Almost Done with the First Mini of 2026

Rolling for This Week’s Monster

Before getting into painting our boy, I’m stealing another idea from Trent at Miscast. Every week this year I want to paint a monster out of the Dolmenwood monster book. I’ll probably have to 3D print most of them, so I’m doing it now so when I finish him, he’ll be ready to go.

I got these really cool, really strange dice for Christmas from my mom. She said, “I know you like that kind of thing.” They’re actually very high quality resin with little dragons in them—not just one kind, there’s a different dragon on every face. And the glitter material inside moves!

This is something I never would have bought for myself, but it’s really cool to see and play with. Rolled a 23, which gives us a Brele—a short hornle. Instead of having to build something, I just remembered there’s a short horn brele in the official kit. Boom, that’s the next one up for this weekend.

Making Custom Washes

For some actual painting, we’re going to make our own wash. All-time favorite paint: Brownish Decay, plus Cultist Cloak. I’m going to wing this—I haven’t tested it, so you’re watching it live.

This is for our silver. We’re starting on the foot because if it’s too terrible, we’ll be able to work it off. We want to make sure it doesn’t pull up. Just being a little careful because I don’t want a ton on the green.

For the gold, we’re doing purple and red. I wash gold with a purplish red color because it really makes it look rich—I don’t know how else to describe it. We want it to pull in these little holes, but not pool on the surface.

The Wash Technique

You can see the effect—it’s going into the cracks and stuff, but this part right here is still pretty bright. The other side is shiny all the way through, but this side has more of that contrast in it.

The way you avoid coffee stains is you go slow. I say I go slow as I’m slapping this paint around, but I’m going back to that initial deposit of paint and that’s what I’m using to wash the rest of the model. Always wash the nuts!

Fixing My Mistakes

Oh god, you see all that? That’s exactly what I said not to do. The wash went crazy on the legs—I was nowhere near as careful as I thought. We got a lot of water coffee staining on the legs. That’s okay, we’ll figure it out.

The second wash attempt is definitely more what we’re looking for. What happened was I put too much paint when I washed it the first time and it just ran down. We’ll fix that when we highlight—it’s not a huge problem.

Edge Highlighting the Gold

For edge highlights, I’m getting paint on the brush, then when I drag it down my thumb, it puts paint on the side of the brush. That’s what makes it so I can just come right here—I’m using the side of the brush for those edge highlights.

This really adds so much to it. Just want to hit this corner where all the light comes in, then down that hard edge right there by the crack. The top of that edge, same thing.

The Green Touch-Up Challenge

Here’s that crazy idea. We’ve got our three colors from the airbrush workup. I’m just going to paint over this whole side section with the midtone and make it look like we wanted that transition to be there.

It doesn’t look as good as our airbrush transition, but we’re just making it look intentional. I’m starting from the highest point and just pulling it down into the shadows. If you look at it super closely, it’s pretty janky. But if you don’t look too close, it looks like an intentional transition and blend.

Edge Highlighting the Green

I’m using off-white—a warm toned white. The reason we’re using this is because our speed paints are so transparent that we can’t really use them to highlight. They’re too liquidy to get the kind of result we want.

This white keeps our warm tone but also highlights up. If we used brilliant white or straight white, that coldness would make it look a little weird because this model is pretty warm.

I’m coming in using the belly of the brush, the middle of it. The first couple of passes, you don’t even really see the edge highlight. Just take your time. See really—as we get into that transition, having that hard line is what makes it look like “wow, that’s a nice paint job.”

The Biggest Lesson

The paint will dry on this brush because there’s such little paint on it. Make sure you’re paying attention that you don’t have too much. If you have too much, you’ll get a fat edge highlight and nobody likes that—like I just did right there. Just use your finger to wipe it off. It’s all good.

Final Thoughts

I think we’re done! We got to do the eyes and the base and the sword, but I don’t know what I’m doing with the sword yet. Very happy with how he turned out, except for that damn water stain from the wash.

There’s a lot I’m actually pretty critical of, but I want to go into this year focused on getting models finished and not letting perfect be the enemy of good. That’s a perfectly fine and acceptable tabletop model—actually probably painted to a pretty high standard.

To close it out, I’m sitting here at tabletop level and damn that model looks good. Everything I’m hyper critical of for myself just doesn’t matter because from the tabletop it looks amazing.

Don’t be too harsh a judge on yourself. It looks great. Don’t overthink it. Don’t let it stop you from painting—that’s really what I’ve learned.

Day 112. Catch you tomorrow!

