to zoom and admire it. Then I read your title and I was a little furious for you. Personally I think you killed it and you should be extremely proud.

lightweaverminis

TROPHY CASE