Painting Gone Bad (How to kill a raging art-on)

“The artist must be blind to the ways recognized or unrecognized, deaf to the teachings and the wishes of his time. His eyes opened must look to his inner life and your ear to pay attention to the inner necessity “

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

I’m fairly certain that the late, great Mr. Kandinsky was referring to the blindness used to create the following works of horror.

Let’s get two things clear: I’d rather game with someone using chess pieces as figures than sit across a table from a guy using badly painted minis.

Secondly, yes – I’m shooting rats in a barrel. But I’m doing it for shites and giggles. I just ran a image search and am posting the images. No painters will be named – but I will say that the painters were all over 18 years of age. I am a terrible painting snob, but in this case it is for your enjoyment.

Show a picture of a mini online, and the top piece of advice you’ll get is “thin your paints”. It is almost a meme.

Go ahead and click on the above images to see them in their full, unadulterated glory.

Do you know a painter like this? Help ‘em!

Contemporary miniature painting is not an autonomous thing. It’s part of a network – a social system – and derives meaning or importance primarily from its position within that network. Painters have an improved chance of doing good work because they will have gained exposure to the methods by which art comes to have meaning. So you have to get new or inexperienced painters into groups, introduce them to sites like the following (presented in alphabetical order):

• Blackmoor has a handful of tricks and tutorials; its handling of non-metallic metal for different colored metals is quite useful.
• Dr. Faust’s Painting Clinic is another popular destination for miniature painting advice. Most of the tutorials seem geared toward specific problem areas, such as painting eyes, gemstones, and flesh tones. The tutorial on removing old paint from miniatures is one of the most useful on the Web.
• The appropriately-named How-to-Paint-Miniatures.com site provides a long list of tutorials that covers the basics of miniature painting especially well.
• The Jenova Project offers well-done photo tutorials on many of the hobby’s more advanced techniques, such as blending and non-metallic metal. The tutorial called, “Painting a Pseudo-Tartan” is especially interesting.
• Necrotales Miniatures has some brilliantly-painted tutorials, although most of the offerings are for more advanced techniques.
• The Reaper Miniatures page has a section titled, “The Craft,” which contains photo tutorials of several unusual techniques. It is rarely updated, but the information presented is useful.

By linking them to these sites they’ll have been introduced to the logic of the mini painting world. Remember – there is no such thing as good art in a vacuum.