For me, painting miniatures has always been a Campbellian experience.
You start out with all this white-undercoated potential sitting in front of you; your mind creating and revising color scenarios and complex decal arrangements. As you pass through the base coat stage and onto the black-for-metallics phase, you start to get discouraged when the loose association of basic colors and white begins looking worse and worse. Your washes look messy, your drybrushed highlights make the primary colors look dusty, and none of the lines are clear or sharp.
Out of this despair you start to crack down with the detail, touching up mistakes and splatters, eliminating remaining white space, until somewhere along the way you end up with a pretty nice looking product.
My camera is terrible with colors. In reality, the blues are darker and the golds are brighter.
It's taken me about 2 1/2 weeks to get to this point. I do a little every night, a little more on weekends. I'm going to try freehand painting icons on the shoulder pads, but I'm not sure how that's going to work out.
With basing, clear-coating, and banner, I'm thinking I'll hit 4 weeks to finish the squad. Then, for variety, I'll paint up a rhino to match them.
Depending on how the shoulder pad work goes, I'm hoping to shave things down to 3 weeks on the next squad.
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