 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about the difference between tabletop competition and display quality and what exactly does that mean for your work so let's get into it. So I'm going to take you through a bunch of different miniatures I've painted and how I would frame them as tabletop versus display versus competition and what exactly I see is the defining characteristics of that. Before we go and look at the individual miniatures I think it's important to lay just a little bit of quick groundwork and the first thing I'll say is that there's no one definition of anything we're about to discuss. The reality is that all of these things comprise a broad spectrum of techniques, application, quality, purpose, like why are you painting a miniature to what end and of course skill. So that is to say what one person's display quality might be might be actually quite different than another's. But I think there is still an important value to thinking in these terms not in this sort of 17th century enlightenment, false categorization way it seems to be used. But instead in thinking about how you approach your figures and decide about the amount of effort, time and sort of intensity you're going to put into them and hoping you to focus on sort of what actually matters when painting your miniatures depending on what your ultimate goal is. So with that being said let's jump over to a different screen. Okay, so here I have a unit of Empire handgunners that I painted quite a long time ago as part of the video where I speed painted an army in a week. A week? Oh, was I ever that young? Just a week? How lazy of me? I could have done far better. This is definitely what I would frame as table top quality and if you go back and look at how I execute in the video you'll see that I'm doing a lot of things here like using thin inks over zenithal to get a lot of my contrast. Maybe I'm reinforcing it just slightly to pop up a little bit of additional highlights. I'm doing things like getting the skin tone through the cheating of stuff like washes. Now I'd probably use contrast paints but those didn't exist at the time. So I think when you look at the elements like this, when you look at a group of minis like this, when you're thinking about table top standard, what that effectively means is one speed is sort of your overarching concern or if not that there is at least a time box. I think that's the first defining feature of what it means to be painting in a table top standard. So we all want to paint our figures well but I think that seems fair and we all want to spend as little time as is necessary because life is short and we all have a lot of things to do. We have spouses and partners and children and jobs and sleep I guess for some people. There are other things, other demands on your time so ideally you want to be finding some kind of balance between these two components, quality and time but in the end one of them has to win. One of them has to be the deciding factor and if time is to be the deciding factor then almost by necessity you are going to end up in table top unless you set a really really high bar. Like okay I won't spend more than a hundred hours per empire handgunner. Okay fine you can still paint to whatever quality level you want just because the sculpt isn't going to demand that level of attention in almost any scenario even for a competition that that would be excessive for a single one of these guys. 50-60 hours probably not that's probably about where you would be for a single figure that's part of a unit in a competition entry. But my point is that that's not usually what we mean when we say we're painting in a limited amount of time. What we usually mean is time is the key factor and if that's the case then we're going to figure out where we can minimize quality. And the answer isn't a big unit of guys like this and I did 30 of them you know having some basic contrast having some basic simple muted colors works just fine. The individual elements are all picked out everything's there right so everything is there everything has some kind of contrast even the metals have some kind of darker inks applied and stuff like that to give them more reflection and things of that nature. Everything has some kind of shading and highlight colors are relatively simple yes they look fairly desaturated because they're you know thin inks over a zenithal which will always give that look but it works and that's the key. Let's look at another image here. This is one I did more recently. This is for the serif on video for 24 hour the serif on 24 hour painting challenge. And this is absolutely a tabletop quality job okay. What techniques was I using here well I certainly relied heavily on things like the airbrush to do a lot of work. I use things like dry brushing and washing extensively because it's a good way to forget through a lot of stuff fast by the way there's this is a judgment free zone this video okay there's no wrong way to paint a miniature a painted miniature is better than an unpainted miniature full stop all right but those techniques tend to be a little less precise which makes them in general not as acceptable for broad usage in things like display or competition painting where quality becomes the ultimate deciding factor but in addition look closely at this guy and spot all of the different errors right so I'll draw your attention notice how this area here isn't actually orange because I missed this spot in depth not going to take that amount of time to clean that up right okay notice how all the wood is so basically monotone because it's just a couple of washes over dry brushed wood it's you know the scale 75 intense wood and then a couple of layers of agrax or something like that over the top then maybe a dry brush then a serif from sepia super fast super easy to apply I could do it in a minute or two set to the side and go back to working on the skinks right the only guy here who has any kind of extra effort expended on him is the skinker do in the middle the chief who did get a little more time and that's because he's the center point of where you're actually looking like when you click to this this image or when you're looking at this mini on the table what you're seeing first is this little guy hanging out right up top because he's bold he's brighter than anything beneath him he's actually aided by all these horns and everything that are kind of drawing your attention up here to him not to mention the fact he has the bright weapon that's reflecting light and he has a little bright crest right so because I knew that guy was the center of attention I put more effort into him and ignored it everywhere