Rogue Painter- Getting into Miniature Painting w/ Sorastro’s Guides

For the longest time, the idea of painting a miniature scared me. Fine detail work has never been my forte. I lack patience and fine motor control. I know much of that can improve with practice. But most things I attempt that require careful detail just leaves me feeling frustrated. This has kept me from getting into Legion and Imperial Assault much. While I still find it annoying that you don’t have the option to buy the figures painted, like in Armada and X-wing, I’ve come around some to understanding the appeal of doing it yourself.

My wife and I had been looking for some hobby to do together. We play some games and watch TV but those are activities, they aren’t hobbies. I don’t remember how we struck on it, but we started talking about miniature painting. I had a bunch of Imperial Assault figures unpainted (we had played with them like that in combination with some old figures from the WOTC game). My wife discovered a set of wonderful tutorials for how to paint almost all of the available IA figures and that was the final push to get us to give it a try.

Sorastro provides an easy, step-by-step guide for everything you need to do to take the boring grey figures into vibrant looking figures. He outlines each step for us novices and explains why each one is important. He also gives a detailed list of required materials. Painting can be so daunting due to the sheer volume of possible colors, brushes, types of paints etc that having this guide was half the battle already won. We watched the video, bought the right items and then got down to work.

Now, the videos are great but they are still only half the battle. Once you sit down to start painting, that’s all on you. But armed with this preknowledge, my wife beside me, and baseball on in the background, we went into it confident for success. On my first Stormtrooper I took a set of magnifying lens from one of my son’s science kits and took my time. The results were…better than expected. Sorastro makes the whole thing like ridiculously easy. You’re not going to match what you see on the video without a lot of practice. But, in the end, it still looked like a Stormtrooper. And a far nicer Stormtrooper than I thought was possible.

After that, I got arrogant. My second Stormtrooper looks considerably worse than the first. But that was due to my impatience We moved on from there and did Probe Droids, which I think turned out great, then Heavy Stormtroopers and some Royal Guards. Each effort taught me something and while it’s not steady improvement in quality every time, there’s definite steady improvement in comfort.

Once we had done these first few IA figures I felt confident enough to try some new things. I started by pulling out a spare Kihraxz fighter from X-wing. I have more figures than I have dials for 2.0 so if this one went terribly, no big deal. Plus, who ever flies a Kihraxz? It went far smoother than anticipated and I followed it up with an X-Wing, Aethersprite and N-1.

I gave the fighters from Armada a try but unfortunately, aside from the freighter scale ships, they lack a lot of detail on the model. This makes freehanding difficult for someone like me. It’s one thing to apply paint to particular spaces on a model clearly defined by ridges and texture. It’s another to do it yourself. The Lambdas and Ghost turned out okay but the TIE’s require more work than I think they’ll be worth.

We still have a lot of IA miniatures to do and then there’s still Legion to get into. We’re running out of simple multi figures though so difficulty will start to ramp up. And if you screw up a unique figure, you can’t improve on the next attempt. But I also think it will improve the fun. Painting the fifth Stormtrooper gets a bit old. But each new figure is exciting, which, for me at least, helps me to slow down and take my time.

If you’ve ever thought painting miniatures was beyond you, give Sorastro’s a try. He has guides for all kinds of miniature games. Yours probably won’t turn out like his, but they’ll turn out a lot better than you fear they would.