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Fallout – Not Done Raiding

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While I had my doubts that there would be an update this week, I managed to get one thing done or at least close enough that I can share it. While I wouldn’t mind a break from Fallout minis for a bit, I decided to tackle another raider since they are the one thing in my backlog where each one I finish gets me closer to being able to use them in-game. This mini had some rough spots from the primer and not every part of the mini came together perfectly when I assembled it so I’m glad to see him come out as well as he did. Truthfully, the pictures are a bit dark for some reason but since he isn’t finished and varnishing and rusting is to come, these are good enough for now. I will hope to take better pictures of the finished product. It looks like its time to replace my photo background as well…

Truthfully, I realized recently that I don’t paint non-white skin tones often enough and so I had a think about why that is. My wife is not white and so when I paint someone of darker skin, I feel added pressure to get it right. Through knowing her, I’ve learned about how underrepresented people of color have been historically and also the importance of seeing people who look like them so I want to do what I can to portray them accurately. On the rare occasion that I do paint non-white skin, I almost always ask my wife what she thinks about it. She said this one is a bit too orange and I agree but it isn’t too far off from the real thing so I will take it. I think will try to paint some more skin tones besides white and black more in the future as well. You don’t get better without practice after all.

That’s all for hobby progress this week but I did want to mention the ongoing saga with my Games Workshop order. Well, I contacted their customer service last Saturday and they responded pretty quickly by sending me a new order. That was nice of them and much appreciated. I wasn’t expecting to get the order for a few days and to my surprise, I got a package from GW today. Well it turns out, its my original order! It took about three weeks to arrive but it did make it. With the second one on the way, I’m potentially getting double the paint and minis. Normally, you would be thrilled with that and I’m glad to get double the amount of paint but I bought because I will use it all eventually. However, I also bought Galadhrim Warriors and was maybe going to paint as many as 10 in the box of 24. I have no use for 48! I’m going to have to really sweet talk a couple of regular commentators to take some of them off my hands!

Lastly, I’ll close by saying Adepticon opens on Wednesday. I have taken Friday off from work and will enter my miniatures into their respective competitions then. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out exactly how I’m transporting said miniatures. I only have one miniature case that has the vast majority of my miniatures in it so while I’m not thrilled about it, I may have to press it into service. I should have really thought about this ahead of time because I can’t have any of the miniatures get damaged en route to Adepticon. Fortunately, its a modest 30 minute drive to the convention center for me so its mostly just moving them from the car (and then maybe a shuttle bus, depending on parking) to the event. I’ll certainly give this some thought and I’m sure I can come up with a solution.

The final decisions for the painting competitions doesn’t occur until Sunday so I won’t know anything interesting until then though I wouldn’t be shocked if some of my miniatures are eliminated from the Golden Demon before the final round. As a result, it will almost definitely be Sunday night at the soonest before I can update the website again.

I don’t have any expectations of winning anything. I’m just going to enter what I have, get what feedback I can, and go from there. The competition level for Golden Demon will be incredibly high and it will be an honor to have so many people looking at the minis I bring alongside the “big name” painters who have a following and teach painting seminars. I hope to make everyone who has helped and supported me over the years proud and I hope to have an interesting story or two to share as well. In the meantime, I’ll probably a bit nervous as this is all a first for me and it feels pretty daunting now that it is nearly a reality!

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38 thoughts on “Fallout – Not Done Raiding”

  1. Great work as always mate, although I look forward to seeing the finalized figure with your excellent rust effects.

    I will be wishing you good fortune in the transport and in the competition. Plenty of us cheering for you.

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    1. I reckon the Raider will look quite a bit better with the rust applied. I ran out of time this week or I might have gone ahead and applied it.

      Thank you for the well wishes! I think everything will go okay and if all else fails, I can do a bit of shopping while I’m there on Friday!

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    1. I think it will be fun, John. I have only gone once to essentially see what the convention was like and that was enjoyable so I figure entering the minis in the competition lets me enjoy it a bit further 🙂

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  3. Great work on the raider, and look forward tro seeing your rust effect on it. Nice to see you including other skin tones, there is such a wide variety, one thing to remember is that as the skin tone gets darker the more reflective it is and thus needs a starker highlight, google people from different areas of the world and you’ll see a huge variety of skin tone.
    Good luck at the convention, and learn as much as you can, while you’re there, and try to have fun ! LOL

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    1. Thanks, Dave! If I made a mistake, it was choosing a photo reference of someone who has lighter brown skin with not as much contrast to it. Next time I will try to pick an image with higher contrast and try to get that right.

      Adepticon will be fun regardless of how I perform in the competitions. I look forward to doing some shopping and just seeing all of the entries in the painting competitions. It really is a privilege to see high quality work in-person.

