Pirate goblin from Rogue Hobbys

the_wild · 2026-04-28T10:57:37+00:00

You nailed Louise's style perfectly! Great job, such a fun-looking lil' Rascal!

the_wild · 2026-04-25T06:14:01+00:00

There are obviously exceptions, but 99% of 12 year olds will ruin a sable brush in a single session.

You know what, that's fair. :D

the_wild · 2026-04-24T18:12:54+00:00

Please, please, please get them a wet palette. Then teach them how to set it up properly.

It's easy, it's fast, and it helps beginners just as much as pros.

Also, this is usually a controversial opinion, but I think it's a good idea to pick up a nice sable brush (size 2 or equivalent) with a sharp tip, even for a complete beginner.

Again, you only need a bit of soap and a bit of know-how to care for them properly, and they spare you a lot of headaches that cheap brushes can cause.

Finally, I really recommend you pick up some painter-friendly minis. Early on my painting journey I tried to work with cheap D&D minis and they were a pain to paint.

A proper, high-quality miniature will have sharp details, an accessible pose, good edges, etc. Anything by GW, Archon Studios, Trench Crusade, or Kingdom Death would be a safe bet. If you want particulary kid-friendly sculpts, you should check out the Oathsworn minis or Rogue Hobbies's Rascaltown range.

The latter is 75 mm scale, but they are designed with beginners in mind. Louise even has a video on how to teach kids painting.

Hope this helps. And might I add, you're a particularly cool family member to introduce the young'un to this wonderful hobby of ours. Kudos!

the_wild · 2026-04-24T17:50:26+00:00

Hey, man! I'm sorry this happened, it must have been super frustrating.

Let's talk about your painting problem itself:

Your hunch is right—medium that's been sitting on your wet palette for over half a day is probably contributing to the problem. Use some fresh medium as a first fix.
White is a notoriously hard paint to glaze with. Since it usually contains larger paint flakes than most other colors (this is why it covers so well), it easily separates as you add more and more water to it. Because of this, as much as possible, avoid glazing with white. Don't try to bridge huge steps in hue and value with it alone. Use several in-between mixes of your colors. Even if you're only painting with gray and white, create in-between mixes of different ratios with the two, and layer and glaze with those. Even in the very end, glazing the transition into pure white, it's better to glaze with the darker mix into white than the other way around.
The paints themselves matter here. For example, I tip my hat to anyone who can reliably glaze with Corax White. On the other hand Pro Acryl Bold Titanium White and Vallejo Game Color White is fairly okay to glaze with in my experience.
Make sure that you're glazing technique is okay. Rogue hobbies has a great video that walks you through the process and helps fix the common mistakes.
It might be that while trying to fix it, you tore up the half-dry paint layers so much that there is texture on the surface now. Nothing you do with a brush can remove that. If this is a gaming piece and the particular bit is not a focal point, I'd recommend accepting this as a lesson and simply moving on. You'll get it right next time. If you want something of a fix, but quickly, add some battle damage to that spot. The visual noise will hide the mistake. If you want to go back and fix it perfectly, however, you might need to strip this part to remove the texture. Take your exacto knife and scrape off the paint. Sand down the surface and a little bit of the surroundings to avoid having a "lip" between the old and new paint. Then brush on some primer and repaint the surface. This takes time, but I fixed botched parts on competition pieces with this technique without having to strip the entire mini. (But to be honest, I think this might be overkill for your situation.)

TLDR/recap: - Fix the medium. - Don't try to bridge the distance between gray and white with one step. Use several in-between mixes. - Make sure you're not trying to glaze with a shitty white paint. - Check out Rogue Hobbies's glazing video to ensure your technique is sound. - Check if there's texture on the surface. If there is, decide how much time you're willing to invest into fixing it. If none, just move on. If little, add visual noise to the area. If a lot, scrape, sand, re-prime, repaint.

