Kung-Fu Painting

       This has been my hobby for almost 40 very rewarding years, and no part of it has been more rewarding than inspiring other people to enjoy every aspect of this hobby, being painting, sculpting, building or even just running games in general.      One of the best ways that I have contributed to the hobby is the Miniature Noob Network.      Created by a bunch of like minded people we started with two groups on Facebook: Miniature Painting Noobs and Miniatures Sculpting Noobs(links below) We started this perhaps 5 or 6 years ago now and at the time of writing the Painting group has well over 30k in membership! (I found a post from July 2020 that says the group had 7000 members, so a lot of growth during the pandemic)     The really exciting thing is creating a place where people of all skill levels feel comfortable posting their work, and then watching it grow from a small handful of your friends to, frankly, a monster you c...

 A little about me.      I have been painting and playing with 25-28mm toy soldiers since the early 80s. My father was into the hobby(still is sort of) and as a child he a great collection of Ral Partha Colonials which really set my imagination on fire like nothing else, at least until I discovered 40K. I grew up playing with minis by companies like Heritage, Ral Partha, Grenadier, Frontier, Falcon, Hincfliffe and many others besides.      Around 9 years old I painted my first minis, I still have them too. They were King Arthur and Sir Mordred from Heritage. Wonky clunky old sculpts from the early years, and as you can see, I never really finished them.  I got more paint on me than the minis and I remember my mother being less than thrilled about this.    These were my first steps into a hobby that has brought me great joy for the last, almost 40 years now. In that time I have had many different painting styles, made a lot of mistakes an...

 Kung Fu painting? Kung Fu painting? What the heck is that, and how does that work? Are you kicking the paints onto the miniatures? Well, no, not exactly. Lets start with the word Kung-Fu, or more correctly Gong-Fu.  You likely know Kung Fu from the movies, with Shaolin monks flying around on wires spin kicking Manchu soldiers, but that is only one type of Kung-Fu. We really need to expand your definition of the term, so let’s start there. These days you hear this term Gong-fu mostly associated with Chinese tea ceremonies (google it!)  Traditionally the word Gong-Fu means any practice, discipline or activity that you engage in that requires time, patience, and energy to complete. When you take the two parts of the word, Kung-Fu, the Kung/Gong part can be translated to hard training, or skillful work and Fu means spent time. Time spent on hard or skillful work! These days you hear this term Gong-fu mostly associated with Chinese tea ceremonies. This is essentially a ver...