i am curently thinking about painting the mini's that came with the descent base game. i do have quite a bit of experience painting for i have painted a few car models and have about a hundred warhammer mini's but this ones are not the same as warhammer because for warhammer if i mess up there are still about 15 other nearly identical ones after that, and worse case scenario spend another 35$ for a new box. but with descent i get one chance or else i have a needed mini that does not look good at all, and do not feel like throughing over 100$ away for a few replacable minis.

does anyone have any tips of any sort for painting these mini's?

thank you.

Just paint them how you would paint the GW stuff. If you goof, don't rebuy the box, just re-prime and try again.

These mini's paint up well with the black primer, followed by dry brushing. Lately, I've given up dry brushing and gone to blocking colours and then going over top with an ink for shading. This method is much quicker. When you are done, seal with a matte varnish. These mini's have the paint peel off of them easier than the GW stuff. The varnish seals the colour in and protects it from flaking off.

okay thanks, i did not know how well they would paint because they seem to be made out of a softer platsic, but it ounds like it still works okay as long as a seal like varnish is applied. one other thing i noticed; i was planing on painting the mini's roughly the same colors as they are shown but some of the monsters use such wierd color combos that would be near impossible to use effectively with paint. (the naga, or even all the different dark shades on the dragon might prove slightly frusterating.)

does anyone have any pictures of some painted monsters so i can see i good finished result? does anyone also know of any good advice for painting some of the wierder colored monsters?

If you look op Descent on www.boardgamegeek.com you can see lots of pictures of painted minis. I'd like to paint them myself but am feeling a bit daunted by this epic task

That's a big job, I thought that just painting the Lt's could be an option.

I've used the 'dip' technique (painting blocks of color, then applying minwax polyshade to the figure, then spraying with matte clear coat). It works great. So far I've done 4 heroes, all the skeletons, beastmen, the medusae, and the deep elves.

I suppose some day (year) I could potentially have the whole thing painted but I'm in no hurry.

I've only painted a handful of the heroes from Descent so far, but I've also painted my entire Doom set (they seem to be made of the same plastic.) You definitely want to prime these guys, because I noticed the paint had a tendancy to "run away" from the flat surfaces of the minis. I "primed" mine just by painting them all black first, so I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying you want a good solid layer for your colours to stick to before you start doing detail work.

I read on the Doom forum a tip about washing the minis with soap and water first to help the paint stick (something about a release agent from the molding process), but after having tried that on a few of them I didn't really notice an appreciable difference between washed and unwashed minis for that first layer. Maybe mine were just extraordinarily clean when I bought them =D.

If you mess up, the good news is that the non-stickiness of the first layer makes it really easy to just scratch off what you've painted with your fingernail. Even a few days later. That will ruin the bottom coat though, so you can't just undo one part, you'll have to start all over if you want the whole mini to be solid. If you don't like getting under your nails though, I've also heard good things about brake fluid as a paint stripper for plastic minis, as long as you don't leave them in there more than 24 hours. (I've heard this, but I haven't tried it myself yet. I take no responsibility if you decide to do so. =P)

As far as a varnish goes, I've been hesitant to use it on these minis myself. The soft plastic is easy to bend and I worry that if the mini gets bent too much the varnish coat will crack and start flaking the paint. I haven't varnished any of my Descent heroes and they don't seem to be flaking very much anyway. Now that I stop and think about it, I honestly can't remember if I varnished my Doom minis or not. Man, I'm old =(. They aren't flaking though, so if I could remember which way I went, that would sure be helpful... =P

http://www.tanksandtrolls.co.uk/speedpainting%20descent.htm

This would be a good page to get some inspiration. This guy apparently was able to do them all quickly too.

Here is a link to my minis.

http://picasaweb.google.com/wardog.jamz/DescentFigures#

They were the first things I ever painted so the quality is not as good as now but if you use washes and inks and a few highlights you can get some really good detail to pop out and it makes the game that much more enjoyable.

Also if you screw up I would recommend Simple Green for stripping paint off of minis.

OK, since we're plugging our painting, here's my base figures:

Higher resolution images and links to my painted expansion figures can be found on BGG: www.geekdo.com/image/440405

Wow, there were some really cool looking paint schemes for the mini's. i already have ideas of how to paint them, its just putting some of those ideas down on the mini's now.

I *highly* recommend using the dipping technique for the Descent minis. Take a look at Space Hulk on BGG, there've been a lot of dippers there that can give you lots of ideas of how/when to use this. It's extremely fast (less than 10 minutes to *completely* paint the figure) and very forgiving for inexperienced painters.

-shnar

There are a lot of paint jobs here: new.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp , my own included. I really should post my Heroes too...