Mini Painting – Space Henchman

Being so wrapped up in other kinds of creative projects, I was beginning to worry that I was falling out of practice with miniature painting, which I attribute to giving me the experience and confidence boost (even though I’m still learning the basics) that I needed to finally try my hand at things like action figure customization. I still have an old cigar box that’s full of unpainted miniatures and I fully intend to paint every single one of them, no matter how long it takes. But the next step in my path to mini painting proficiency would be this Reaper brand Space Henchman mini figure.

If you’re wonder why it looks like he already had paint on him, it was because I was messing around and using him to test out various Games Workshop/Citadel paints from a starter set I purchased recently. I liked the sculpt and character design so much that I decided I would strip the paint using nail polish remover on an old toothbrush, wash him off, and try painting him for real.

Since I'm still getting comfortable with the very basics of miniature painting, I still favor a limited color scheme. But for this project, I did want to make a better attempt at highlighting and trying to create some semblance of contrast so that I might improve a tiny bit with this project. Despite how important the highlighting and dry brushing stage is, I admittedly never really spent much time on it in my previous miniature painting projects. As I mentioned in the write-up for my last action figure customization project, I’m a proponent of the general Kaizen philosophy in which incremental attempts to improve over time compound on each other and eventually yield amazing results. The incremental improvement I want to try to make with this project is a tighter focus on the highlighting/drybrushing stage.

Before all that, I would first need to lay down my base coat. It consisted of the following paints: 

• Citadel Phoenician Purple (mixed with a drop or two of Reaper Dragon White because I thought it was much too dark, but I probably should have left it dark because it would have maybe provided a better contrast with my lighter dry-brushing)
• Reaper Mountain Stone (gray uniform)
• Reaper Pure Black and Naga Green (belts and boots)
• Citadel Leadbelcher for the gun and base

For the wash, I just used some Citadel Nuln oil. I tried to make my own purple wash for the skin by diluting some Phoenician Purple with a drop or two of Vallejo thinner medium and about eight drops of water buuuuut…it didn’t really work out. So I just used a Nuln Oil wash on everything.

Next up was the final dry brushing stage. I took the base colors and went a shade lighter by mixing in some white, going lightly over some areas but brushed on a bit more on areas like the top of the head and shoulders as well as the upper edges on the wrinkles where I thought natural light might pool (given my limited at best understanding of lighting). Here’s the paints I used for the dry brushing and highlighting:

• Citadel Phoenician Purple mixed with a drop or two more of Reaper Dragon White than what I mixed for the basecoat
• Reaper Mountain Stone and Dragon White
• Reaper Pure Black and Naga Green mixed with a drop of Dragon White and an extra drop of Naga Green to bring that out a little more (since the basecoat on these areas just looked black)
• Naga Green and pure white (for the teeth, last minute detail)
• Citadel Runefang steel for the gun and base

Again, I'm choosing to work with a limited color selection here. I've seen youtube videos of these expert min iature painters where they dry brush their models with dozens of different color paints to create and blend these incredible looking gradients but in my case, I think it's safe to say I'm not quite there yet.

If nothing else, this project helped assuage my guilt over not practicing miniature in a while. However, I do have some new miniature painting beginner’s kits that I plan to delve into very soon. In a weird way, I’m actually looking forward to an instructional booklet telling once again me what colors to paint and where to paint them like the Reaper Core Skills: Learn to Paint kit that was my first real foray into the hobby.