Author: Stryder Notavi

A Screenshot, Some Colours and a Scheme

Quite a while ago, Miniac posted a video where he used a photo as the basis for a colour scheme. Others have also visited the same idea, but it’s an interesting concept and it struck me as a fun way to find interesting new colour schemes to try.

Recently, I had a background ambience video walking through a forest in a northern-hemisphere autumn, and something about the colours was very striking. The orange of the autumn leaves contrasted beautifully with the almost iridescent blue of the rocks, stone and river. The brown of the trees also looked nice, and gave me a good third colour to round out my scheme.

A wonderfully vibrant forest photo, just waiting to become a paint scheme

When it comes to picking paints, I originally expected the orange would start with a brown. But when I examined the photo more closely, I could see that the red tones are surprisingly strong amidst those leaves, so I chose to start with a dull red and shade up through orange.

For the blues I started quite dark, using a very dark blue-black as my base, and shading up to Deep Ocean (a dark teal) . This ultimately didn’t have enough contrast though, so I wound up also using a bit of Marine Teal as well just to push the highlights a bit higher. For the browns I went with a simple range of earth browns to get the colours I was looking for. This tended to be the background colour of my schemes, filling in where it made sense but not really being the focus.

Expand for detailed paints list

Orange: RMS Clotted Red (#09134), VMC Mahogany (#70846), RMS Redstone Highlight (#09225), RMS Highlight Orange (#09243)

Blue: RMS Nightmare Black (#09280), VMC Dark Sea Blue (#70898), RMS Deep Ocean (#09076), RMS Marine Teal (#09077)

Brown: RMS Dark Shadow (#09040), RMS Muddy Brown (#09028), RMS Dark Highlights (#09042)

Abbreviations: RMS is Reaper Master Series, VMC is Vallejo Model Colour

The Lizardman

The first model I tried this colour scheme out on was a lizard man figure (Degenerate Serpentfolk from Reaper Minis). I went with the blues for his scalemail armour, with the orange used for most of the trim and details. I reserved the browns for the leggings and sleeves (as well as his flesh).

I’m pretty happy with this overall combination. It’s pleasing to the eye and yet a little bit novel. While I don’t think it’s a exact match to the photo, I don’t think I would have thought of this colour scheme if I hadn’t tried this exercise – so I consider this to be a success.

The Pirate

The second model I applied this too was an old Pirate mini that’s been sitting in my backlog for quite some time. From memory he was part of a set I fished out of a bargain bin long ago.

I did end up changing the colour scheme up a bit on this one, mostly because he was wearing a ruffled poets shirt that wouldn’t look right if it wasn’t white. The mahogany went well for his coat and jacket, with the teal providing a wonderful contrast for his hat, sash and pants. The darker brown didn’t end up making it into the composition.

I did put a bit more effort into pushing the contrast with this figure, which paid off and I’m very happy with the result. It definitely helps the mini pop.

The Trooper

The last of the three minis was a sci-fi trooper figure from my pile of old Reaper Bones figures. I again chose to go with the more vibrant, higher contrast approach I went with for the pirate. Whilst that may not be the most realistic choice for a military uniform, it certainly produced a nice result. I do wonder if I could use this scheme for a StarGrave or Space Wierdos crew in the future.

This proved to be quite a fun experiment, and one I’ll probably repeat with other schemes in future. The teal and mahogany are both solid colour results that I’m sure to use in other schemes in the future, and I think I’ve learnt a bit of colour theory along the way.

Rediscovering RSS

You’ve probably seen this icon before – let’s discuss what it’s for.

In the olden days, before the internet devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”1, the web was full of blogs, news sites and other content. And while you could just visit each page to find out if there were any updates, there was enough of them to make it a bit cumbersome to check every site. This was solved through a wonderful old web-standard called Really Simple Syndication (RSS)2 which provided a way for websites to publish feeds that could be pulled together by a feed reader to show users what’s new across all of their favourite websites at once.

In its day it was one of the key ways people kept up with blogs and news across the web, long before we all became accustomed to simply browsing our social feeds to find things. That was ok for a while, but as the years went by those feeds began to show us less of what we’d subscribed to, replacing it with ads, sponsored content and engagement traps.

Thankfully, RSS never really went away. Most blogs still support it, as do many news sites. It’s even possible to subscribe to someones Mastodon, Bluesky or Youtube account using it3. All you need is a feed reader – these come in multiple formats, you can have an app, a web based aggregator or a browser extension. All of these do the same thing – add the sites feed to your reader and it’ll handle letting you know about new content as it gets posted. It’s a powerful tool for taking back control of how you consume information4.

Many modern feed readers are smart enough that you can point them at the homepage of a blog and they’ll find the RSS feed automatically for you. For those that aren’t, you may need to look for the RSS icon to get the feed URL directly.

To help people get started, here’s some resources that might help people find blogs that suit their interests.

Blog Lists by Topic

Tabletop Miniatures & Wargaming – I maintain a list of tabletop mini related blogs on this website, you can find it here.

Tabletop RPGs – Mike Shea maintains a wonderful directory of RPG related blogs covering a wide variety of games (from D&D to Traveller and beyond)

Blog Directories / Discovery

ooh.directory maintains a wonderful catalogue, organized by subject.

blogroll.org has another great searchable catalogue

blogroll.club has an alphabetic list containing hundreds of blogs. They can also be browsed by category.

Smallweb by Kagi provides a fun discovery tool that allows you to randomly sample blogs until you find something interesting.

If you know of any other useful resources that belong on this page, please go ahead and post them as comments below.

