"Least favorite thing to paint?" Topic

Artillery limbers and teams.
A huge amount of effort for something that is just a sttaus marker.

Haversacs and other un-necessary items like bottles and other stuff on figures

Paisley-patterned cloth. Fortunately, it is rarely necessary.

I always put off painting buildings too, for fear of boredom.

I hate the four, five, six or more times I finish touching up the gaps in the undercoat…

Horses I find really annoying to paint, especially 15mm, for some reason!!!

At the moment Light Spugs – lovely figures as usual, but there are some bits visible to the eye, but an absolute rear end to try and get a brush to! Not that I've been cursing them on anything, nor bought a new brush specifically to try it with them, oh no! ;-p Still love them though :-)

The interior of my house. What a pain in the butt. Takes hours just to prep a room correctly, paint is expensive, and the previous owners used some funky colors that take multiple coats to kill.

generaly the face, Dosn't mater if it's 15, 28 or 40, just can't get the hang of it

I hate doing the bases, but I'm happy when they come out nicely.

I have lots of stuff waiting to be based, as you can imagine!

GregS

I like painting horses! Especially ones with complex coat patterns like appaloosas and pintos…

I hate painting shaggy things like bears. There are always annoying paint-free crevices that materialise 2 minutes after you have carefully checked the mini over and are SURE it is all done.

And I don't like doing big things that need a lot of assembly, like dragons or vehicles.

But what I hate most of all is undercoating. Dull, dull, dull.

Bystanders, civilians and hordes :-(
Too much variety and no staying power on the field!

And FIW Highlander striped socks!

thomas

KILTS!!!!!

I painted three regiments of Napoleonic highlanders for a friend once, and swore I'd never do it again. One or two guys is fine, but not figure after figure after figure. Add to that the checked stockings and headgear, and I thought I'd lose my mind.

Horses I have always thought to be easy to paint. I use a variant of the late Peter Guilder's mass production system. Once they were primed, he would paint them in large lots by color by using a large brush and slathering on the paint, then rubbing the horses down with a solvent soaked rag to smooth out the paint jobs and remove excess paint. Manes, blazes and tack are then painted on. I attach my riders before I paint, so my process is a little different. But same idea -- use a very large brush and get the entire model painted first, then worry in a few details to make it look right.

wolvesteeth on darn shabraques. hate 'em. never pointy enough and the distance between each goes awry. shabraques in general that is the borders and cyphers grrrr

Flesh tones – I hate painting hands and faces so I try and get them out of the way in one go. I tortured myself once by painting the hands and faces of 70 28mm WWII Germans in one sitting. Then I had to go back and and touch the paint up two or three times. A necessary but thoroughly boring experience. I'll happily paint field grey or olive green uniforms all day though.

Napoleonic uniforms also do my head in, especially since I have Russians (green and white) and Italians (a different green and white, but with a bit of red too).

Wheels (cannon wheels, chariot, etc); you have to paint one side, and then wait for it to dry, and then paint the other side…I hate that!

I used to dislike white straps a lot more, but now I see them more as a mandatory nuisance than anything else.

I still hate the yellow & black braids on Austrian hussars though!

Human skin. Especially of Mediterraneans, Middle-Easterners, Indians, Chinese, Mesoamericans, or anyone else who isn't Norwegian or Congolese, which seems to be the only skin tones paint manufacturers believe in.

Having a 28mm napoleonic Prussian army, 15mm acw and 20mm WW2 Russian army it has to be blanket rolls. I hate them! A curse on them!!

Horses in any scale. Happily, pre-contact America has saved me.

I can pretty much paint anything but 20mm figures. God i hate paiting them!!!!!! I guess that why most of my games involve good old fashioned tank smash ups……

Tanks. I game WWII in 10mm; love infantry and horses. I just can't seem to get the hang of Tanks. I get everything I can in pre-paints.

Blue – as it seems one of the hardest colours to get right – too bright, too glossy, too "electric" etc etc.

And white straps

And piping

And yellow shako bands – because it has to be done twice – in white, then in yellow (so back to white straps there…)

I acutaly like painting straps, even white ones,

mabye it's because I do them last, so when I start on them i know i'm almost finished

Horses bore me to no end. I have to paint 40 of them and horse holders for some of my 25mm ACW cav. I sit down each night fully prepared to delve in but I just cant find the motivation. Its not that they are hard to paint, they are just so darn tedious!

