Review - How to Paint Citadel Miniatures (for iPad)

RRP - From £1.99 to £17.99 (although I received a free promotional offer)

Having found the miniatures I mentioned in my previous post I decided that before I started painting them I'd take a quick at a few painting guides to refresh my memory a bit. Naturally my first stop was the Games Workshop website which I knew had a wealth of resources, except it didn't...

After searching in vain and almost convinced that'd I'd somehow losing the ability to search the internet I realised that all the painting guides and all the conversion articles had been removed. Now I suspect the official reason will be that the conversion guides have been removed because they no longer sell components, and the painting guides, they'd have gone because all the names of the paints have changed.

Anyway whatever the reason my search eventually led to the iTunes store where, to no surprise, I found that you can buy painting guides. I opted to try a free guide to Space Marines for the iPad before deciding if I should buy one of the others.

First impressions are that it looks very good on the screen, bold high resolution pictures and plenty of content. These painting guides are fully up-to-date, featuring the newest range of Citadel paints which saves me having to use a conversion colour chart, (although in reality I'm using a mix of old and new paints). After a very short introduction to a few hobby basics it takes you straight into the guide for painting the first type of Space Marine.

There's another 70 pages of this

The typical painting guide page consists of list of paints, a large interactive picture which shows you each painting stage. This is then repeated for each part of the model, the armour, weapons, faces etc. And that's it, a few pages in and it allow seems a little empty. Words are kept to a minimum, advice on technique or mixes is non-existent. You finish the section on blue Space Marines and then it's on to the white ones, black ones, yellow ones and so on. It's just (on average) four colours per stage, which is great if you want to paint models to the Games Workshop's "standard". Want to do anything creative, then it seems you're not exactly going to find much help in the world of "How to paint Citadel Miniatures."

Until recently the guides in the White Dwarf magazine and on the website helped aspiring painters by showing such a wide and varied range of topics and painting styles. Inspiring they most certainly were, you'd pick up a brush really wanting to try to emulate what you saw on the pages of the magazine.

How it used to be

I remember the the old painting guides from the 1980's, the unique work of John Blanche, (a painter and artist that inspired me so much), the helpful step by step guides of more recent years and I can't help but wonder where it's all gone.

So where do aspiring painters go. Thankfully there is the internet and there are thousands of guides, websites and blogs ran by people who love their hobby and are more than willing to share that advice with others.

Overall, technologically a good tool, the content however is shallow and basic, much improvement is needed before it'll appeal to anyone other than beginner painters and even then it offers little in technical guidance.