Stone Bridge

Tonight I experimented with this miniature stone bridge, the first piece I've painted from the massive Dungeons & Lasers project I Kickstarted last year. Having spent an entire evening painting last night's miniature for rather mixed results, I knew I needed to attempt some of the tricks that other painters use to speed up the process. This is important because I have literally hundreds of pieces of terrain to paint, and I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing it. The idea is that these bits of plastic and resin and steel are meant to be played with, so finishing is important. 

In the case of this stone bridge, I threw caution to the wind and tried to approach the piece more by feel than analysis. The piece was molded in dark grey plastic, a good base, I thought. I started with a base coat of slightly lighter grey, then inkwashed it. After that, I drybrushed a coat of still lighter grey overtop, just letting my hands guide me without trying to second-guess where the brush strokes were taking me. I painted the flowerpot tops red to represent roses, dotting the bridge with a couple of fallen "petals." Finally, I added just a tiny bit of dark wash to each flowerpot. 

The bridge has "wooden" supports, so I painted that entire square section dark brown, inkwashed it with brown wash, and then used metallic silver to carefully dot the rivets - probably the slowest part of the process, but even then, I tried to let my hands stay in control. 

All told, it took me about 20 minutes to paint this bridge. As a bonus, I'm much happier with the results than I am with yesterday's lich. Feels like success.