else and that leads me to the sort of element of tabletop quality that's the most important tabletop quality means spending time where it matters and ignoring everything else like you go as basic as you can with everything else to get it done so the classic way I always heard it said was you know faces bases banners and shields we can take that a little broader and say things like faces the bases which I certainly spent a good amount of time on the bases here and I think the jungle bases I have a whole video on that I think they really help these minis pop but I think that's a big deal you notice that I spent a lot of time on the face of a little skink or do so he looks real you know he his face grabs you I knew you're gonna be staring at it hence I actually spent some time there making things look nice and clean things like weapons exposed weapons shields stuff like that things that people are holding we will tend to look at so humans are very trained to look at two areas when we meet other people their face their eyes and whatever they have in their hands for obvious reasons because those are the two ways we know whether this is gonna be a fight or flight situation right very early in our evolutionary development we had to make decisions and the quickest way to make a decision is does this does this being I'm encountering what is his face what is his or her face telling me are they angry are they sad or they need to help are they in pain do they have a weapon with which they mean to do me harm right so we make very fast flash judgments looking at those kind of areas when it comes to miniatures it seems like it be removed but it doesn't we tend to still employ the same heuristics so focusing on things like the weapons which you can see there I tried to do a nice metallic like a nice metallic blend over the weapon to make it look really interesting and varied okay I focused on his face the stuff that matters but look at the underbelly of this Degadon like there's all this interesting texture all these different little sort of bumps and things that he has going on which I've just done nothing with nothing and that's fine because ultimately it doesn't matter this was a speed painting project this was aiming at tabletop quality that stuff can be ignored I made the little bones look rather you know it look as nice they could with some quick stratification lines to make them kind of stand out backed it up with a little bit of dry brushing to purposely get a little bit of rough texture in there to break up some color and call it a day right because we didn't need to go farther than that these are some old storm fiends that I did so same thing here you're gonna see an effect right now their armor very simple that's a some quick airbrush blending on the big armor pieces really nothing too complicated their skin is much the same their little robe and tabard pieces much the same all these effects were real simple mostly done with an airbrush we're very quickly with a brush using you know thin colors over zenithal to achieve what I needed to achieve right but notice for the two guys with the rattling cannons I went to the extra effort to do the heated gun barrel effect right and the reason that I did that heated gun barrel effect is because I knew that would be drawing attention again big weapons they're pointing out there they're like very in your face with them so that was worth putting that extra time into tabletop isn't necessarily about some objective measure of quality what I am able to paint in two hours or five hours or ten hours will be better than someone else and not as good as yet a third person okay what's ultimately important is that we use the ten hours that we have or five hours or two hours or 30 minutes to accomplish the most we can where it matters where we know attention is going to be drawn and where we know we can have a good visual impact and make the fig interesting so things like making sure that the little runes were well picked out on the armor was something I spent time on because those are you know I've seen people paint this armor and leave things like the runes just the same color which is boring like it's such a nice chance to pop out a supplementary color and make a little bit of visual interest in otherwise big flat space that's all the same right but between the guns and just extra little things like that we were able to create something fairly visually interesting but still be fast these are the ogres that I did for the for a 24-hour speed paint video get again here's much the same thing in practice right there the skin was all airbrush you can go watch the video see how I did all that absolutely nothing special about it it was just so building up some colors with an airbrush I did the whole army all their skin and maybe I think off the top I had two and a half three hours I mean it's it's so fast to achieve something like this and that's why something like an airbrush can be a great great great great tool for achieving table top quality fast right same with pants by the way but the extra elements that I added to try to make it more visually interesting are stuff like the banner obviously I freehanded the banner again faces faces banner shields weapons that kind of thing so I added the painted banner because I thought well it's a pretty major defining element of this unit and so I wanted to be something that looks kind of cool right so I just googled around real quick for an image idea that I thought looked kind of neat and basically just drew a simple version of that no big deal didn't worry too much about refinement didn't worry too much about cleanliness just worried about getting it down and having it look visually interesting same with the weathering and the rusting this is another thing that can be used in lieu of sort of extreme blends or things like that on tabletop quality stuff to make it look more interesting quickly things like weathering rusting and those sorts of tricks create a lot of visual interest when used sparingly say that again for the people on the back sparingly if they are overused it just becomes it'll just look like a cacophonous mess but when you have a little bit here and there as you can see of like some orange and brown and scattered around and little bits of rust hiding here and there on the weapons and things it actually becomes something that's again visually compelling a cool thing part of the larger hole okay this guy was for my zinch army and again that army was done basically to tabletop standard and here I knew what I wanted was for things like the skin to be really eye-catching so by choosing to go with the color pink which is this very bright loud