Armies

I am a moderately decent painter and I can produce some ok individual figures or a small group, but more than a handful kinda kill the fun for me.

Yeah, I only paint one unit at a time, even if I have a dozen units that will be just alike.

A discussion we had on another thread a while back on the subject of how to paint horses might help some of those who find it a problem. Here's a link to it:
TMP link

Backpacks and such. I like to paint any kind of uniforms but i really hate to paint the backpacks, flasks, bags, ammo puches, ropes and all the kind of stuff a soldier normally carries apart from his weapon.

Very time consuming…love to paint ww2 soviet infantry. They carry almost nothing :D

…Norwegian or Congolese, which seems to be the only skin tones paint manufacturers believe in.

But have you ever met anyone, of any nationality, with skin the colour of Citadel Dark Flesh? I haven't. (It's a dark reddish-brown, in case you don't know it.)

On the other hand, Citadel flesh wash is great for turning a whole range of Vallejo light browns into skin tones for the Middle East, North Africa and Asia.

Horses
Faces
Artillery train

Not necessarily in that order or at that speed.

It's got to be Samurai. I paint professionally and charge £10.00 GBP a figure for 28mm Samurai, mostly to put people off but also I worked out the amount of time it took to paint multi-coloured lacing on lacquered armour.
Then someone comes along wanting the back banners as well, all for the same price as a normal, pleasantly uniformed figure. Get lost!

Horses

Ancient Gauls

Ancient Gauls on Horses are the worst of the lot.

I can paint vehicles until I'm blue in the face though, I usually paint on all the tactical markings, formation signs, bridging numbers etc as well.

The rubber on wheels, especially the thinner rims on tank road wheels. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
--
Tim

horses and the wifes kitchen………..

I don't do faces (15mm); just a dab of flesh color, maybe a mustache.

Horses and most drummers

I don't mind horses but can't stand horse barding and saddlery, dull dull dull

Buttons. Getting the little emblems on them right is a pain. But on the bright side they don't always have to be level.

Next would be fingernails, but that has more to do with how difficult it is to find research on fingernail length.

Most fingers are overscale anyway, just like the weapons they are grasping in their big, fat fingers.

I'd forgotten about rubber rimmed tank wheels, argggh.

Well, I've got some 6mm Austrian flags to paint tonight – the Madonna and Child is always a bit of a challenge. Thank goodness for lining pens!

Re rubber-rimmed tank wheels: just cover them with mud/dust!

Dappled grey horses! Definitely the worst. Yet for some reason the most common cavalry regiment for wargamers to own is the Scots Greys!

Regarding highlander's diced hose: use a Technical pen with red ink. Much easier.

I have found a new hate thing.

White pants, I think it's the paint i'm using

but to get white pants that looke like white pants and not thin white paint over black primer, I need like 5-10 coats before it covers the prime.

I spent like 2 hours just repainting and repainting 5 Frenchmen before it looked ok

It's your paint.

Define "technical pen," please. I've been wondering if there isn't some kind of pen I could use for drawing fine lines, like the shadows under cross-belts.

25/28mm horses,overalls/gaitered trousers on AWI figures,and American Indians! I just can't paint native flesh! Oh,and AWI gun carriages!

Bob

donlowry, I have used a pen like that before. It is kind of like a sharpie but has a much finer tip. I used them to make lines on Gundam Models. Very effective!

But have you ever met anyone, of any nationality, with skin the colour of Citadel Dark Flesh? I haven't. (It's a dark reddish-brown, in case you don't know it.)

I always assumed it was meant for Chaos mutants or something like that.

Generals for my own armies, I'm never satisfied with the results, I usually repaint them so many times the detail start to disappear! Now I just have somebody paint them for me. Talk about being quirky!!!

ghost02: where does one get such a pen?

Faces, especially in 25mm. I'm a good "technical" painter – I can work up beautiful tanks or airplanes or uniforms, but faces are tough for me. I can do a respectable face in 15mm, because it doesn't require too much detail – but at 25mm I can never get faces to look quite right.

I've painted a lot of Medievals just so I can paint knights with fully-enclosed helmets and thus avoid painting faces.

Wow, I get to start a new page, on my first day back on TMP.

I dislike painting anything not uniform. My favorite thing to paint are religious Military Orders, because they are all alike.