Review: Let’s Paint volume 01 – Lucius Panderwagon at Dragonlaird Gaming Studios

Review: Let’s Paint volume 01 – Lucius Panderwagon

September 5th, 2011 by Jim Davenport

After purchasing Christopher Davidson’s “Let’s Paint! Vol. 01 – Lucius Panderwagon” a couple years ago at Origins, I finally sat down to give the two DVD set a good viewing. I thought it was good enough to review and share with my Dragonlaird Gaming friends.

Overall, I liked the DVDs a lot. Christopher has an easy tone and his off-hand references to Bob Ross seem perfectly in character. He covers a lot of important techniques in the course of painting Reaper Miniatures awkwardly-named Lucius Panderwagon figurine: dry-brushing, painting eyes, blending highlights, painting metallic objects without metallic paints, rich basing, painting wood, painting clothes with many, many layered highlights. It answered a lot of questions I had on how certain techniques were achieved. I would certainly say that the photo of the finished miniature used for the DVD cover does the actual results no justice, but photographing miniatures is notoriously difficult.

The entire lesson is 4.5 hours long as he does layered highlights on the robes, the flesh, the sash, the sword. The beard and staff were dry-brushed. His presentation is pretty good although there were some technical oops when the DVD seemed to skip a couple times. Ideally, it would have been nice see how he was handling the brush and paint more explicitly, although there are limits with a single auto-focus camera capturing the action. The techniques certainly come across with repetition. You definitely have to keep your paints watered or his ten+ highlight layers will blob up the details of the miniature.

While I have no plans of becoming a master painter such as Christopher, I do see some techniques I can adopt to “up my game” somewhat without taking 4 hours for a miniature. If you’re serious about improving your miniatures painting techniques, I would highly recommend this as a good place to start.