Hard way towards improvement - 8 months later

Devilfish from dec last year

Hello everyone! After more than 8 months i remebered how depressed i was last december when i was trying to become better painter. I started taking this hobby seriously last summer and it was frustrating as i liked painting miniatures but was unable to achieve any improvement. Now when im looking back at the pictures of my old miniatures im begining to feel a little optimistic and whats more important, i enjoy painting even more!;-)
While looking at the space wolf i painted during last xmas im realizing how many steps i made, how many new trick i learned and how much confidence i gained while holding brush.
I think major break in my painting came when i started using airbrush, even cheap one, with compressor salvaged from old fridge, it opened me whole new dimension of thinking about miniature painting, i could start trying some of the advanced techniques while painting vehicles and through another series of stupid mistakes and dissapointments i finaly started noticing some improvements while painting vehicles.

Rune priest painted while trying to improve for first time;-)

 Brush painting was much harder to improve, but major improvement came from my lazzyness. As i live in very small apartment and dont have the room to store all my paints on my painting/computer desk i ve put all my citadel paint pots to metal box i have underneath the table and  and as i had vallejo model air colours stored on the shelf above the desk i started using model airs even while painting with humble brush. Dropper bottles themselves forced me to start using pallete. Im not using wet pallete at all, but my collection of Profesionals(sorry Bodie and Doyle)and Red Dwarf dvds served excelent;-) I got used to work with very diluted paint and started diluting these model airs even more, started feeling comfortable working with multiple thin layers on the model rather than covering everything in first coat.Then i watched miniature mentors speedpainting dvd and it opened my eyes and i started to experimenting with preshading technique shown there and i finaly started receiving better results when paiting. My first mini i was excited about was krieg commissar whitch came to my table totaly unexpected as i did not wanted to paint kriegs at all but i just could not rezist 2usd price for the mini and in the end i really enjoyed evening i spent with that piece of resin.
After that i started working on more cadians for my imperial guard and i must say i had a lot of fun when i was painting second command squad box, and even with low cool mini or not ratings they are still ones of my favourite figure models.

Lemna Russ, my favourite model

While painting more vehicles i noticed my valkyries received great feedback and make me happy for a while i started noticing that i should not measaure paintjob quality just by uploading pictures to CMON and then wait for 50 votes. I noticed it was pretty easy to achieve cmon rating of 8 with my first valkyrie as it is nice model, everybody like the kit and eye candy factor is pretty high in this case, however achieving same ressult with leman russ is almost impossible to me. Does not matter i improved my painting process for vehicles ten times since i picked airbrush in to my hands for first time(first valkyrie), it is just ugly model and most people ll rate it lower than ussual unless u give them some cheap eye candy. This is the case of the space wolves razorback i did couple of weekneds ago, i painted that box on tracks very fast, in fact if i would exclude airbrush cleaning time and model assembly it would be under one hour, but i added simple osl under the lights. Woha! Pll are excited crying its awesome model on games workshop facebook, but i feel dissapointed as i did much better models before and nobody cared about them, received under average cmon rating and it seemd like nobody likes them.

Razorback with eye-candy element;-)

Dont get me wrong, im glad ppl liked that razorback, but when i was listetning opinions on my latest model, the chaos terminator lord, ppl claiming its a pitty i did not made glowing power weapons as they should be glowing i realized i have different priorities when looking at the finished model than most audience. My priority is to feel the atmosphere of the model and in case of that terminator lord i wanted the paintjob to represent grim/dark/cold feel of how i imagined chaos space marine should look and im pretty sure adding luna park-like glowing effect whenever is possible would ruin the impression from the model. I came to conclusion i could receive more positive feedback, get more followers on this little blog, get better cmon ratings if i would start adding these little eye catching features to my models, but that would not be me if i would take the easier way.

One month old speedpainted krieg

Conclusion is same as was 8 months ago, have to work even harder, paint even more models and do what i enjoy most, paint models how would i imagine them in my head, not how would majority want them to look like. I belive if i ll keep trying then better results ll come naturaly and i ll be able to move ideas from my head more acurate to the models and be even more satisfied with the outcome. However, thanks to writing this little painting diary i can feel little less depressed about my painting as it allows me to have a look in to the recent past and see how i was painting year ago and i think i managed to get at least little better and feel great about it. Sure, it could be better, but its enought for me right now. The pursue of improvement can wait till tommorow when my daemon prince ll arive;-)
Thanks for reading guys and see you on weekend as im going to visit plastic kit exhibition and i ll try to bring you some pictures from that awesome event.