How I went from painting beginner to competition winner in 8 months

three years ago i started painting miniatures again and in february my miniatures looked like this six months later this was my miniature and two months after that this was what i want to paint the competition with and here are all the steps i took to go from pleb to lesplab [Music] this video is sponsored by the best website you can use to make even better websites squarespace hey everyone you're watching squidmart miniatures and i'm emil welcome back to my channel again my old set because again it's the last video we recorded in this studio my basement before we made the big move to the new studio which is amazing we pre-recorded some stuff so we'd have time to prepare the new one thus the old setup but anyway maybe you get a bit of strategy i don't know from february 2018 to october 2018 i went from this to this and even though i came from a history and working as a professional photographer the medium was entirely new to me of course i had a big leg up having eyes trained to see light and color but none of my techniques were applicable my first ever painted mini was a dryad i used a base a wash and then i used dry brush and i was not happy it didn't at all look the way i envisioned so i went on a journey and this video is how i crossed every plateau on that path [Music] [Applause] number one your regulars already know about this one i removed all washes from my painting process and here is the reason for it washes and tones they fall into all of the crevices and not where the shadows naturally would fall when as a photographer i am used to setting a light to make it look as pretty as possible on a person or create a mood i'm used to light falling on places where it looks the best and where it naturally would fall so when i stepped over to painting miniatures and i used washes things just looked unnatural for me and on top of that it just dulled down all of the colors when i was using the darker shades or washes and when i was using colored washes it just changed the tone completely i just lost that original color that i had used so i just went cold turkey and just cut them out entirely from my painting process and that was the first big step for me to get control of my painting number two the second thing that just stepped me up so much and the one who was talking about this in every video was vince ventrella i just have to thank him so much for pushing me to make my own wet palette and once i could start having the palette in front of me with all of the paints that i was using for that specific paint project i could change things as i went on if i did something wrong i could adjust it on the fly while i was painting just going back and forth when i got started on the other hand i was just having like one color and adding all of the highlights with that color and if i did something wrong i felt like i had to repaint the whole thing because i just didn't know how to change it i would have to do the washes again i would have to do the base coat again but when having a wet pallet and having all of the paints there it was super easy just go back and forth the first thing that this does is it made me a faster painter so i could paint and finish a miniature faster and with the wet palette it's so much easier to learn how to thin your paints and to fill your belly of your brush with the right amount of paint for the consistency that you want to have when you're painting hey listen have you ever wanted to make your own website where do you have award-winning templates to make it look amazing where it looks like you're a pro even though you have no website skills at all show everyone the beautiful art you make with a simple drag and drop portfolio it can look like this website or you can if you click when you click on this one it's gonna look like that website it's gonna be amazing the best thing it's free to try out if you follow the link down below you can make it look however you want and then when you're ready to launch the website you just use the code squidmart and you get 10 off how awesome is that [Music] number three i painted every day for six months i painted every single day every time when i had put the kids to bed i made sure that they were sleeping the first thing i did was to sit down by my living room table while my wife was watching a tv show and i just painted whether it was for an hour three hours whatever i could get i took it at work whenever i had a lunch break or a break or there was nothing important to do with a client's work i was just sitting around waiting i had a miniature i had a homemade wet palette had some paints there so i could paint during every day just do something and when you come to this mindset of painting every day even if you don't improve on the theory while doing stuff like this you're going to improve your brush handling your brush skill brush control and that is so important to make stuff look good with your brush [Music] number four i didn't repeat and what i mean with that is if you buy a space marine army and you have 200 primaries intercessors and you paint all of them exactly the same way you're not going to improve maybe the first one is going to look 10 better than the first one but you're going to do it with the same techniques the same skill everything is going to be exactly the same and speed is of course something that can help you in the long run but if you want to improve you need to do things differently as an example for my silvernet army if you compare my first set of three revenants to the second one the techniques used the skill and creativity is completely different i had learned so much from triad number one to try at number 87 but that's just one thing another thing is to paint different things don't just paint space marines paint maybe try to paint a bus so you can learn all of these different techniques and you can apply them to the other jobs as an example when i painted the old barbarian from black sun miniatures that was something that took me on the next step of how to paint skin so when did that one i could