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.

Buried Treasure?

A while ago my father asked me to take some of the huge collection of old miniatures that'd I'd left behind when I left home, almost 20 years ago. Of course in recent years I'd built up a sizeable collection of my own which was filling my own home but I took a few figures that I'd found buried deep in a box and promptly forgot about them.

When I started painting metal figure were by far the best option, plastics were far behind the models you see today. But as time progressed they caught up and I found myself painting them and my vast collection of lead and white metal figures were discarded into boxes to gather dust. I remember at one point I'd do anything to avoid painting metals, so old and out of date was how I viewed them.

Back to the present and I wanted to try a new way of stripping paint and so I decided these old figures would be good for a test. The paint stripping was a success (and will feature in a future blog post). After reading an excellent blog, Realm of Chaos 80s, I began to to look at the figures and see them in a new light.

Sure some of them were certainly worth something on eBay, I'd seen some of the figures selling for between £5 to £50! But really I have no desire to sell them, I feel inspired to give some of them a chance to be repainted rather than cashing them in for a short term gain.

So what did I find?

Here's some of the highlights:

First up a set of figures from the 90's game Warhammer Quest. The Pit Fighter and Chaos Warrior were playable characters, the rest were NPCs from the Lair of the Orc Warlord expansion pack (left to right Gubbinz the Jester, Bogoff the Snotling and Growler the Squighound).

Next up was part of large group of undead, I seem to remember writing a lot of undead scenarios for Warhammer Quest. If my memory serves me well these are all 1990's Wraiths, with the exception of the figure at the bottom left. This one is a 1980's Wight, made from lead.

Finally we have a collection of hero figures that I used over several years. The Golden Wizard and the Dwarf Pirate were more recent figures. The 2 Dwarfs were part of a larger group I had when I played advanced Heroquest in the late 80s / early 90s (before playing Warhammer Quest).





So is nostalgia going to be all it seems? I certainly have happy memories of the times when I played games with these very figures and maybe I was wrong to write off these figures all those years ago. Will they paint up well second time round or have me rushing back to painting newer plastic and resin figures? Well keep reading and I'm sure future posts will hold the answers.

Completed Review – Tamiya 1:700 Japanese Submarines I-16 & I-58 (31453)

Scale: 1:700, RRP - £7.99 

So here's something miniature, 1:700 scale miniature. I have to confess this was an eBay impulse buy, I was browsing Tamiya items and for some reason it stood out from the rest. Before I knew it I'd gone through the checkout and it was on its way to me (along with two German Class Z Destroyers in the same scale).

While waiting for Royal Mail to get it to me I decided to do a bit of research. I have to confess that I know very little about ships and submarines, beyond details of a few famous battles and watching the film Das Boot many years ago. I rather liked the box art and thought it would make a nice naval diorama but my (all be it, limited) research seems to suggest the I-16 was sunk months before I-58 was ready for service and so the box art isn't accurate.

Anyway few days later it arrived and by this time I was excited by the potential for this build and was eager to get it out of the box and get the build started. There aren't many parts to the kit as to be expected, but what there is manages to convey enough detail to make two very nice submarines.

The I-16 has the option of carrying a two man Kohyoteki mini-submarine, so technically you get three subs for your money in this pack! The I-58 comes with a catapult and an Yokosuka E14Y Glen reconnaissance aircraft. Later in the war this submarine carried four Kaiten human torpedoes, however they're not included in this set, Tamiya released a later variant on it's own in another set.

I began by undercoating all the parts on the sprues with a grey Tamiya primer before giving them a base-coat of 2 parts Tamiya XF-53 to 1 part XF-63.

Once everything was dry I began removing the parts carefully from the sprues, and you do have to be careful as the parts are very small and delicate. There was was a fair bit of cleaning required to the periscopes and care has to be taken to avoid bending or snapping them, but apart from that there were no major dramas.

The hulls were both then masked and the decks were sprayed with Tamiya XF-55 ready for the conning towers to be attached. Both these models are waterline models and the flat base is a separate part which can be painted and then attached.

The conning tower assembly consisted of attaching the periscopes, instruments and a deck gun, which was painted with XF-56, metallic grey. It was here I learnt the importance of having a good pair of tweezers. The ones I used were far too thick at the tip and on a few occasions resulted in parts flying across my desk, fortunately to be found afterwards!

I-16 Conning Tower Detail

I-58 Conning Tower Detail including the hanger for the seaplane

Once complete they were both attached to the hull. Next up was the addition of the cranes, mini-sub and the seaplane and before I knew it I had myself two submarines.

So what are my thoughts on this kit? Despite never previously considering ships or submarines as a modelling subject I found this to be a thoroughly enjoyable build. I can't really comment on the accuracy of the kit as I don't have enough knowledge of the subject, but for this scale it looks detailed enough to me. There were few aspects I felt were more difficult than they needed to be, mostly as a result of the way the sprues have been created. But apart from that this was a welcome break from the other models that I'm working on so I'd not hesitate to recommend this kit.

Overall Build Score: 3 out of 5, a fairly simple build with a nice end result of two detailed models. Some slight issues with removing parts from the sprues which could result in parts getting broken.

Something Smaller (As Promised)

At the end of my previous post I promised something smaller that I've been working on. Well that something smaller is complete and just awaiting photographing.

So here's a smaller teaser. It's a 1:700 scale Yokosuka E14Y Glen; an Imperial Japanese Navy seaplane. From nose to tail this plane is about 10mm long.

Click the image for a close up!

I haven't decided to take my earlier small 1:100 scale build a step further and start building aircraft at 1:700 scale. This is part of another project that I've been working on this week and once it's all photographed I'll be posting it here!

And Then There Were Two... Or Zwei

There's been a lack of activity for a reason, a good reason, I've been busy building and painting various projects. 

I've also got my hands on a compressor for my airbrush and have been practising with it. After a few false starts it's making a huge difference to what I can achieve with an airbrush and so now I'm having a re-think about what projects I'll be undertaking in the future. For someone who's been so used to brush painting this has opened up a whole new range of potential projects!

In an earlier post I promised that'd I paint more of Tamiya's 1:48 and so now there are two! For now I'll leave you with a picture for this somewhat brief update.

Until the next time where, I hope, there will be something even more "miniature" than I've tried to build before!