 Hello everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. And I'm here with my little elf, and we've prepared a little presentation for you of the miniatures I've painted over the past 25 years as a Christmas gift. We do this for two reasons. Christmas is a time of both looking back at your life and giving gifts to others, and I wanted to do a little of both today. I wanted to look at some of my favorite miniatures I've painted and the journey I've taken, but I also wanted to give you the gift of believe in yourself that you are an artist. There's nothing special about me. I've just put a lot of time into this, and practice. I've had some successes and a lot of failures, but you can reach whatever level you want with miniature painting, and that's what I hope you come away with today. So Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and if you don't celebrate anything, happy December 25th. Let's get into it. Uh, the strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get into the technique and learn it Vinci V style. Not everyone still has the first miniature they've ever painted, but fortunately I do. The year was 1997. I was given some Battle Masters figs to use as Empire Knights, and this is the paint scheme I decided on. Everything is wrong here. I didn't paint everything as you can see. I painted over the plastic. You can still see the red, black, yellow straight over the black, terrible 90s paints, bad metallics, woof. This is where we begin. This was the first miniature I ever painted, and for some reason I decided to keep going. And you know, it's just a show that you should always keep the first thing you paint around. As I expanded my Empire Army, I of course wanted to get that sweet war wagon. And I looked at the box art and said, yellow, red, and black. Let's do it. Now this is an age before washes, so there was no shade colors or things like that, hence the incredible definition on these models' faces and skin. But once again, good old yellow and red straight over black. You love to see it. Now these three little fellows are three plague monks, and they're actually the first, part of the first unit I ever finished. I was so proud of them that I kept them to this day. There were no washes still, but I discovered you could water down brown paint and run it all over the miniature and it would flow into the recesses. So truly this was an advancement. I have to say, even to this day, I'm pretty happy with the little scroll, the writing on a scroll. We'd fast forward a couple years, and we continue our Mordheim game. This is my Amazon and my Halfling Morban, and at the time, these were two of what I thought were the best miniatures I ever painted. I actually had a transition from white to blue. The skin is still super flat, but to me, at the time I painted these, these were just the height of skill. I was so proud of myself. I eventually returned to Maistanesh, we're now into the 2010s, and I picked up some fiends, and I thought, hey, let's give these fiends a paint scheme worthy of Slenesh. This is somehow the best one out of all six that I painted. But you can see here that I'm actually starting to figure a few things out, like there are highlights on this and they don't look absolutely terrible, at least in the purple magenta color. And I started to understand the nature of highlighting things and how volumes interact. It was very infantile, but hey, I got there to some degree. At that point, I then went into my Tomb Kings, and my Tomb Kings were a really big project for me. I love the Tomb Kings. I have about 13,000 points of painted Tomb Kings. I just kept painting this army. And I have to say it was a lot of fun. At the time, again, I was quite proud of how they were painted. I felt like I had done a lot with them. The nature of the Tomb Kings is that there's a lot of gold, a lot of turquoise, and I really feel like it informed a lot of my early color choices and likes. It really set a lot of things in its stone. It was where I started experimenting with doing non-metallic style shading. On metallics, you can see that on the big Ushabti. But again, you can see the growth. I decided I'd become a great painter and it was time to do my Bretonians. And each night would be his own little special snowflake. And I have to say to this day, some of these don't look totally terrible. I think the guy on the right with his little fleur de lis, I think he came out OK. But each of these nights in this army, of which I have about 100 nights, is all painted individually. I would take two days for each night. I didn't black rim the bases yet, which is a mistake. But overall, I have to say this army didn't come out completely terrible. The metallics are awful and that hurts me to my soul, but the rest is OK. As we move forward, Age of Sigmar launches and I decide to make a stormcast army. And this was my little vignette. I was so proud of him. You're going to hear that a lot because at each time I tried to push myself. And you can see here, I'm still continuing to experiment with the shading on the on the metals, but also doing little dioramas on the base. And I discovered black rimming the base. This cloak, though, was something that I would that would stick with me. The idea of painting freehand and gems over nothing of doing this non-metallic shading was something I was actually beyond happy with when I painted this model. And it's something I'd carry with me for a while. This piece was the first thing I painted to go to competition. I did this piece for Crystal Brush, I want to say 2016. That sounds right. And it was my first time really giving it all for a miniature. I tried my absolute best. Now, that first year I did have one finalist came in fourth, didn't win anything. It wasn't her. But I learned a lot from this piece, like don't do this, don't put a giant wall behind her. It just doesn't work at all. The non-metallics are poor. But it was the first time I had really invested hours and hours into a miniature and tried my hardest. This is the first bust I ever painted. She's quite large as a bust goes. And this