Welcome to part one of a new article series: How I Painstakingly Paint Individual Effigies, a series of articles in which I describe the way I paint miniatures, the results of which you can see on the left in the sidebar and on my Flickr account. The idea is that this will become a series of posts, much like my earlier series on miniature photography. If I’m feeling really industrious, I might even combine the seperate postings in a single document to put on the club website later.

This is very much an I did it my way article series — I will describe how I paint miniatures, and I will only treat my normal ‘wargame’ painting style. In other words, this guide will be about my way of painting my miniatures for the tabletop, not for display quality. This is about army painting, not display painting.

I’ll finish this first article with an introduction of the miniature I’ll be painting: I’ll work on the army standard bearer for my WAB Celtic army. The figure is a Foundry Celtic standard bearer, which I will convert slightly — I’ll replace the cast standard with a florist’s wire one, add a shield to the figure (slung across his back) and replace the animal standard itself with a duck (all my generals have a duck as shield motif or standard). That’s all for a next article, but here’s the figure as purchased — the blank canvas, so to speak:

• Part 1 - Introduction — You are here
• Part 2 - Cleaning and Conversion
• Part 3 - Priming