  1. Credit to Tom Eastman, however the original tweet is no longer accessible ↩︎
  2. What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) | About Feeds provides a really good rundown on RSS and how to get started with it. ↩︎
  3. Here’s the instructions for Mastodon, BlueSky and Youtube ↩︎
  4. On this, I firmly find myself agreeing with Cory Doctorow ↩︎

A Useful Little Workstation

Back in November of 2022, I was just recently migrated off Twitter to Mastodon and was starting to learn about the rest of the Fediverse. Someone called Ari was just starting up a Pixelfed instance for mini-painting called, appropriately, miniature.photography.

My first post on the site was sharing my new portable hobby station. Just a simple MDF kit, but also spray painted to give it extra protection.

An mdf hobby station, fully assembled and painted gray. It looks shiny and new.

I put this together to make it easier to make good use of the rather small amount of hobby time I got (having a young family sure does kill most of your free time). It has its dedicated spot on the shelf which makes setup and pack-up relatively quick and easy.

That station is still with me today, though it now looks a little less immaculate. But it’s served me well so far. One of the minis is even the same in both pictures (for fun, see if you can spot which). I do tend to take a meandering approach to getting figures painted.

The same mdf hobby station, but showing clear evidence of paint spillage and other wear and tear.

Since then, Ari eventually decided that running an instance wasn’t for him. He’s given us all plenty of notice, so I figured it’d be a good idea to migrate some of the stuff I’d posted over there to this blog before the instance goes. You’ll probably see a few more posts where I go back and discuss old projects so I can ensure some of those photos remain available somewhere.

And thank you to Ari. Miniature.photography was my place to share my projects with others for quite a few years, and led to me discovering many other talented painters to follow within the wider hobby corner of Mastodon (frequently simply shortened to Hobbyodon). I could talk more about how wonderful it’s been, for now I’ll share a blog post from someone else whose captured it wonderfully.

Having a go at Non-Metallic Metals (NMM)

Whilst the simplest and easiest way to paint the metal bits on your mini is just to use metallic paints, there’s a whole other effect you can go for using nonmetallic paints to simulate the highlights and reflections. I’ve been interested in giving it a try for awhile.

My first attempt was a couple of ninjas, painted up to look like their blades are catching the moonlight. These were good to start with as the thin katanas made it a lot easier to get a good effect.

Two 28mm Ninja figurines, each painted to look like they’re sneaking through the night with the moon glinting off of their blades.

After these, my next NMM attempt kept the same theme but had a slightly larger surface to work on. For this attempt I focussed mainly on getting the right “shapes” and ensuring there was plenty of contrast. The final result is a bit rough – it looks good at a distance but is a bit messy when inspected more closely.

For attempt #3, I went with a more of a bronze/copper hue, painting both the weapon and the shoulder pads of a lich. My colour plan for this (based on Vince Venturella’s Copper NMM guide) involved using the following four colours:

  • Vallejo Game Colour Charred Brown (#72.045)
  • Reaper Master Series Gory Red (#09278)
  • Reaper Master Series New Copper (#09306)
  • Reaper Master Series Maggot Green (#09282)

This kind of worked out ok, but the very pinkish hue of the New Copper looked a bit wrong, so I wound up using a thin glaze of RMS Explosion Orange (#09219) to bring back more of a red and yellow hue. My first attempt looked alright, if a bit muddy, but I wasn’t completely happy with it. I then went back in and worked on bumping the contrast up a notch, which delivered a much better result.

The Halberd, first attempt on the left, with the right showing the result after bumping up the contrast

This is definitely just the start of my NMM journey, but so far there’s a few key lessons I can share.

  • It will look terrible right up to near the end, when it will start to look good (even then, it looks its best from a distance).
  • After you’ve placed your highlights expect to go back and forth repainting bits until it looks right.
The finished Lich, holding his awesome NMM halberd.

Australian FLGS

Ive been keeping a list of friendly local game stores (FLGS) that I use to find products I’m looking for because I prefer to order things locally if I can. I haven’t ordered from all of the retailers listed (I generally favour Combat Company and Milsims, for convenience and range respectively).

It may be convenient to just order everything off of Amazon these days, that comes at the expense of local game stores that provide not just our games, but frequently spaces for the gaming community to play and meet.

While you probably won’t get a better price (Amazon has a few anticompetitive tricks to prevent goods being offered elsewhere at a better price). You can at least be sure that the profit goes to a local business rather than a multinational residing offshore.

After all, when’s the last time Amazon organised or supported a local gaming event?

NSW

The Combat Company

Website https://thecombatcompany.com/
Location: Mortlake, NSW

Located within Sydney’s Inner West, these guys are a good source for Games Workshop, Infinity, Bolt Action and Wyrd Miniatures stuff

The Hall of Heroes

Website: https://thehallofheroes.com.au/
Location: Campbelltown, NSW

Victoria

Milsims

Website: https://milsims.com.au
Location: Mont Albert, Vic

Milsims carries a much wider range than most, so is well worth including in your search for harder to find items.

Western Australia

Alpha Strike Games and Hobbies

Website: https://alphastrike.com.au/
Location: Seville Grove, WA

Is one of the few game stores to carry a decent range of Ironwind Metals (Battletech) figures.

Tactics

Website: https://www.tactics.net.au/
Location: Perth, WA

Australian Capital Territory

Jolt Games

Website: https://www.joltgames.com.au/
Location: Canberra, ACT

Seems to mostly focus on VR these days, but does carry some tabletop gaming stock.

A Blog is born

I’m still setting this site up, and I’ll have to come up with a better name, but it exists. It is here.

I’ll be using it to share the miniatures and tabletop stuff I find myself working on. I’ll probably continue to post WIP shots to Pixelfed, and to do more long-form write-ups here.

If you’re interested in hearing more, go ahead and add me to your RSS reader of choice. If you don’t have an RSS reader of choice, consider adopting one for the sake of the indieweb.