Transcript

What’s up? Hobby vlog day 12. Uh before I get into painting our boy, uh I’m going to once again steal an idea from Trent this cast. Uh and I every week this year I want to paint a monster out of Dolan wood monster book. So I probably have to 3D print this.

So that’s why I’m doing it now. Uh just so when I finish him, he’ll be ready to go. So what I’m gonna do is uh I got these really cool, really strange dice uh for Christmas from my my mom actually. She said, “I know you like that kind of thing.” They have like they’re actually very high quality resin and then there’s like these little dragons in them and there’s not just one kind of dragon.

Like there’s a different dragon on every face. And this glitter material inside moves. So this is like something I never Whoa. This is something I never would have bought for myself, but it’s really cool to to see and play with since I dropped this one. You can see.

And um and I I don’t know how like accurately they’re or fairly they roll, but we’re going to use them to pick a page. And I got to see how many pages there are as we start pulling. So let’s see what our first monster is going to be. 23. And these dice are like really cool.

[laughter] I don’t think they’re If you can still see them moving, it’s pretty pretty neat. All right, so 23. Um, let’s see what our first monster is. And if I don’t have to 3D print it, I definitely won’t. But I’m just assuming I’ll probably have to.

So monster 23 is a brele. A short hornle. Oh, you know, instead of having to to build something, I just remembered that there’s a short horn bregole in the official kit. So, boom. This is the next one up for this weekend.

For some actual painting, uh we’re going to we’re going to do the wash. We’re going to make our own wash. Uh all time our newest all-time favorite paint, brownish decay. Uh a cultist cloak. I’m just going to kind of wing this.

I haven’t uh I haven’t tested this, so you’re going to watch it live. Here we go. So, uh we’re going to This is for our silver. So, we’re going to start on the foot. uh because if it’s too terrible, we’ll be able to work it off.

But no, I think I think we’re pretty good on the money here. So, we just want to we want to make sure it doesn’t pull up. Pretty easy to do. Um here, I’m just being a little careful because I don’t want a ton on the green. Okay.

Trusty bottle lid. For the gold, we’re going to do purple and red. So, this is also We might just need the purplish red. So, let me start with this. And now that I’ve seen the consistency of the wash, I might not even put there’s like a little I might put like literal literally just some droplets in there that are already in there.

Like two drops of water. And let’s see. Let’s test it here. Uh maybe we need a little bit more water. All right, there we go.

It can’t be seen in case it’s too crazy. Uh, but I think we’re going to be good. Oh, yeah. Definitely fine. Okay.

So, I wash the gold with like a purplish red color cuz it really kind of makes it look like rich. I don’t really know how else to describe it. So again, we want it to pull in these little holes, but we don’t want it to pull on the surface. So you can kind of already see it’s it’s hard to get these true metals, true metallic metals on camera well cuz I though my lights are just so bright so I can see what I’m doing. So again, just coming in.

I’m making sure it collects in the holes, but not on the surface here. cuz on the surface we want to be calm and steady. Make sure we get our palm hole here. Yeah. And I don’t think we’ll need that parry when go purple actually, but I might I might just do it in the shadows to test it out.

Uh, let me hit this before we get too and really on this mask because there’s so many tiny details to catch on this mask. And I’m going to work the wash up towards that front and then down into the bottom. But I’m going to keep the wash away from the very like the center line of that face plate. And this side of the head printed pretty gnarly. I didn’t catch that when I was building it, but I’ve got a second one printed already.

So, I don’t think I I probably won’t be playing two Tauros, but I printed two just in case because it seemed like the only one I would be tempted to play two of, you know. So, see, I’m going to hopefully Let me zoom in so you can see real quick. So, I’m I’m there’s a little bit of wash on the brush and I’m working it up towards the center highlight or towards the center of this mask, but I’m keeping that mask wash the center mass wash free. Looks pretty sick. Um, we’re going to be very careful and hit the top of it.

And that’s really just because we want this to settle down into the eye mask because we’re going to put we’re going to make some glowing eyes later and that’ll just add more shadow in. So, boom. This is how much washer I wanted to make for the silver eye. I’m going to end up wasting a bunch of paint uh of the other two. But, and these shoulders the the shoulders draw the eye a lot.

So again, I’m I’m putting my pan my uh my brush at the high the brightest point of the shoulder and then I’m pulling the wash down into the shadows. And that way uh it keeps a brightness. So see that see how the effect of like it’s going into the cracks and stuff, but this part right here is still pretty bright. The other side is like shiny all the way through. And now this side has more of that like contrast in it.

