At Adepticon, I leveled up so much as a painter. I put skill points into weathering, glazing, and freehand. I'm looking forward to using these new techniques. I certainly have no shortage of miniatures to try them on either.
The first class I took was the freehand seminar with Jessica Rich. She gave us a mini with a cloak said we were going to paint fleur de lis on it. I was skeptical but the result was spectacular. Here's how mine came out:
I'm really proud of it. I made them a little too close together but the effect still works because I managed to space them evenly. It looked a little fake when I first finished, two quick glazing coats later it looked brilliant.
She broke it down for us into little steps and it made an otherwise complicated image surprisingly easy to do. A great way to kick off the con, this was my first event.
The second class I took was a weathering class with Todd Swanson. This one was a blast, too. We started with just a foot, basically, and he showed us how to shade it effectively, and then added rust on top. He gave a us a great set of handouts, too.
Eventually, my foot ended up looking like this:
I was a little floored by how well he came out, considering it was all new stuff and we didn't have a whole lot of time. I definitely spent the most time trying to blend the highlights and shadows into the thing. After that, the rust effects were devilishly simple to do.
Later, I took two different classes about competition painting, one geared toward getting the best army score taught by Caleb Wissenback and the second was about painting competitions by Kirill Zhilkov.
Caleb showed us James Wappel's fantastic Lizardmen army, and using some interesting placement techniques, helped us see how something as simple as how you present your models on the display board can make a huge impact on your score. He even took a look at my Space Wolves and gave me some tips on them, so no more getting a 30 paint score at the NOVA Open for me!
Kirill's class had some very similar points, but was all geared toward entering competitions. He had some fantastic advice about sketching out your concept and considering what you want to go for before actually starting to work. It actually made me feel a little bad for not finishing my Crystal Brush entry, because I think I could have gotten a lot of constructive feedback.
The last class I took was on Sunday, a glazing class taught by Rhonda Bender. We go a lovely Dark Sword miniature to work on, but I actually brought a mini with me that was mostly finished so I could concentrate just on the glazing and not worry about painting up the base colors and highlight first.
I was able to master the consistency, getting the right paint to water ratio. That was clearly my problem when trying this on my own, I was going just too thin. It make it difficult for me to see any results without lots of layers.With a better ratio, I did a nice colorshift on a tabard from tan to pink.
All in all, I highly, highly recommend taking any of these classes if you get a chance in the future. I'm a little tempted to skip games entirely and just go full tilt into painting classes at the next con I attend.