Wow, thanks for all the positive feedback guys, I'm seriously humbled! There are some seriously talented painters in the TMP membership base, I can only hope to try to come close to achieving some of the amazing things I've seen on here!
I think one of the things that painting again reminded me of is the idea of diminishing returns in painting.
The camera has absolutely no mercy when it comes to miniatures. You zoom in on the Flickr photos and the miniature's detail just breaks down, it becomes pretty clunky and blocky.
But if you look at this regiment at tabletop height, or even from a foot away or so, the contrasts of the colors and highlighting and shading are all perceived collectively by your eyes.
I'm a fairly neat painter, but my hands shakes a lot so I kind of compromise with myself and decided that hey, I'll do the neatest job I can with what I've got and not obsess over it! The other thing is that with miniature dwarves or with halflings, or goblins – they are the hardest of all the fantasy races to paint because they are so darn small! It's hard to find enough surface area to drybrush without interfering with other areas of the model. For many components, you can really only do one basecoat and one highlight.
I found that doing more than that really didn't make a difference in terms of how it looked at tabletop height.
Another interesting thing is that if you look at this type of painting job compared with like something you see in White Dwarf or a GW army book and all the eye candy they produce, at tabletop height the differences in the level of painting begin to lessen. LOOK, I'm not saying that I'm a White Dwarf-caliber painter! BUT, it does show that even GW's level of painting breaks down if you get close enough to it.
One final thing I thought was interesting. If you look at the purple cloaks, those were done with one of the Foundry purple triage sets. I did a classic shade, base, and light exactly using the Foundry technique. If you look at the cloaks from about a foot away, they look like pretty nicely blended shades of purple with the recesses darkened and gradually coming out to the brightest part of the folds of the cloth.
But, if you zoom in on those, you can see that even the Foundry system begins to look clunky up close. The Foundry system is really about the illusion of blending and transition. You don't have to do it perfectly for the effect to work!
