Fifteen years apart

When I was re-arranging my Stablemate customs along their shelves to try to squeeze in a few more of the newer ones, I noticed I'd painted two which are more or less the same colour, and on the same mould. The first was one of my very earliest customs ever, and the second from last year - I had a little count up and reckon they were painted fifteen years apart! 
So I thought it'd make a nice blog post, to see how my painting has progressed, so here's the little pair of pinto mares together :

While the first paintjob isn't terrible, and I'm not planning to tuck her away in a back row out of sight, or sand her down and start again, I'm definitely pleased to see how much better the second one looks - a sign I have got better over the years, rather than just painting more of the same without progressing at all!

I really would credit most of my improvement over the years to finding the right paints and brushes.

The horse on the left was painted with normal artist acrylics from an art & craft shop. The one on the right was Citadel colour from Games Workshop, where you get about a quarter of the quantity for twice the price, but the texture means they blend and layer smoothly, and the finish has that soft sheen of a healthy horse coat. The art acrylics are far too matte, looking dry and dusty, and the thickness needed to cover (especially with the white) means there's lumps and brush marks, and no room for finesse in shading or blending. 

Expensive paint doesn't make good painters. But paint you get along with makes painting to the best of your ability a whole lot easier, while the wrong paint makes it impossible to do good things. Find the paint that suits the way you want to paint, and you're halfway there.

Compare these two tobiano mares again, and you can also see how I've got far more confident with intricate markings, with more complex shapes, feathery edges and detailing, and shading within the patches. This is a combination of co-operative paint, and helpful brushes - much like I stick to the same paint brand I know and love, I also buy the same kind of brushes over and over again. 

Despite having tried (and struggled with) the various, often pricey, specialist brands aimed at the model painting market, I eventually found the best kind for how I paint are the packs of brushes sold for nail art. Yes, they're designed for applying nail varnish, but the springy, silky synthetic hair texture and compact, tight construction is perfect.  I get them from ebay, in two batches - in the chunky brush packs you get a range of bigger brushes for thin smooth layers of paint and smudgey shading, while the thin-handled sets contain a mixture of smaller ones for detailing and markings, and the finest sharpest points for detailing eyes, edges of pinto patches, and hair-by-hair roaning. And they only add up to about £4 in total for six fat brushes plus eight or ten small ones, when you could easily pay more than that for one brush from the model shop.

I really don't know exactly how many customs I've painted in the fifteen years between these two, but it's been interesting looking back on one of the very first, and figuring out what's helped most in making my paintwork get better over the years.