So it’s again not a big deal. We’ll just go back over it uh with our correct mix and see that looks so much better with like the wash. Like the wash really does so much work with the gold. And same like how before the part we painted gold, I’m just going back and forth with my brush to get the wash out of that area and push it down into the corners. So you can see like this is a really good example.

Like this one’s got the wash. This one doesn’t. Like how much work that wash does for us. The reds and the purples. All right, cool.

So, I’m going to let this guy dry, see where we’re at. I think on the silvers, I might need to go back over it without as much of a watered down wash. Uh, just because I didn’t do it quite as much change quite as much as I wanted it to, but I’m going to let all this dry. I’m going to paint the gold right here and then wash that. And uh then we’ll be I washed out the outit um grim black brownish decay favorite paint.

All right, we’re going to try this again on the silver. So a little bit of brownish decay. Hopefully just a touch of that black. Maybe a little bit touch more. Okay.

Uh a drop of water. All right, there we go. I think this is closer to what we actually want for our silver. Maybe just a touch more water. All right, same thing.

We’re going to start on the feet in case it’s terrible. All right, so this is definitely more of what we’re looking for. Even out that transition. I must I must have had too much water paint uh in there. That’s okay.

That’s not a huge deal. Maybe we’ll fix that when we’re doing highlights. Oh, that’s probably exactly what happened. It probably just ran right down this. Yep, that’s exactly what it did.

That was silly. Put too much paint when I washed this the first time and it just ran down. So, we got to be careful of that. We’ll sit here and watch it for a second. That’s okay.

We’ll fix that when we highlight it. It’s not like a huge huge problem. Um, so now we’ll hit here again. Hit there. Our hands.

Yeah, this is doing a much better job of what I wanted. And with the silver, we can actually take it pretty dark cuz it’s going to come back to life with the highlight. Now, we just really want it to get up into the cracks to really get like darken this down. So, this is going to be much better for us. Just quick swipes.

Sure we’re getting in the pistons. And oh, I definitely want to get in here in there. Okay. And we’re just moving slow. You don’t want to like put a bunch of paint on it cuz what’ll make it look like ass very quickly is if you watermark it and coffee stain it.

And the reason the way you avoid coffee stains is you just go slow. Uh, and I say I go slow as I’m slapping this paint around, but I’m going back to that initial deposit of paint, and that’s what I’m using to wash the rest of the model. And there we go. Now you can a lot more of the browns are coming through. And a lot it’s a lot darker on this like boiler thing.

We get the nuts. Always wash the nuts. Okay, cool. So, now we’re washed. We’re looking nice and grimy back there.

Um I don’t want to be grim dark, right? Like I don’t want it to be grim dark. I just want it to look like a dirty boiler. Um I I washed the gold. I got to wash the shoulders.

I’m waiting. I was doing this while the shoulders dried out. That’s good. And I think we’re still probably hit pigment powders on the top of these smoke stacks. Back in the highlight.

Oh god. You see all that? That’s exactly what I said not to do. Oh, that’s brutal. All right, let’s uh let me get fresh water.

Okay. So, actually, instead of thinking, I’m just going to keep painting cuz this the wash on the on the gold dried and I saw that paint in my palette. Man, the wash went crazy on the legs. Jeez. I guess I was nowhere near as careful as I thought I was.

We got a lot of water coffee staining on the legs. Okay. So, what uh that’s okay. We’ll figure it out. Um this painting I’m hitting these edges now.

And this is a top light gold, the same gold we started with. Uh and it’s hitting the bottoms. That’s where the light’s going to catch. And then just a little bit in here. And then same thing over here.

Okay. So, this is that part where I was talking like we’re just kind of coming in and uh painting like scratch style like cross-hatches. And then we’ll hit this edge, the side of that edge right there. And then this really adds so much to it. Just want to hit this corner here where all the light comes in and then down that hard edge right there by the crack.

The top of that edge. Uh same thing. And uh to do these edge highlights, I’m getting paint on the brush. And then when I drag it down my thumb like this, it puts the paint on the side of the brush. And that’s what makes it so I can just kind of come right here.

I’m using the side of the brush for those edge highlights. And this got to get washed out. There we go. And so again, just using the side of the brush. And then we’ll come in here and we’ll paint just this middle part that’s going to be the brightest.

Oops. Boom. All right. Uh then we just have these side panels. Same thing.

Edge highlight this raised section. Uh just do a little bit in the middle here and paint the bottoms of all the holes. Okay. So, real quick, I just I highlighted the silver. Pretty much same concept as the gold.

