Painting Purgatory: Reflections

I know there isn't a conspiracy against me, but sometimes it feels like it. I got back from a month long vacation out of the country just a few days ago. During that time there were contractors working on remodeling the kitchen and dining room of our townhouse. In order to accommodate that effort, everything got moved out of those areas into the spare bedroom, garage, and whatever other space we could make. The project was supposed to be much further along, but due to extensive dry rot and foundation problems the project is way behind schedule. So our 3Bed/2.5Bath townhouse is more like 1.5Bed/1.5Bath, which is a pain especially with an 18 month old. Anyway, this has put a serious freeze on any painting activities for the time being while the work gets finished. So even if I can't get any proper painting in, I can catch up on a month's worth of reading from the painting community and spend time posting some of the other ideas I've had for blog posts. Honestly, I had forgotten what a stress relief painting is for me. It'll be nice to have our house back to working order, but equally nice will be the ability to clear out my painting space properly so that I can get some good cathartic relaxation in. In the mean time, I'll be posting a bunch of random thoughts about painting inspired by the catchup reading I'm doing.

So the first item that struck me as interesting was a very recent post on the Wyrd painting forums here. It's a discussion about how to tie a group of models together theme-wise. There's some beautifully painted models in that thread, but the discussion itself is pretty interesting. There's as many ways to tie together a group of models visually as there are to paint a model. There's obvious methods like a uniform color scheme across an entire army which is one of the most common. Other folks have used unified basing to bring together disparate models. I myself used this for all my Cryx "pirate" type models. And then, as is beautifully exampled in this post, a couple key colors can be used for elements of every model in the group to tie them together visually while not making them overly similar. Now these are just some simple examples, but there are plenty of others. Another example is my friend Lance's Lava Trolls, which are tied together by a visual theme of fire. Now what method you use depends on a number of factors, not the least of which is the similarity (or dis-similarity) of the models being painted. This thread on the Wyrd forums was more relevant than other games since the Wyrd crews tend to be much more varied in style. In any case, the discussion here got me thinking about creating a unifying look to a group of models, particularly in light of starting a Skaven army soon, so I thought I'd share this with folks out there.

So what do you do to create a uniform look to a group of models? Leave a comment and share your thoughts!