eye-catching color and then contrasting it with the blues and and teals of of zinge right it gave this guy a lot more visual interest if his skin had been blue which you see a lot of Zangor painted blue he would be a much less compelling figure it'd be just that easy which seems so silly but color choice is one of those things that can make a big deal in tabletop armies now sometimes our color choice is restricted right if you're painting ultramarines or blood angels or something you know those are to have specific color schemes although sometimes you do still have the ability to mix it up in there and things like that so if color choice is one of the things that's on the menu for you then the use of brighter more vibrant colors can often be a substitute for a lot of extra time spent in sort of display painting when you just want to have an army look eye-catching look compelling and look visually interesting right but you can get there fast so having things like your army be using strong complementary colors like using bright blues and orange okay or having your army feature a lot of like really pastel colors like bright pinks and purples and teals these are things you'll see I use a lot I like them because I like visually bright compelling armies that just grab your eye from a long distance away you probably won't see me paint an army that's just a bunch of browns right so just adding little elements like your color choice in your composition stage is be fast you can still end up with a better result and all this is still in tabletop quality all right so now we're going to transition out of tabletop and I want to talk about what exactly makes that transition happen so when it came to my iron jaws part of the goal was to make sure that I had a display quality army so and that's what I aim for with most of my armies these days I have enough armies I mean I have something like 16 armies painted so the idea of having a rush job as an army just really doesn't make sense to me so what's the difference between tabletop and display quality when you go into display quality what you're aiming for is something that has more nuance and more details so when I move in closer I can see a lot more elements that are only discovered at that level okay there's a level of refinement and a level of detail to me that makes display painting means you're aiming for smoother blends additional detail you're using things like texture right all of those sorts of elements you're also aiming to have much more complimentary hues and contrast of both hue and value showing up in the piece so for example on my iron jaws armor every one of them features every single part of my iron jaws army has lots of freehand all their armor so in addition to doing these big blends and again you can go back and watch the video on how I do iron jaws armor but in addition to having these big blends that go basically from white to very dark blue black I also have these freehand flames all over the armor I also have this freehand damage all over the armor right all of this is painted on right like that none of this damage is real so that meant I had to do lots of steps so blend out and smooth out the armor which took quite a while and then I would have to go back in and do all the freehand then I would have to go back in and add the battle damage around and all the steps there right very carefully applying all these different layers and then streak over the top and stuff like that same thing for the metallics where I'm making sure which again I have videos on everything for the iron jaws you can go back in the hobby cheating playlist and find all that stuff but making sure that there was good transition very natural in all the medals that there was interesting sort of rust vertigree happening in places all these sorts of things right that in things like the orc skin I made sure that there was life through having pink and you can see it in the nose and the lips in his ears it's in their knuckles right little bits of that different hue varied in and you wouldn't notice that looking at these guys from a distance on the tabletop but you notice it when you get super close when you get super close you'd see things like the little veins have a slight shading to them so each of each vein was individually picked out you'd notice like all their leather belts I've actually hashed out texture and stuff on all the belts and all the pants so they all have little scuff marks and things like that all those little tiny touches right okay that's to me where you're making the jump into display quality this is another example this is from my daughters of cane which is also painted to be a display army as a point of fact this was originally painted to be a display army but then I ended up taking it competition and they did quite well but that's where the line between those two is kind of blurry we'll talk about in a moment but again here so yet again we're using like still we can use a lot of the tricks we learned before bright colors that are interesting and complimentary so here I'm using the pink and the teal this is I think one of the first armies where people started to be like Vince you only use pink and teal that's not true I use pink and then everything in the teal turquoise range and purple thank you very much now so but this was this was a really fun army to do so again really trying to make sure unlike last time when we looked at the Empire guys here we're really trying to sketch out the individual elements of these girls right like their faces are well-defined the shadows are carved out all over the place every volume has been identified right okay the weapons have a lot of extra work put into them to make them have this sort of glow type effect like the hair and the individual stranding the veins on the wings all these sorts of things when you're talking about display quality in my mind it goes like this here's where we start okay here's where we start tabletop takes you to there display takes you to their competition takes you to their and all three of those steps take an equal amount of time almost okay so what I mean by that is you don't see the huge change that you do between display quality and tabletop that you see between or sorry you don't see the same you don't you see a big change between tabletop and display quality that you don't see between display and competition I will talk about what that difference amounts to the real focus shift here is that I stopped having time as my determinant factor right all of these minis for the iron jaws army and my daughters and you know the elements of this army and this is a good bridge into competition minis I said well I'm