All posts tagged: photography

Good Reads 52

Good Reads 52 with Nurgle Titan, Painting Tutorials, and a Cult

Another awesome week of hobby posts to check out in today’s Good Reads 52. Come see some of the work done by fellow hobbyists, learn from tutorials, be inspired, and some things to think about. While it has been a busy week here between finishing a book and getting started on a crazy Rainbow Warriors Project (more to come), it is awesome to poke my head up and see what others have accomplished. Sorry I haven’t commented on your site lately, but I do bookmark posts to eventually get back to 🙂 But for now, dig into this week’s Good Reads, they are another set of amazing work. The White Knight White isn’t a color you see very often in the fantasy setting, especially on chaos warriors. But Nick has done a great job with this Chaos Knight, the start of a new AoS army. Rotten Skin The Rednekkboss has become proficient with the multiple wash technique. Here, he put together a tutorial on how to paint rotted skin that looks incredible. It has a …

Good Reads 50 with Hobby Blogs to Read

Good Reads 50 with painting tutorials, Battlefleet Gothic, and Orruks

Another week of Good Reads hobby posts for you to check out and enjoy. With painting tutorials and inspiration for your hobby needs. Check out these posts from fellow hobby bloggers and check out their sites. Remembering Battle Fleet Gothic I never got into Battle Fleet Gothic but it looked like a fun game, and with the growth of other ship based games I wouldn’t be surprised if Games Workshop brings it back. Caladaris dived into his collection and shared what made this game so fun. On Commenting You may have heard me talking about the importance of community before as it is a big reason why I do this blog. Morpheus on The Fantasy Hammer shares his thoughts on commenting and why it can be so important in our hobby. Using Lots of Washes I have been getting more into washes and glazes as they can not only be super fast to get a good look but add nice variation and color to parts of your model. Da RednekkBoss talks about the goodness of washes as …

Brush Stroke 1 - The Broken Paintbrush Newsletter

Brush Stroke 1

Exactly one year ago I started a newsletter for Broken Paintbrush called the Brush Stroke. The first few issues didn’t go out to many other than family, so I decided to post each week’s post here for posterity. Want to get the latest newsletter into your inbox? Make sure to sign up in the form at the bottom. Welcome to the first ever Broken Paintbrush newsletter! I hope to bring new ways to help your hobby right to your inbox. New Post: Foldio Review This week’s post on Broken Paintbrush is a review of the Foldio 2 Light Box, a relatively large, but portable light box. Photography: Build Your Own Light Box But you don’t need to buy a light box, Marc from Old School Gaming built a huge one out of a lawnmower box. Painting: Tutorial on Painting Eyes I’ve been working on improving my skin tones lately and stumbled upon a Reaper Minis article on painting eye first. Inspiration: Warlord Titan Dave Taylor is a long time favorite painter of mine, and recently …

How to Improve Your Hobby Skills Through Showcasing

How to Improve Your Hobby Skills Through Showcasing

Want a quick tip to improve your miniature painting skills? Post pictures of it for the world to see. No joke, this has been one of the best drivers for me how I improved my hobby skills: through showcasing. This is part three of my series on improving your hobby skills. You can download all three parts into a single eBook by filling in the the form below. [convertkit form=5003522] Improve Your Hobby Skills Through Showcasing You may think it’s odd that I would add a suggestion for showcasing your model as a way of developing your hobby skills. But it comes down to this: community feedback and incentive to improve. With very rare exceptions, we have a very warm and encouraging community of hobbyists, and if you post your progress and ask for help, more than likely some of us will find you and encourage you to keep it up. I know because that is how I pushed myself to improve and keep at it. This final post in my series focusing on improving …

How to Photograph Your Mini

Huge List of Tutorials for Miniature Photography

You spent all this time to build and paint your mini, and now it’s time to share it with the world. Do yourself (and your work of art) a favor and take a bit of extra time to take the best picture you can. Below I’ve put together a bunch of tutorial links on miniature photography to help you do just this. I must admit that it kills me a bit inside when I see what could be a fantastic looking model but it’s hard to see because it was snapped on a busy desk or a bit blurry. As many of the articles below prove, you don’t need a fancy camera and photo studio to take good pictures. Just a bit of setup and care. So dive into the tutorial and find a few things that you could improve to improve your model’s glamor shot. Miniature Photography Basics For some good start-to-finish tutorials, these guides to miniature photography will help you get going. From something as simple as leaning a piece of paper against …

Photograph Your Mini Challenge

Dreadtober Challenge: Photograph Your Mini

While October has come and gone, and hopefully everyone completed their Dreadtober models, we still have one challenge left: photograph your model. This may seem a bit redundant as each of us has been taking pictures along the way and posting them in the showcase articles. But I felt it was important to take a week just to improve our skills of photographing miniatures, editing the picture, and loading it to your site of choice. Challenge: Photograph Your Model So this week your challenge is this: read/watch some tutorials on photographing your miniatures (some helpful links below), build a simple light box if needed, and take the best picture of your model possible. As you will see in some of the tutorials, you don’t need a fancy camera or photo booth. A white sheet of paper and your cell phone can take some amazing pictures – if you take the time to do it right. So this week, take that time and up your photography game. Result: A Beautifully Photographed Model After four weeks of …

Advanced Photo Editing with Gimp

In the last article on Basic Editing with GIMP, I talked about cropping and using auto white balance tools. For many of my pictures, this gets me 80% of what I need. Today I will be going into more advanced photo editing using some of GIMP’s other tools. While I call them advanced, they are still relatively simple to do but require a bit more time and focus -thus adding in the advanced title. But I hope to display the steps in a fairly straightforward way that any of you could try at home and see what it does for your pictures. Watch the Video As I attempted to write up this tutorial and take screenshots, I realized much of this would be better suited to video, so I welcome you to the very first Broken Paintbrush video! All the text notes are written out below still so if you aren’t able to watch the video now, still feel free to read. As this is my first video tutorial, I would love your thoughts, either …

Basic Photo Editing using GIMP - Header

Basic Photo Editing with GIMP

Today’s tutorial is a bit more technical in nature in that I am stepping away from the brushes and showing how basic photo editing can help show off the best your model has to bring. First off, this isn’t photo-manipulation to make your model ‘look better.’ But rather I will show you how I adjust the result of my point-and-shoot camera to make up for its limited abilities. Why Bother? Think of how many hours you spent applying careful layers and details to your latest model masterpiece. OK, maybe it was just a quick drybrush and Quickshade dip. Either way, you want to snap a few pictures to share with the online community, get featured in a hobby magazine, or be featured on Games Workshop’s Flickr feed. Here is an example from my archive of an Iron Warriors Warpsmith. Notice how he only fills about 20% of the image (forget about the darkness of it for a minute). Ok, so the Ork Deffdread below is a bigger model and able to fill in more of the image, …

Review of the Foldio 2 Photobox

Foldio Unboxing Review

I’ve been struggling with a lightbox setup for quite some time now, and after reading a review from Greggles on the Foldio Lightbox, I recently took the dive and picked one up. I’ve put together my review and a couple of tips I have already found with it. The Foldio was a recent Kickstarter success, with this lightbox being their second, and larger, version. They’ve even got to the point that I was able to pick mine up from Amazon and get it in just two days. The biggest things I was looking for from a lightbox was to be able to break it down and store it between projects. I share my painting/hobby space with my other work projects, so being able to clear out table top room was a must. I had previously built a crude lightbox from an Ikea records box that closed nicely to put on a shelf but took over a whole shelf just to store. It was time to shrink the footprint while getting a larger lightbox – a solution …