Painting Miniatures - Super Dragon Explore

Ever wondered how an old Japanese (console) RPG could look like in reality? Well you can try it if you buy Super Dungeon Explore. But first you'll need to paint about 50 miniatures and that's my task for the near and more distant future^_^.

If you don't know anything about painting miniatures (that might be the case of many of those who bought Super Dungeon Explore) I'll give some pointers...or well after seeing/reading this post you might have an idea what it means to paint a mini. I'm not an expert or anything, anyone can do it. To be honest I loved to assemble models and paint them since my childhood so I kind of have 'some' experience but I never took this to the next level^_~

In order to get started I needed to visit two local game stores and I bought some stuff. (I usually have store credit at different places in our city and most of the time one store or the other does not have the thing I need). Brushes, glue, primers, anti-shine (matte) sealant, green stuff, exacto knife, paints, washes...

So I bought a new exacto knife or cutter or whatever. I'll call it a cutter. This cutter is something I use everyday now for different tasks. But well if you are going to paint miniatures you'll need it. There are parts that need to be cut into the right shape in order to fit. Also you'll notice some little blobs or whatever (it's called flash actually) that are not part of the model and need to be cut off/out as well. In order to get rid of it one needs something sharp, really sharp. ^_~

Green stuff is well...err.. there are models that even a cutter won't help much with and for those one will need something like this that will fill in 'the holes' and will make a smooth model. This is something one will notice this when trying to assemble the models.

In the case of SDE it's mostly the big models a most of the heroes (for the smaller models it's better to use liquid green stuff).

One also needs some paints to get started. Here's a pic of some I collected with time...

I also bought some primers. Red for the 'evil' minis and grey for the rest. Priming a miniature is an important thing. Good priming is something that will show even after you paint the mini with many (thin) layers (um..coats). The best solution to have a good primer is to spray the paint on the model (before I used to prime with a brush...never going to do that again).

Here is a photo of random two washes I used on my two last minis.

This is a picture of two brushes I primarily use - fine detail and insane detail. It costs quite a lot^^. With that now I can start painting! But there's a lot to do before one can actually start painting.

So yesterday and partly today it was assembly time! I assembled and glued together some Dragon Hatchlings and painted them. (Actually there should be two more somewhere but I couldn't find them...so hopefully I'll find them.)

Here's the result of the first few...I wonder if I should not make them a bit more crazy... (the photo does not show much detail unfortunately. taking photos at 3am is probably not the best time). Going to continue in the paint job after I get some sleep.