I play miniatures games. It's an affliction, and I'm well aware of that. It has, however, caused me to learn how to paint...and I like to think that I've gotten pretty good at it. I'm not as good as some -- I know my limits, and most of them are caused by laziness -- but I've finally reached the point of being able to look at some of my work and admit that it looks good. And so, I've scanned a whole bunch of my miniatures and posted them on the pages that follow. Be warned, though: these pages are all very graphics-heavy, so they will normally take a bit of time to fully download. I'll be adjusting the pictures little by little, to reduce this time.
The Gallerys are:
The miniatures on these pages were all painted with acrylic paints. I use two brands -- Fasa's "Partha Paints" and Cel-Vinyl's "Cartoon Colors" -- for about 75% of my painting, with a variety of other brands (Floquil, Apple Barrel, Folk Art, Aleens', Howard Hues, Tamiya, Games Workshop) making up the difference. Finished miniatures are sealed and protected with Testor's "Dull-Cote" for a flat finish, or with their "Model Masters SemiGloss-Cote" for a shinier appearance.
I do not own a digital camera, so all of the miniatures on these pages were scanned by placing them directly atop a flatbed scanner. In some cases (particularly for the Starships) the miniatures were suspended above or at an angle to the flatbed, held in place with a sticky putty.
It takes a bit of work to get the scanned pictures to look right, and here's the proceedure that I follow (using PaintShop Pro to do the work):
1) Place the miniature face down on the bed of the scanner. Cover it over with paper or cloth if you want a light background; if you want dark you don't need to do anything at all.
2) Scan the figure at 500 DPI and 200% magnification.
3) Save the picture as a .jpg.
4) Open it in your graphics editor, and adjust the brightness and contrast until the colors look right. Miniatures typically scan much too dark. Generally, I adjust the contrast by about twice as much as the brightness, but this varies from picture to picture.
5) Run the Sharpen More filter over the picture.
6) Resize it to whatever size feel proper. Just remember that you want it to fit on a normal screen if at all possible.
7) Use the Edge Enhance filter on the picture...which will now look awful.
8) Use the Soften filter, and then run the Sharpen filter over the picture.
9) Save the file at 72 DPI and at compression rate of about 50%.
And that's it. It's pretty simple, too. The most time consuming part of the whole process is removing the background from the pictures...which is why I don't bother to do so any longer.
Feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions or comments.