Style

My friend Henry got chatting to me today. He's nearly exactly 10 years younger than me, and is very much a different generation of Warhammerer. He's got a lovely painting style, nice tone, and a really delicate technique. Its all about the airbrush and the top notch inks. His comments about my technique often revolve around "you have a lot of patience". But truth be told, I'm a bit of a dinosaur.
It seems a lot has happened in my 15 years away from the hobby. The new miniatures are so good, perhaps almost good enough to justify the price! And a lot of ideas have clearly bounced around the internet, something we didn't have back in the day. Back when I last played, my painting tips were gleaned from the pages of White Dwarf and my local hobby store - the sadly now defunct Fun Fact and Fantasy. I'd never heard of airbrushing being used on miniatures, and heat guns to dry the paint? Where have you been all my life?
It seems my style of painting is very much upside down to the current vogue. I do my nice clean base coat of colour - several very thin coats to get a really smooth finish - and then get nice and dark with an appropriate ink. From there its about bringing the tone up to a high contrast, I lazily call it highlighting, but its more accurate to call it Defining. I don't really think about a light source, I'm trying to define the shapes with a view to making an illusion with the scale - trying to make a small miniature look big. The result is quite cartoonish I think.