Painting Animal Figures – Learning Series 14 by AK Interactive – Book Review

As the Learning Series grows, I’m sure it is becoming harder and harder to come up with new ideas that will sell books and be useful to hobbyists. Fortunately, AK Interactive have something fresh with the fourteenth entry and at a conceptual level, it is a winner. Animals are a subject that are not discussed as much as they could be and there are more and more animals miniatures being made in recent years. Even Games Workshop has been creating new fantasy animal miniatures for their various games so it feels like a bit of an emerging trend in the hobby. There’s no better time than the present for a book to explore how to paint animal subjects and in this review, we will discuss whether this book is a useful resource for those interested in painting our animal friends.

Introductory Materials – The first 21 pages of Painting Animal Figures cover a wide range of animal related topics. Some of the writing is from an artistic perspective and with whatever translation service that AK Interactive uses, it takes on a bit of a strange poetic tone that is not easy to follow and absorb. The introduction does provides some very inspiring pictures of dioramas that include animals as well. Several of these are scale model dioramas that happen to include animals like Russians storming Berlin during WWII and there are animals escaping from the zoo but no matter what you like to paint, you’re likely find inspiration here. The quality of the dioramas is indeed very high and are strong examples of why animals can be a useful addition to many painting projects.

There are also brief explorations of how to create animal tracks in a diorama and artist renderings of animal eyes with AK Interactive paint recommendations for recreating them. Both of these brief sections are thoughtful and handy inclusions that could have easily been missed, especially when you consider the modest page count of the Learning Series. There is also a brief discussion with photographic examples of animal miniatures currently available to buy. For many people, I think the products shown on this page are unfamiliar. I wasn’t aware of Mantis Miniatures or CIX Models, for example, and in that sense, this two-page spread is helpful to give you some ideas on where you might find animal miniatures you’re interested in. It certainly is much more impactful than showing some WWII tanks or generic orc miniatures which should be pretty easy to source.

Tutorials – The main chunk of the book is tutorials for large scale animal sculpts (54mm mostly). At first glance, some might be disappointed because there are tons of animal miniatures in gaming scales (28-32mm) but I think 54mm is a nice middle point between larger scales and smaller scales. You can take the techniques shown here and shrink them down or blow them up so to speak as needed. Here is a bulleted list of the animal species covered:

• Horses – both large scale and small scale
• Zebra
• Prehistoric animals, mostly dinosaurs (there are 6ish tutorials overall)
• Rhinoceros
• Giraffe
• Orangatuan
• Gorilla
• Deer
• Walrus
• Goat and Snow Leopard
• Elephant and Camels (Both of these aren’t full tutorials and more like suggestions for paints/colors to use)
• Cow Skull

Its worth mentioning that the vast majority of the sculpts used in the tutorials are from CIX Models. You can check out their products on their website, if you’re so inclined. In some older AK Interactive books, there has been an issue with the tutorials feeling too disparate. It almost feels like the tutorials were pulled from other publications and copied and pasted into the Learning Series book instead of being freshly written. I’m happy to say that that is not the case here at all. The tutorials feel uniform in their style and are thoughtfully done. It seems as if one person painted all of the projects and wrote up the tutorials for us. I think this is a huge improvement and I applaud AK Interactive for their editorial work here.

Just as importantly, the tutorials give you good advice for how to paint animal miniatures as well as you can. While there are things you can do differently, like not using oil/enamel paint washes if you don’t want to, in general, I found that the tutorials make sense and are easy to follow. If you’re at all intimidated or confused by how to paint animals, I think you’ll find that the tutorials teach strong fundamentals. I particularly like how they teach you to think of the animal fur and scales in layers like the zebra tutorial above. This is a helpful strategy for tackling animal miniatures that I’ve used in the past. And ultimately, if you can paint the animals in the tutorials, then you’ll be able to apply those skills to other animals not covered.

Speaking of which, the list of animals covered is pretty extensive and varied. Sure, a lion and chimpanzees would have been popular choices if they had room for more, but in general, I think that the “heavy hitters” of the animal kingdom are represented here with the possible exception of domestic animals like chickens and cows. I also appreciate that they threw in the cow skull at the end as bone can be a tricky subject and bones are well worth a tutorial as well. All in all, the tutorials section has a lot going for it and is a strength of this book. It does what the title suggests and that’s what most readers are looking for.

Closing Thoughts – As I’m sure you can tell, I am a fan of this Learning Series book. It takes a fresh topic, delivers a lot of inspiration, and empowers us as hobbyists to tackle animal subjects. While I’m sure that if the page count was increased, there’s more useful stuff that could be covered, at the same time, I think AK’s editorial team did a great job packing this little book full of useful content. It will teach and inspire you and I think that is all you can hope for in a book like this. If you’re interested in painting animal subjects, then I’d highly recommend this book.

Before I conclude, I thought it would be worth mentioning that the overall market for high quality animal sculpts is somewhat small currently. CIX Models has a miniature range that contains a lot of the most popular animals like elephants, gorillas, lions, giraffes, etc. There is also a 3D sculptor called Animal Den Miniatures that offers a pretty wide range of STLs for 3D printing. Beyond that, there are not many dedicated sculptors working in this space. Unfortunately, some types of sculpts and animals are underrepresented currently as a result. Monkeys, including lemurs, and other small animals are under represented. Smaller bird and amphibian species are the same way. I mention this because I think its good to have realistic expectations on what miniatures are available for purchase and I hope that the range of animal miniatures expands further as I think there is a growing market for them. Painting and collecting animal miniatures is absolutely something I’d consider doing in the future and the more great sculpts are out there, the more tempting this hobby route becomes.