Uh so, just I just that way all the metals are just done now. Um very happy with how the metals turned out. And it’s hard to actually like get it fully on camera. Uh, but I think they turned out pretty good. Silvers are pretty good.

I’m gonna do a little bit more work on the shield probably. And I need to paint the gauges. But, uh, there we go. So, I need to do a final highlight on the gold, which will be silver, but I will do that one after the mat. So, now it’s on to the black and the green.

What I think is probably a crazy idea. So, these are our three colors uh from the airbrush workup. Uh, I’m going to take this. Actually, you know what? Um, so this is our midtone, just straight midtone by itself.

And then Tyrion navy, a little dot of it. What I’m going to do is just mix. Get a little bit of that, a little bit more of that to brighten it back up some. Uh, let me see what we’re working with. That’s too dark.

I’m just going to paint over this whole thing on the whole side section with this midtone here and it’s going to not be as good. There’s a bubble or something right there. Okay. So, same thing. We’re going to have to paint this other side to make it look like it was intentional.

and we’ll touch up the black. Okay. But see, see what we’ve done is we’re just kind of making it look like we wanted that transition to be there. And so now it, like I said, it doesn’t look as good as our airbrush transition. And I want to let this dry because I don’t want to get too crazy.

And I actually think I probably need I’m about to just put it right in my drinking cup. Uh I need a little bit more water. Put a little bit more water right here. And now we’re in like full glaze territory. And just glaze it.

And I really don’t want to spend the time to wetland that whole damn thing. Okay, this is going to be crazy. But this is like mostly just water at this point. Like if you can see my thumb right here, we’re just going to Oh my days. We’re just going to go for it.

We’re starting from the highest point and just pulling it down into the shadows. And this glaze, I could sit here all day and I could keep doing that, but instead I’m only going to do it once or twice and make sure it doesn’t coffee stain. And we’re going to call that a day. So, if you look at it super closely, it’s pretty janky. But if you don’t look at it too close, it looks like it was an intentional transition in a blend right there.

And we’ve kept most of our airbrush work intact. So, we’ll let this dry. Uh, see see how bad it is. Okay, it’s dry now. And like it actually it doesn’t look too bad.

I know I could that transition line right there is pretty janky, but I just don’t want to spend time to fix it when I could just paint out one back there and not be mad about it. Let’s stop playing around and get this guy finished. So, you Here’s that side. And now this side. Uh, we definitely need to do a little bit more love to that side to get that fixed, but we’re going to work on everything else and then I’ll come back to that.

So, now I’ve got off-white. And so, this the important thing about this, it doesn’t have to be this is it’s a like a warm a warm toned white. And we just need a little bit. And the reason that we’re using this is because our speed paints are so transparent that we can’t really like use them to highlight. Uh, one is because they’re so transparent it’s not going to come through and they’re also just so liquidy that it’s going to be hard to get the kind of result that we want.

So, uh, it’s going to be important that we have clean water. We don’t want metal flakes in here. made sure my my brush was nice and washed out. So, we’ll go ahead and mix this together. And so, this white, it’s going to keep our warm tone, but also just highlight up too, right?

If we use like a brilliant white or like a straight white, that coldness, like the blue that’s in it would make it look a little weird because this model is pretty warm. So, this is where we’re coming coming to. And you can just see like it’s gonna be very bright. Uh but it’s still warm like the rest of our colors. So I can make sure I like how it looks.

And again, we’re just going to lightly hit our edges, hit our nuts, the top. So, coming back in, I’ve done like all the lower body parts. I did that arm and this arm, and now just coming in on the shield and the the stuff that’s going to be a little bit scarier, but I thought the shield’s like a great way to kind of show the process of edge highlighting. So, see, I’m coming in like I’m using the belly of the brush, the middle of it, and the first couple of passes, you don’t even really see the edge highlight. And I’m just taking my time.

Uh I’m actually taking my time, right? I’m not just saying it this time like I did with the wash. And you just very carefully build it up and you just keep working, right? And like I’m used to doing one color, but if you wanted to do more than one, you see like see really like as we get into that transition having that hard line like that’s what it’s like, oh wow, that’s a nice paint job. But really like we just airbrushed it and then we did we used the belly of our brush to get it on the side.

And like same thing here, like that line going down the middle and on the gauntlets. It really like it just adds so much to it for something that’s so simple. Um, we’re going to hit these other guys right here. Probably need a little bit more paint on my brush. And and like the biggest thing is like the paint will dry on this brush cuz there’s such little paint on it.