gonna paint them until I don't want to paint them anymore and I'm gonna try to take them as far as I can and what that meant was that quality was my ultimate decider if I put 40 hours in and I was happy and I felt like I got somewhere then I was good if it took another 40 hours then that's what we're doing right and this brings me to where to Marathi to miss centerpiece model of this particular army I think where you should try to push yourself into display quality first if you find yourself as a tabletop painter and you want to say well I would like to push my painting quality then where you want to start trying that in an army you're still an army painter I'm still an army painter I love painting armies it's fun as all get out I paint pieces just for competition as well but painting armies is super fun okay so if you're like me if you're someone who is at heart an army painter and loves playing games with your plastic toys there's nothing wrong with but you also want to be able to paint some display quality stuff here and there this is the place to start not Marathi specifically but your centerpiece model your leaders your space marine captains your whatever it is right it doesn't have to be a big model like this not all not your characters and your centerpieces it could be as simple as your Lord Celestin on foot or it could be as complicated as your Lord Celestin on Star Drake right say you were about to collect the new Lumineth realm lords look at that box set that came out right if I had that box set in front of me the character I would be spending the most time on was that light of El Tharian because it's a super cool fig it's not that big but it's gonna stand out in the army that's where you push yourself into that display quality and for Marathi it was it started actually with my goal that I would do a display piece but by the end I started liking it so much I then kept pushing her into a competition okay and so what I found was that I just wanted to keep painting her I just wanted to keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing and as a point of fact this is where expectations matter at the start of your project I think it's important to understand what is your constraint and where do you intend to stop this is the best way to avoid being unsatisfied with your work if your goal is tabletop then you have said time is more important than quality in the balance it doesn't mean quality is zero I think but I say that sometimes people think it's a light switch it's not a light switch could be 51% time and 49% quality but time still wins right so but once you've already decided on a quality then it's just a question of how far you want to go right so what does that mean so when we get to things like competition managers I think I hear a lot of people and I think a lot of people sometimes believe that things like basing or something has got to be a big part of it like you've got to have a big crazy base this guy has a decent enough base it's not super crazy bases are fine I see pieces win competitions all the time that have extremely simplistic bases you don't need a big crazy base and in fact it can often take away from your competition piece if your base is not at the same level as the rest of your piece all you did was paint yourself into a hole because now you just you've got a big anchor literally attached to the feet of your miniature trying to slow you down okay but this guy was certainly for competition this was the the fig I did for how to paint Imperial fist yellow and I really like how this guy came out with the the sort of lighting structure and stuff like that around him he has a very warm side and a very cold side which is kind of the goal I was going for I wanted to look like he was sort of standing somewhere at dawn and you know sort of after having defeated his his foes but what competition ultimately means especially as you push yourself higher and higher in competition pieces is spending lots and lots and lots and lots of time refining spotting from a foot away the difference between a good display piece and a good competition piece is usually impossible that's why if you've ever been to like a golden demon or a miniature painting competition you look in the case you might find seven or twenty or fifty pieces you think are all totally awesome and then the judges don't pick them and you're like why I don't get it those are totally awesome well because you were looking at the thing from here okay and the judges were looking at the thing from here and you notice a lot more at that level right obviously even this guy on screen right now I've blown him up real big and in doing so I noticed things I want to go fix so there you go but competition is always what as you as you transition from display to competition the difference there means spending twice as much time as you have already more or less simply doing final careful refinements that if you do them right almost nobody will notice it is making sure that every sharp edge or little thin line you've drawn whether freehand or an edge highlight or anything like that is completely crisp meaning not only did you draw right there but you went back with the other color and blocked it out so it is a perfectly crisp line it means making sure that every shadow and every transition is perfectly smooth and every bit of texture is where you want it and every highlight goes to exactly how high it should go right and on and on and on and on and on slightly adjusting the color like the number of times I adjusted the light on this guy's face because I wasn't exactly happy with how bright this side would seem versus this side so many times because I had to keep going back and forth and looking at him and setting him down and looking at him up close and I mean I probably spent 20 hours just fixing highlights on his face and if I hadn't made those changes wouldn't be that much it wouldn't look that much different to you especially not on camera right now but it would look very different to somebody judging it in a competition take something like the this keeper of secrets so this keeper of secrets again is actually at a display quality and I didn't take her all the way to competition but she has a lot of elements of those things that one would you know expect to see so she has a lot of freehand and stuff like that obviously all these different color shifts and fades I mean she's freehand all over the place all of her blends I tried to keep you know perfectly creamy smooth she has things like texture your hair came out really well non-metallic metal as true metallic metal type effects all that stuff works right but if she were gonna go to competition she