apply the skin painting to my space marines and my faces started to look a lot better on my space marines as well so just try different things do things differently try new techniques with every miniature do something new with everything you do and that was one of the things that made me improve fast [Music] number five analyzing other painters job this is something that i find so important i've even done a full video on this topic alone and what i mean with analyzing is not just going on instagram and scrolling fast between different awesome painters works it's to actually look at a piece and analyze it in every detail where's the highlights where did you put the scratches what colors did you use for shadows there is there a reason why as a secondary reflection on this armor piece once you start doing that and start seeing things properly actually looking at them for take 10 20 minutes look at your favorite piece and just analyze everything again things that took me to the next level this is definitely one of the biggest ones and it's completely free so do that more do it often and a massive thanks to all of my patrons as always for paying my salary and my top patrons your best number six copying other people's work this might come as a surprise to a lot of people but one of the things that again maybe probably the paint job that taught me the most was one where i copied another painter's job it's still one of my favorite pieces this is my orc mega boss those of you have been around on golden demons etc know that this paint job is 99 inspired by david soper what i did was i printed photos of his miniatures i analyzed them first like in the previous step and i even had him in front of me while i was painting to see where every brush stroke was where he placed the highlights why he placed them there i really copied it step by step again there's no single piece where i learned as much where i did here because i took the theoretical thing and practically practiced it it took me so many hours to get there it's not even as good as his work because his is amazing but i was super happy with the end result and i still am super proud of it remember whenever you do something like this where you copy someone else's work if you're posting it on social media make sure to give credit like on instagram where i did with my first post maybe you don't have to do it three years down the line but make sure that when you post it you give them the credit that they deserve number seven learning about lights and volumes understanding the concept of shapes on miniatures and how light falls is so damn important whether you want to do the heavy metal style or you want to do the more painterly style this is one of the most important things to learn and once i started grasping this concept that just pushed me so many steps forward understanding the basics of shapes like that an arm is a cylinder the head is a sphere the whole body main shape is a cylinder together with how light falls on different materials like metallics leather skin cloth will make your stuff look so much better you don't need to become a master directly this is something that i'm still learning so much about every week with every paint job that i do there's always a new shape that i have to figure out where the light is falling but once you work with the main shapes of the different pieces the stuff just 10 times better in no time this is maybe not the beginner beginner steps where you just learn how to handle the brush and the paints but more the sort of medium steps to becoming a little bit better i started with this around maybe i would say seven eight months into painting and that is skyrocketed how my miniatures are looking two three months after i started working with volumes and light and shapes [Music] and number nine commission work this is really a blessing and a curse in one but here's the thing once i started doing commission work number one i got to paint a lot of different miniatures miniatures i maybe normally wouldn't paint using colors i normally wouldn't paint and this comes back to one of the previous steps that we talked about trying new things and stepping outside of the comfort zone and doing things differently number two it forced me to paint within a specific time frame so i needed to paint something as good as i could in eight hours or i would be spending too much time on a miniature and i wouldn't make the money's worth in terms of time spent so this forced me to make it look as good as possible in a low amount of time it forced me to think about where the light would be hitting as fast as possible and i couldn't sit and hesitate on things i couldn't have a miniature in front of me for two hours painting one thing thinking about it for 20 minutes i would just do as long as the client was happy i would ship it away i could think about what i did wrong and then correct it for the next piece instead of redoing the same thing over and over and over and over but i would not recommend painting a whole army for someone really think about how many jobs you accept because if you take on too many it's gonna become a chore and a job and unless that's what you want it's going to break a lot of the fun for you so with that i hope you had some fun to hear about my journey the things that taught me most about painting if you want to check out squarespace and try to build your own website you can follow the link down below and again use code squidmart for 10 off with that said have a great day bye

Channel: Squidmar Miniatures

Views: 211,539

Rating: 4.9413476 out of 5

Keywords: warhammer, miniature painting, painting warhammer, age of sigmar, squidmar, warhammer 40k, dungeons & dragons, d&d, how to paint warhammer, space marines, squidmar miniatures, emil nyström, airbrush, vallejo, citadel color, how to paint miniatures, become a better painter, how to paint age of sigmar, painting techniques, warhammer paint tips, warhammer tips and techniques, painting tips, painting warhammer 101, level up your miniature painting

Id: 8uFUoLrAyKo

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021