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      1. Idris Elba has a great skin tone to show what I mean, if he is under light his skin has a pure white highlight showing his skin reflecting the light around him and not diffusing it, plus he’s a great actor, and I’ve enjoyed most things I’ve seen him in ! LOL

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      2. He’s a great actor and a good recommendation. You’re scoring points with my wife as well because she’s a big fan of his too haha I’ll have to use him as a reference and see what I can come up with on a mini in the near future.

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  5. Awesome work!

    It can be tricky at times. I think my first attempt at painting different skin tone was around the time I got the Stormcast Eternals Sacrosanct bundle set in 2020, about 11 years of being in the hobby just going for white skin. It’s only when I got into F:WW that I tried spreading as much variety as possible. The Minutemen squad was one of my first squads that had distinctive characters, two African American characters being related to each other as sisters, one Asian and one Caucasian.

    Best advice I can give is randomising skin tones in a squad. Whilst making selected skin tones is a good practice, you don’t want to go too uniform (unless the faction has a specific background). Think of the miniatures as characters, and you’ll have much more fun with the process.

    Another advice is looking into the Fallout games themselves for references to individuals with different skin tone. NCR, Raiders, The Institute, The Brotherhood of Steel and so on.

    Good luck at Adepticon! 😀

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    1. Thanks, mate! I appreciate the level of thought you put into your minis and games. You’re on a deeper level than most! I think your advice on randomizing the skin tones is spot-on. My plan is to try for other skin tones to try and keep the minis looking as unique as I can. As you said, the Fallout games do a great job with that so we might as well try and match it as painters 🙂

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    1. Thanks for sharing the links! The CMON article is a classic and I hadn’t looked at it in quite a long time. I will definitely see what I can do to push my personal range of skin tones further. I reckon that would be useful even in LOTR because the Easterlings and Haradrim would benefit from at least some non-white skin tones.

      Thank you for the kind words on Adepticon as well. There are quite a lot of things I could be persuaded to buy so it might be an expensive weekend!

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    1. Thanks, Nic! You make a good point about convenience. Australia gets no Golden Demons anymore which is a shame. I think the US had about a ten year gap between 2022 and the previous one. Its crazy to think about! I’m lucky that it is held in the city I live in because if it was more than an hour or two away, I couldn’t be bothered to travel just to enter in the competition.

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      1. Australia used to have its own Golden Demon back in the day, it was in Sydney and being in Perth that’s a 4h flight away but the stores would ship your entries over which was nice although meant I was never willing to send anything too breakable! I managed to get a few finalist pins and a bronze over the years, so I was grateful that was an option. Not too much happening since sadly.

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      2. That is pretty cool that they’d let you enter in that way and receiving those awards is excellent and something to be proud of! I’m not surprised that you earned them because you’re a talented painter. It is baffling that GW can’t be bothered host a regular painting competition in Australia. Its such a big country and its far away from Europe and the US. They can’t expect Australians or Kiwis to fly to either place for a painting competition, can they? I don’t think they should!

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  9. Skin tones are tricky. I used to use recipes, but now I just wing it. Like all experiments, it will work some times and sometimes not as much. I usually don’t aim for a specific race, so that helps. There is such a variety of skin tones though, that you have a lot of leeway. I’ve really noticed the thing you mentioned about identification/relation with my daughter. When selecting characters, it’s very important to her, to have female gender representation but also skin colors that match her own. She’s mixed and has skin that is tanner than my own Irish pasty white. I’ve tried to include more diversity in my work, but realize I have to keep pushing that even more as I go. For your extra minis, there are a few options. Ebay, give them out as prizes on your site, Secret Santas, etc. Good luck at Adepticon. I have a feeling you’ll do better than you think you will! 😀

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    1. Ah shoot, forgot to mention… that the skin on the Raider turned out nice, but I think I would add some tats or scars to make him look more the Raider part. Those things were freakin scary in the game after all!

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      1. I’m glad you mentioned this, Brian. I was thinking about some face paint while working on him and forgot about it. I will go back tonight and add some kind of face paint to make him look that much more savage! I don’t think I have the patience for tattoos or scars on him but both would elevate the mini further without a doubt.

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      2. Tats on dark skin on a mini this level, are really to make noticeable. Face paint would work really well though. I forget what sort of markings the raiders had in Fallout 3, mostly I just remember the piles of bloody organs in their areas. 😛

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    2. I’m glad to hear it isn’t just myself who has noticed identification/representation in people of color. It makes total sense because many of us grew up around other white people and we see successful white people all the time so its normal. Also, I’m a pasty German-American reporting in 🙂

      Those are good ideas. I hadn’t thought about trying to use the extra miniatures in such a way. I might have to think about what to do with them because the two people I tried to get interested didn’t bite in the comments haha.