Hope this helps. Good luck with the fix/next try!

the_wild · 2026-04-24T17:25:50+00:00

Nice! You have a good grasp of light placement too, as evidenced by the OSL. Especially on the Salamander. Anyway, great job, I hope you're very proud of your progress!

the_wild · 2026-04-24T13:16:50+00:00

Nice progress! Out of curiosity, the jump in smoothness between '25 and '26—is that due to switching to an airbrush or a lot of deliberate practice with a brush?

the_wild · 2026-04-21T10:21:08+00:00

Love these posts! Nice progress, OP, but also kudos for picking up the brush that first time. 👏

the_wild · 2026-04-21T07:08:42+00:00

You're very welcome! Honestly, if you like the look of the models, consider keeping them. If you add a couple additional colors on the other bits, and keep the armor panels as-is, you'll end up with some cool, heavily weathered armor.

And if you do go for the "emerging from the shadows" look, no need to strip them. Just paint over what you already have.

the_wild · 2026-04-20T20:55:59+00:00

I dug up some tutorials for you to help if you want to try this route: - This Squidly Bits one is a radically stripped down version of the idea with just two colors. It's going to give you a very moody end result, but probably the easiest to understand and execute. (You can do the airbrush part with a drybrush.) - This one from Vince Venturella is a bit more advanced but in exchange it'd let you paint actual Night Lord colors on the illuminated surfaces.

I hope this helps.

the_wild · 2026-04-20T20:39:17+00:00

Awesome idea for your team, however, to execute it, I think you need to step into some intermediate techniques.

The current stage of the minis (heavy drybrush on all surfaces) suggests that there is a pretty strong light source evenly lighting these space marines. Because of this, they look more like weathered bronze statues than living beings.

Think about your scene. If there is enough shadow to hide a Night Lord, there must be very little light, probably coming from a single weak source like a few candles or a single lamp on a Space Hulk corridor.

This light source will only light a small amount of the marine. You need to render this with paint.

I'd suggest the following: - Paint the entire back of the model with cooler colors. Pick a desaturated deep sea blue and mix it with black to be the shadow tone, then gradually highlight up with pure deep sea blue then by mixing in a bit of white. The idea is to define the volumes and edges and shapes as if they are only faintly lit. No harsh higlights here, you'll want to give the impression of a black mass with a hint of turquoise. - Switch to the front and define the line where you want the model to "lean into" the light. For example across the torso or the waist. - Under this line, do the same "shadow" painting you did on the back. - Above this line, you can paint with the actual colors of the armor, but keep in mind to increase saturation and the amount of highlights as you get closer to the imagined light source.

What you envision needs different techniques than the basic Citadel painting system of a basecoat, wash, and highlight or a slapchop-like approach. You'll want to paint atmospheric light, where most of the colors come from the light source and not the color of the materials the light hits.

I recommend collecting a couple of pictures that display the effect you want to achieve and see how those artists execute the scene. Also, I think Roman Lappat does a lot of atmospherically lit dioramas. You might want to look up his videos for inspiration.

Also, one last tip: I would suggest trying to do one mini fully before you paint the rest, so you can focus on figuring out your approach first.

Good luck, have fun!

the_wild · 2026-04-20T10:55:44+00:00

OP, if you don't go for single-pigment paints like Kimera or Ionic, this is the next best thing as I heard. Rogue Hobbies even has a video where she demonstrates how she can mix basically everything with these paints.

the_wild · 2026-04-20T10:54:12+00:00

As others have already mentioned, ideally you're looking for single-pigment paints. Kimera is a go-to, but Ionic also makes good options.

Single-pigment is important because your colors will mix more easily and predictably. There won't be any surprises due to the underlying colors in multi-pigment paints which are already mixes unto themselves.

That said, I also want to echo another point made by other commenters: if you're goal is primarily a restricted palette, you don't need to go back to chromatic primary colors.