was a real learning experience. When I look at it now, all I see is all the things I didn't do, all the extra detail I didn't put into it, all the things that could be improved. But at the time, it was a very big learning experience because it was the first time I painted something so large and in this style. And I thought, you know, this is my real chance to really expand my skills. And I think I did learn a lot from doing it. And as you can see, I think this represents a real moment of growth in the hobby for me. This was also a crystal brush piece for the following year. Fun story on the way to Adepticon, my car broke down and had to be towed more than 400 miles as he bounced along in my lap the whole time. This is obviously immortalized on the channel in my non-metallic gold video. And I think some elements of this really do still hold up. What I particularly like about him is that I didn't just do white wings, but instead did wings that are more yellow with lots of purple tones and red tones in them. It felt more angelic to me, and I think it aligned better with the overall piece. This was also a great moment where I focused in on a lot of things and really taking each element to the highest quality. And you can see that cloak trick that I had done earlier, just for an army, got brought in here into a competition piece. And in fact, that ends up happening a lot. Oftentimes when you experiment with armies, you practice and then you can bring it into your competition or display pieces as a final technique. This is one of the first pieces I did that was really serious competition because this was a lighting piece. And I ended up taking this to one of the smaller crystal brush competitions and placing quite well with it. And I really, really loved it because the idea was to only have the thing lit by the sword. That was her only source of light and everything else is in shadow. I custom made the entire cave from scratch and I repainted this and repainted this so many times to get this blue, dim, single light source. Correct. I really didn't know what I was doing. So it was a lot of just trying and failing as I learned about how to color the shadows and treat everything appropriately. This is probably again, 2016, 2017, somewhere in there. And it was a big learning experience for me in lighting and in really understanding volumes and how they worked. But of course, I kept army painting as well. I did my Sylvaneth at the same time. And they were a real chance to just explore different techniques to have fun, to use exciting colors. And my journey has always been one of trying to balance competition and display painting against army painting because I love doing both. And as I mentioned, a lot of the things I do when I'm painting an army end up becoming lessons that I integrate into my competition and display pieces. So you don't ever feel like a fig is wasted. Treat every figure you paint as a chance to experiment, to learn, to grow. Around this time, I started a slaves darkness army. And this was one of my first real big conversion projects. This was turning the Balrog from Lord of the Rings into a zhench demon prince and I see zhench demon prince and I had to use a lot of green stuff. I had to convert different elements into him. And I have to say to this day, I feel like he's still pretty good. It was also an experiment in painting and basically monochrome. Where everything is one color or one difference of shades. And so I only used basically this tone of blue. And it was a lot of fun to do because I just sat there and kept working. Sometimes just keep painting one fig can be a good lesson. I also did this gaunt summoner. I was very inspired by him when Silver Tower came out. So that places this in the time that it happened. And again, this ended up being a competition piece. So what started as just an army ended up having display and competition components to it. And this was again one of those times where I really tried to learn and work and continue to grow in my glazing. And you can see that on things like the feathers and the face really trying to achieve those ultra smooth blends. That was the challenge I set forth for myself with this. And in the end, I'm pretty happy with what I achieved, though there's obviously still a lot of room to grow. This piece, the edge of autumn was one of my first explorations into larger scale. Not certainly not my first, but one of. And when I look at it now, all I see is the flaws in it. The non-metallic is nice, but fairly unconvincing. It doesn't really render in the way I'd want. The skin should have more tones to it. But at the time, and I think what it represented to me was really finding a new scale, a new type of figure that I truly loved and loved to paint. And so that's why I say, don't limit yourself just to armies or just a competition of one type, but explore different scales, types, busts. It can only help you learn and grow. Last hope was one of my first dioramas that I did, little mini diorama of this type. And I really tried to integrate a lot of learnings into it. I was very happy with last hope and how it came out. It's simple, but I wanted to tell a story of this scavenger hunting for the last bit of life in this toxic world. This was for competition and ended up placing fairly well. It was one of the first times I did decent and got really good feedback from the judge for the creativity of the piece. And though the technique needed improvement, it showed me that I could tell an artistic narrative story with little space. In my army painting, I continued to try to advance and challenge myself with my iron jaws project. This was a big landmark for me because it was the first time I painted an army and really put my all into it. I put everything I could into this into this army and I'm very proud of it to this day. I think it still holds up. And honestly, there isn't much I would change. This mega boss ended up becoming something I remained very proud of and ended up leading my army for many years. He also taught me a lot about different freehand, about scratches, dashes and