So you got to make sure you’re paying attention that you don’t have too much. And that’s really like with this mess on my hand is I’m making sure the paint on my brush isn’t dry. And I’m also making sure that I don’t have too too much on it because if you have too much, you’ll get a fat edge highlight and nobody likes that like I just did right there. Oh my god. All right.

You just use your finger to wipe it off. It’s all good. You can see how much more translucent that is. So, we’re just going to get a little bit on our brush, and then we’re going to just work this up on the helmet here. And again, we’re just starting in a place of shadow and then just pulling the pigment to the top of the head.

And there’s a lot of paint right there, so I just want to wick it off. All right. And let that dry. And then on these ones, we’re going to do the same We want to kind of glaze it just because of how fine our shading is already here because we don’t want to wipe out uh the transition we did from the airbrush work. [snorts] Maybe try to work that out.

I don’t know if we’re going to be able to. Yeah, that’s in there. We might have to add some chipping if we really want to get rid of that. That’s okay. All right.

So, now boom. Uh I feel like I’m missing something here. Can we fix this? because we got a little bit over carried away with our wash. >> That’s how we’ll fix that.

That’s why I keep glazing over it and glazing over it until we get till it looks more like shadow piece shadow style. Um, now we got to do the black. Okay, so I noticed two things. I’m looking at the official art and whatever these are are not on the official art. So, I don’t know what color those are or what they’re supposed to be, but they’re not on the official Toro model.

Um, which is interesting. So, I don’t know. I’ll I’ll leave those for now. I’ll definitely come back and paint them. But a good portion of this black is actually very subtle in how it is highlighted.

So I have pastel blue here. And remember our black is actually Tyrion navy. So it has Whoa. Oh, that’s not supposed to look like that. What’s going on there?

Um, so our our Tyrion our black actually has a good amount of blue mix in it. And I don’t know. I guess my something’s going on with that paint. So, this this is like a grayish color. So, that’s what we’re going to highlight with.

And we’re going to be very careful and very sparing with this because it would be very easy to mess our whole paint job up if we get overzealous with it. So, uh I’m going to check it out. I’m actually I’m going to test it on this foot down here just because I don’t actually know if this is what the right color is going to be uh I had some silver right there. So, it’s kind of a bad judgment, you know. I think that’ll work where the light’s catching.

I mean, Okay, so now these we’re kind of back into like our glaze territory of where we need to glaze this cuz it’s so much. They’re so big. So I just added a bunch of water right here. A little bit more water. Checking the consistency.

Just again checking it here. Let’s get a lot of that off. And what we’re going to do is just be very careful. And that’s actually too bright, I think. And we’ll edge highlight this part carefully.

All right. So, boom. I think we are done. Uh, I think no, we got to do the eyes, but uh, very happy with how he turned out. We got to do the eyes and the base and the sword, but I I don’t know what I’m going to do with the sword yet.

So, I’ll probably wait uh, and do that later with the other Tora once I figure it out. But there we go. Very happy with this one, except for that damn water stain from the wash. Oh, we still got to figure out I I might try to airbrush it again or just like leave it, you know, cuz I got another one to paint perfect. know, and there’s a lot that I’m actually pretty critical of, but uh I just really want to go into this year with the focus of like getting models finished and not letting uh like the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Like that is a perfectly fine and acceptable tabletop model. I think it’s actually probably painted to a pretty high standard. Uh really uh just like when you compared to like Battlefield standard, I think it’s going to look great with all the models on the table and also I have a second Toro to paint. So, I’m definitely going to uh now I know the problem areas to to keep an eye on and watch out for so I don’t make the same mistakes twice. Uh so, uh day two model painted.

Uh need to do the base. Don’t worry about the base. I got to figure out how I’m going to do that. I’ll make a tutorial on just the base. And I’ll also make a tutorial on the sword when I figure out the sword and the eyes.

I don’t know. I think I’m leaning towards pink, but I kind of want to like spend a little bit more time thinking on it before I do the eyes, too. So technically it’s not like done done, but it’s done for now until I revisit it when I paint the rest of the army. So thanks for watching. This is day 112.

I’ll catch you tomorrow. >> To close it out, I’m sitting here at tabletop level and damn that model looks good. So everything that I’m hyper critical of uh for myself, it just doesn’t matter cuz from the tabletop it looks amazing. So >> don’t be too harsh of a judge on yourself. Like it looks great.

Don’t don’t overthink it. Don’t let it stop you from painting is is really what I’ve learned