would still need to go even farther we need to go around and spend a lot more time changing almost nothing doing things like making sure the corner of her eye here had a little bit more of like a pink tone to it where it fades out to you know the the sort of corner of your eyes delts doing things like making sure this line under her where her corset is coming up is nice and clean and not so kind of messy as it is right now doing things like making sure these little individual scales that start up here are nice and picked out on the edges so that they stand out more from the the darkness that they're about to go into under this claw guard all those little tiny touches like that making sure that everything is reinforced lined sharp and ultimately extremely clean is what defines a competition many over a display quality many wanted to end here on this guy this is Ignis he is one of my one of my nights that I did for my whole night army and so if you followed the channel for a while you know I did several of these I love painting nights I think they're one of the most fun miniatures to paint I'll be working on their chaos opposition now over the next couple years I've got one done and they'll be more coming but Ignis who was also featured in a hobby cheating video on doing detailed freehand is a good example of bringing everything together into a competition figure like this is everything I made a conscious decision before I started this project to hold nothing back nothing right to make sure that I left nothing on the table so whether it's the sort of extreme use of shadows and stuff like that in the metals and making sure that they really all all the metals were reading is visually interesting the hyper detailed freehand that I went back through and cleaned up and tried to make sure it was very very very sharp and effective in what it was doing and where it was being used whether it be stuff like the slight glow coming out of every light on this thing so there's lots of little lights on this guy like the blue light up here there's a very slight blue right here where it's reflecting out these little green search lights here little slight green right here and here right because again I wanted everything to have a touch every thing that I could possibly touch every little bit of weathering every little bit of detail the ground being cracked where he's stepping under his feet because this is a many many many tonne war machine stepping on concrete that isn't ready to support it right so it cracked the concrete I wanted every single element of this to be thought through in detail and nothing was just being phoned in right for example the number of times I actually had to repaint this text across here was way too high but that's because every time I just wasn't happy it wasn't exactly how I wanted it it didn't come out exactly right so every little thing that I could do to constantly constantly constantly push this guy and ultimately that's what a competition miniature is it's not about hitting this level of quality what you see on the screen right now it's about what it does to you and that's why these are all subjective measures if I had to summarize all of this tabletop is putting speed above quality and focusing on fun and getting painted miniatures on the table at whatever level of skill you can achieve within the time box you set for yourself focusing on the areas that people look at and that matter those faces those bases those weapons and shields banners stuff like that that's tabletop we all are gonna have a different tabletop and that's okay it's a wide wide spectrum above that you have display quality where you're now focusing on the quality on the technique on the outcome more than the time where you're trying your best to push yourself to push your contrast to include those additional elements that make a piece interesting at 10 feet at one foot at one inch right and then competition is where you're taking that to the next level where you're getting obsessive and pushing yourself part of what I think it means to paint a competition miniature and why I encourage people to do it is because it means you have to be slightly uncomfortable that's why it's good not why it's bad painting a competition miniature is at times frustrating heartbreaking exhausting right and that's great if it's the only thing you ever did you might as well just smack your head against the desk now it's just you're gonna stop painting I paint a lot of competition figs every year and by a lot I mean probably six or seven and that's a lot like if these things take an average of 1 to 200 hours in a year or per which is probably about right depending that would mean I'm spending somewhere between 600 a thousand hours painting competition minis in a year that's almost half my time painting on six miniatures so I do this about a full-time job which is about 2000 hours a year so that's a lot of time I and I couldn't do that that much you know some years I might do four some years I might do eight but that's probably a good average whereas if you're doing a display of quality miniature you can still get something that looks really nice that employs all those high-level techniques that gives you something that's really kicking but you're not spending that double the amount of time cleaning up those minute micro details that people aren't going to notice adding in those itty bitty baby elements that you've got to hold the miniature for 30 minutes before you actually notice you whoa I can't believe they did this thing too super great it's good to have minis that do that every so often but you can't do that with every mini and like I said in the end whether your mini is tabletop or display or competition none of these things innately make one better than the other they are all painted miniatures hence they are all good period now obviously some might do better than others in a miniature painting competition but even my competition level minis often don't win competitions because there will be other people there I wasn't up to snuff for that particular time or whatever the case and that's fine that's why you can't define it by those external sources but instead it's best to define these three levels by you by how they challenge you how they push you and how they help you grow and take your next step on your painting journey so there you go if you've got more questions about tabletop versus display versus competition drop them down in the comments below always happy to answer any questions there give this video a like if you liked it subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future but as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time