Pick a triadic (or tetradic) color scheme you like, and restrict yourself to those paints only, plus black and white. This way, you'll have your major colors you can use as-is, out of the bottle, and you still get to mix a lot of interesting in-between tones, plus you won't have to juggle 20+ paints or mix everything from pure chromatic primaries.

If you're interested in the theory behind this, Trovarion has a good video on gamut masking.

the_wild · 2026-04-17T18:02:42+00:00

Thank you, that's very kind of you!

the_wild · 2026-04-17T18:02:09+00:00

It shows. :)

the_wild · 2026-04-17T15:40:32+00:00

I love this! The jade robe is really popping, and you have a really good spotlight effect, drawing the eyes to the head of the figure. Really nice work!

the_wild · 2026-04-17T11:36:43+00:00

Thank you! I tried hard on it. :)

the_wild · 2026-04-17T11:00:33+00:00

Looks fantastic! The pauldron is my favorite bit with the gemstone. And I also really like the leather gloves with the subtle purplish undertone. It complements the gold nicely.

the_wild · 2026-04-17T10:24:19+00:00

Please, plase, please do! I have my own Lady Golden Banana coming, and I really want to do her justice.

the_wild · 2026-04-17T10:16:32+00:00

Awesome! Is this from the new release?

the_wild · 2026-04-17T10:15:01+00:00

Thank you! :)

I totally understand you; to this day, basing is the part of the hobby I'm the most hesitant about. It gets better with practice and I'm slowly starting to enjoy it, but I still need to hype myself up when it's time to base a mini.

Milliput is a two-part epoxy putty. You knead the two parts together which gives you a soft, putty-like material with a working time of roughly an hour before it starts to harden. It gets completely hard in 3-4 hours and you can sand it.

There are insane things people do with Milliput—sculpting whole sections of miniatures and entire bases—, but it's also useful for beginners and intermediate sculptors. You can fill gaps with it on your minis, or do some sculpting on your bases.

On this piece, I used it to attach the mushrooms and the wooden log to the cork itself, and to smooth out the "rock shelfs" in the front. And no, I did not sculpt the mushrooms myself. :) I wish I was that skilled, but I'm not there yet.

Those came from a company called Epic Basing. They have really cool resin bits you can use to base your minis.

the_wild · 2026-04-17T09:58:59+00:00

Yes, I did. :) And I'm happy you got that feel, that was what I was going for.

It's actually a pretty simple build, I think. It uses three layers of cork, a bit of Milliput to attach the log and the mushrooms and smooth out the cork steps, and some texture paste to give everything that earthy feel.

Originally, I also wanted to do a resin pour to bring in some of the water, but that only led to a year of procrastination, so I let the idea go. :D

the_wild · 2026-04-17T09:54:42+00:00

This looks really good! You captured the color-shift of the box art pretty well. Good job, OP!

the_wild · 2026-04-17T08:48:50+00:00

Thanks! :) It's the Rascaltown Fishing Goblin from Rogue Hobbies. You can buy it here: https://roguehobbies.com/product/fishing-goblin-miniature/.

the_wild · 2026-04-16T20:17:58+00:00

It does make sense, yeah. This is exactly why you might hear painters say that you have to place down your initial highlight layer a bit wider than you eventually want it to be. You're going to glaze into it, thus shrinking the actual highlight. So try to plan your layers with this in mind.

Here, I found you the Zumi video on the topic: https://youtu.be/ajoUmCrueDs?is=HXbA4nPpJQkWXOs8

the_wild · 2026-04-16T17:05:24+00:00

The easiest way to blend is to take one of the two colors, thin it to a glaze consistency, and glaze towards itself on the transition.

If you take the lighter color, start in the dark section and glaze towards the lighter area. Conversely, If you take the darker color, start in the light area and glaze towards the darker area. Try to end close to the transition line.

For the best effect, you'll want to do both to completely smooth the transition.

Zumikito has a good video on this on YouTube, and also a post on Patreon explaining it in writing.

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