Miniature Glowup

Happy orktober, everyone… or spooktober, for the undead fans among us.
As part of an in-club activity, I decided to redo an old (and ugly) paintjob on an old model. Since I started my miniature wargaming (lol) career with Warhammer 4th edition in the 90es, an old-school GW miniature was the obvious choice.
Behold: a glorious 90es GW Nightgoblin (Fig 1). Battered and chipped… a goblin in dire need of fresh paint.

Although most of my original starterbox Goblins were lost, my metal minis remained „safely“ stored in my parents’ attic. A while back, I began to repurpose them as a generic skirmish warband. And since I didn‘t have a banner-goblin, this little fellow would make a fine addition.

Please don’t consider this as a full-scale tutorial. This is far from being my intend. It is merely a small presentation of my workprocess when repainting a miniature.

Striping paint (cheap & easy)

I usually use soft nail polish remover to strip of the paint from my minis. It is easy to come by (e.g., the wifes bathroomshelf), dissolves most paints I use, and (if used carefully) might even strip some types of plastic. Though don‘t blame me if the plastic melts… my two meager attempts were surprisingly successful. Furthermore, the smell and vapors don’t make me throw up.

I first let the dissolvant soften up the paint (Fig 2). I then use an old toothbrush to scrub some of the paint and let it soak again. I repeat this process until I have a clean and shiny miniature (Fig 3).

SAFETY ADVICE : wear gloves, a mask and ideally safety glasses. Especially if you work with the toothbrush.

Painting scheme … high saturated colours ftw

I wanted to have a bright colour scheme and refered to my old army book (Fig 4): despite the dark robes, the skin and other details, like the shoes and the bannerpole, were very emphasized (Fig 5), unlike painting styles in later years (looking at you grimdark).

A note on bases: Since the model will be used in skirmish games, I opted for a more contemporary and fashionable 25mm round base instead of the traditional 20mm square.

Priming

Fig 6: Recently, I watched a video on the “state of play” channel on priming. I highly recommend checkinging out the channel l, since he gives a lot of useful and timesaving tips. Stating the very obvious, the author recommends choosing a primer according to the intended color scheme, thus saving both time and (unsurprisingly) paint.
Consequently I primed the Goblin in black and half the paint job was done :).

Adding Details

Fig 7: Initially, I wanted to use dark grey to emphasize and highlight the robes. However, after some pondering, I decided to drybrush the robes lightly with dark blue. The idea was to give the robes the look of a night sky (minus the stars).

Like most bases, I drybrushed this one first with AP stone grey and later with a lighter tone.

Fig 8 & 9 : Oldschool Greenskins, with their overemphasized cartoony faces, especially the classical Kev Adams-style Goblins, are fun to paint.

Like with every face, I start with a base color, in this case, some dark(er) shade of green. I then emphasize the most prominent features of the face using Greenskin (from APs Fanatic range). Adding some yellow to the Greenskin-colour, I gradually highlight the skin, making sure to save the lightest tone for the tips of the nose, warts, knuckles and other “pointy” features.

You don’t see it on the photos, but I referred to the traditional red eye-with-yellow-dot method 🙂

Fig 10 : Finally, I painted the remaining elements like the weapon and the banner. As I mentioned above, I wanted a brighter color palette. I refrained, however, overdoing it and trying to keep the colors saturated but in a realistic (hah) way.

Final product

After painting the entire modell, I did something I hadn’t done in a while. I did a “freehand” banner (Fig 11). If not the best of all results, I am rather happy with it myself.

At a later moment, I will add some details to the base. I plan to add some mushrooms and other nightgoblin-esque details to the bases of all my nightgoblin. But I intend to do it as a batch in order to maintain coherence. But for now, I call this fellow done.

Diving head first in our pile of shame can be very satisfying. In this case, it means delving into nostalgia while giving a second life to old friends. To paint the goblin was great fun.

happy painting

D.