Assembling and Painting a Giant Gor

As I've mentioned in another article, TMP is recruiting some of the world's best painters to assist with our Hundred Kingdoms Simian Army.

Our latest accomplice is Joseph Wiedeman of Mini-Dragon, whose painting service offers "outstanding painting at affordable rates." He sends along this introduction:

When I first signed up with The Miniatures Page, one of the coolest things I saw was the Workbench stuff. I really liked the idea of people painting something up and going into detail about what they were thinking and how they went about their painting. I was quite happy to get the chance to take part in one of these articles myself!

So who am I? My name is Joe Wiedeman and I live and work in Cincinnati, Ohio. As far as painting miniatures go, I've been at it for about 17 years now, though I've only been very serious about it for the past 3 years. Within the past couple of years, I realized a couple of long-held dreams of mine. First, I got the chance to do freelance painting for a miniatures manufacturer (Iron Wind Metals) and second, I won a Golden Demon award (Games Day Chicago 2002).

Those things aside, I've operated a successful miniatures painting service for the past 3 years - this has given me the opportunity to paint all sorts of figures from genres and scales I might otherwise have never looked at.

About my painting...

In general, I tend to use a somewhat natural style, without super-loud colors, odd color combinations, or artificially high contrast from heavy black lining. I prefer fantasy miniatures to other genres as I feel they have the widest variety...and I just like 'em better.

I tend to use metallic paints when representing metals, though I'm pretty adept at doing NMM and SE-NMM (Non Metallic Metals and Sky-Earth Non Metallic Metals respectively). I feel those two techniques have their place and look good when well executed. For myself, I mix NMM and metallic on the same miniature freely, just going with my gut on what might look good. I use 'Partha Paints and Iron Wind Metals paints almost exclusively these days, except for a few GW colors that I haven't found a suitable replacement for yet.

Below you can see my workbench (I've put in some labels to show where some things are). I try to keep my bench orderly, but I'm sometimes lazy about it and the cats don't help things either!

So there you have it, me and my painting in a nutshell. The next thing you here about from me should be my initial thoughts on the figure it is to be my privilege to paint!

Peace!

Oh wait, one last thing...it may induce nightmares, but here’s a picture of me.

Joe will be assembling and painting the Giant Gor, the largest model in our Simian Army.