      Thank you for the kind words and I always am pessimistic to prevent disappointment but I think I’m actually be realistic here too. We’ll see what happens! 🙂

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      1. Well, I’m a bit of a mutt but I imagine I could pass as Irish based on looks. My Mom was born in Germany, so we got that in common! Yea, I’m the same in that I usually prep for the worst and end up much happier with the results. I think I last mentioned the representation issue over on Wudu’s blog. As I said, I’m making an effort to paint more female minis overall. But what I noticed is that a lot of the female minis just weren’t cool. The cooler looking minis (thus the ones I wanted to paint), had cooler poses or equipment in general. GW is probably an exception to the rule (though I’m no big fan of them), they have a number of female minis that I’ll look at and go ‘Damn, that’s cool!’. Though I’m guessing I probably say that to more of their male models than female ones, but I do know that they have had some female models that really stand out. Anyways, just what I’ve noticed anecdotally.

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      2. Ah, I just had to have a look…mostly it was different helmets on the Raiders. Which doesn’t do you much good unless you want to mod after painting! The other trademark was lots of dirt on their faces and clothes. So I guess face paint and maybe some blood stains when you get around to weathering?

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      3. The face paint is pretty subtle in Fallout 4 so I’ve kind of been going off script and coming up with my own patterns. I went ahead and added some face paint so we’ll see if you like it whenever I finish the rest of the mini 🙂

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      4. I reckon we all are in some way. Being very German like I am isn’t really that much to brag about after WWII either or at least that’s my thinking anyway!

        GW is getting better in that regard. Ursula Creed and Lelith Hesperax come to mind. There are plenty of others if you take a look around at GW’s latest offerings. Personally, I see more and more young ladies painting on Instagram and I’m guessing the additional female sculpts is paying off for GW.

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  10. Hope you did well at Adepticon – and at worst had a whale of a time anyway! Hopefully you got some photos that you can share, as we really don’t get much like that around here (especially these days!)

    Stealing some Galadhrim from you would be tempting, but I think the postage to this side of the world might be a bit excessive unfortunately. One day I’ll get some of them painted, but I do want to circle back and finish my Gondor/Arnor/etc models before moving into other LotR stuff (aside from maybe finishing those Wargs one day!)

    The way I see skin tones is that they’re a broad spectrum. Unless you’re trying for a specific skin tone or ethnicity then I just do as Faust does and wing it. I have a collection of paints that I use for skin tones that range from my darkest brown to sand, and that can go in and out of orangeish tones, ruddy tones, paler tones – and so on.

    If you look at people from any specific ethnicity (more specific than “black people” or “white people” – but say “Kenyans” or “Greeks”, you’ll still find quite a wide variety of tones within that group – so I say don’t stress too much about getting it “right” and just experiment with your models and mix up them skin tones.

    Based on that, I even try to make my “white people” have different skin tones and just base it on who or what they are (farmer & big game hunter get more ruddy skin than a scientician.

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    1. All I can say is that Adepticon is over. I’ll post something about it within a day or two. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures because it was really hard to take decent ones.

      I would be happy to give you some of them but you’re right that postage is going to cost big money. By the time I sent them to you, you’d almost be just as well off to buy them yourself, I’m afraid. That really says something about postage costs these days. I hope to see you get back to some LOTR minis when the mood strikes.

      I agree that skin tones can be fudged just as easily as using photo references. I tend to use photo references in general so I was curious to see how close I could get to the photo. It was a bit of a mixed bag truthfully. One thing that I’ve noticed is that if you get into painting larger scale minis, getting skin right and using lots of subtle tones becomes really important. I think that backs up everything you’re saying pretty well!

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  11. Nice, I like the way you’ve painted this naughty chap. The skin tone looks broadly OK, at least in so far as there are certainly folks out there with that colour of skin. Of course, if you were intending it to be someone specific then maybe it’s not quite right. For my own side I doubt that many of the minis I paint have a skin colour that is more than passingly similar to any actual human so I don’t sweat it over much. That said I do think that representation is important and while it’s true that painting one tiny dolly with non-white skin isn’t exactly overthrowing the status quo it is at least another tiny mark in the right direction.

    The pose on the raider is a little bit weird, it looks like he’s trying to stab someone with his shotgun rather than aim it at them. I love the wee bit of extra effort he’s put into his trousers; clearly before the apocalypse forced him to be an evil raider he was quite the dapper gentleman.

    Good luck and have fun at Adepticon.

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    1. Cheers, mate and I agree that the skin we choose to paint minis isn’t going to change real world problems but it can’t hurt either.

      I hadn’t thought about the Raiders pose but he is really sticking that gun out there, isn’t he? Since he doesn’t really have a shirt, I figured he ought to have some decent trousers as you call them in your country 🙂

      Thanks for your kind words as always, I appreciate it!

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