battle damage and helped me to refine a lot of things that I used to this day. This is my first big imperial night. This was a hundred and fifty hour project. This was a serious competition piece. And one of the first times I really invested absolutely everything. I left nothing on the table. And though with lots of former pieces, I had pushed myself. This represented a different way to work, a way where I was going to be completely unconstrained by time and keep refining this until I got it exactly how I wanted, whether it be the freehand or the weathering or the color or anything. Now, this night ended up winning fan favorite at Nova, as well as Best in Vehicle category and was one of the first pieces I painted that really blew away and topped a competition. And as a quick story, it ended up being the picture on the capital pallet painting competition for the next couple years, which I was very proud of. I remained super proud of this piece and did more of these nights. I actually have a whole army of them done in this style because I enjoyed it so much. But it really helped me learn and focus on things like freehand, taking my time and breaking a project up into the individual elements you need to be successful. Prists and the replicants. This was one of the most hard times I had worked on 28 mil scale for a unit. This was a golden human piece. This was one of my unit entries for Golden Demon, and it ended up being my first Golden Demon win. I can't tell you how elated I was. These girls took hours and hours, but from the time the Esher Gang came out, I knew it's what I wanted to paint. I lovingly converted all of them to have cybernetic limbs, change things around. You can see they have different weapons than the Cork hit. And I'm so happy that I ended up bringing home my first demon for this. It was one of the happiest days of my life. Integrating a lot of those lessons into my army painting, they then re-released a bunch of new Slaanesh models. And Slaanesh has always been something I truly, truly loved. This was my keeper of secrets. And much like with the Knight, I integrated a lot of the lessons here. Deciding that with my army, I wanted to try to take this to the highest level of excess that I could, as would be worthy of the Dark Prince S. And so my Slaanesh army explored a lot of things. Working on ultra smooth blends, integrating the airbrush into my normal blending techniques and really taking freehand to the next level. As it continued with, of course, the release of Sigvald, this was shared on the Warhammer community site, which I was very proud of. This was just one of my all time favorite pieces I did, helping me explore things like secondary lighting, bounce lighting of different colors and just really rendering an interesting looking Sigvald. Of course, Glutos can't be left out. He was also in my army. Yes, there's another fun conversion project bringing together everything we've talked about so far, using the brush and the airbrush together, blends, freehand, all of this. And it really was sort of a culmination piece for the army. That brings us up to the current day where I'm working on my rat cast and trying to push myself farther than I ever have before with each individual figure, taking 20 to 30 hours. Trying to render each guy in full non-metallic red armor, trying to bring my non-metallic skills to the next level. And what's interesting about doing this is I feel I've learned more about non-metallic metal doing this army than I have in previous years, all told. And that's because I paint it over and over and over again on tons of different shapes, rendering different volumes. It's a good point that one of the best ways to learn is just to do something a lot. Seems obvious, but it's been very helpful. And it brings us to the end with my last bus that I painted. And I'm so proud of this piece. I do think it's the best thing I've ever painted. This is one of my favorite buss of all time. I truly love this, this bus. And I wanted to explore lighting in a different way, having a soft, warm, yellow light from the front and have her have a magical blue pool or something like that beneath her and off to the left. And I feel I was able to render the lighting in ways that I hadn't been able to do previously. And it represented a new watermark. And what really excites me about this piece is simply the chance to keep going, to keep growing and to keep applying these skills to even more pieces in the future. Because the reality is the learning journey never actually ends. It's always something you can keep pushing yourself on, integrating whether army painting, display or competition. There's always more to learn. There's always more to grow and you can do it. Well, my elf got a little tired after that long journey, but I hope you appreciated it. With this journey, I really wanted to show you that no matter where you are in your hobby progress, you can always keep growing. You are an artist and what you paint is awesome. Remember, any painted miniature is always better than an unpainted one. And we all have our next steps to take. Don't compare yourself to anyone else. Only compare yourself to the last step you took on your own personal journey. So I just want to say thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate all of you watching this channel, sharing these videos, recommending them, hitting like, subscribing, all of that stuff, doing all of the YouTube things. Being on this channel and sharing this information with you has truly been one of the great joys of my life. And I'm so happy that I was able to share my journey in the hobby with you and I hope maybe a little it inspires you that you too can keep growing and keep learning, can keep advancing if that's what you want. And if nothing else, to be proud of your work no matter where you are, because you did it, you painted it and you are an artist. So hit all those buttons. Thank you so much. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. I hope everybody has a wonderful, wonderful holiday and a wonderful new year. And as always, see you next time.