the gear I trust with your minis

With the Kickstarter due to launch in a week (for those not aware, we’re launching new brushes and you should DEFINITELY check it out HERE) I feel like all I’ve spoken about for ages now are our brushes… and yes, they’re sick…and if we can make a success of this Kickstarter then they’re about to get a bunch sicker… BUT there’s a lot of other elements that go in to making TMS run smoothly as a painting studio and I feel like they deserve a mention.

Gear is a really interesting topic to me, because I’m definitely firmly in that camp of people who think that gear doesn’t make the painter… but at the same time, I think it’s foolish to not think about the pros and cons of our different options. Moreover, I also don’t believe that there are binary right and wrong gear choices here and what you’re not going to hear me do is dunk on things mindlessly, or refer to them as “good and bad”. Rather what I want this article to be about are the reasons I like and dislike things, and where I think you might find value in them.

So without further ado, lets get to it. Let’s talk gear!

Neatfi XL 3500 Lumen Task Lamp

First off, let’s do lamps. I like lamp.

I’m currently using the Neatfi 3500 lumen XL task lamp (HERE) and I’m gonna be honest, I both love and hate this thing.

It’s VERY bright… I think it’s genuinely one of the brightest I’ve ever seen. But it’s also HUGE and it runs extremely hot. Like… hot enough that if I have it too low to my desk, it cooks off the tops of my paint puddles in my wet palette after a few hours.

The colour fidelity on the light is great and it’s a very good lamp from a pure functional perspective. The £170 price tag also makes it feel like great value if the brightness is something you need… but honestly I’d probably replace it if I could find something of equal brightness that kicks out less heat.

I’ve had a Daylight Co Lumi in the past, and found it just underpowered for my tastes… I like to be REALLY lit up, because these old eyes ain’t great. I’ve had a number of generic amazon brand lamps too… and so far this is probably the best I’ve owned.

If I could make peace with the price, I think a Redgrass R9 would probably be my most likely upgrade, but right now it’s a little outside of affordability for me.

Redgrass Studio V2 Wet Palette

Speaking of Redgrass however, now’s probably a good time to talk about the Studio XL V2 wet palette and the interesting story of how I came to rely on one.

So, first of all let me be up front… I did NOT like the V1 wet palette at all. The actual plastic box was just fine, but the papers were hell for me. My painting style is VERY mixing heavy and the papers just couldn’t hold up to being mixed on extensively. They’d shed little bobbles in to my paint and it became a living nightmare having to constantly pick them out of my paint.

The V2, along with its updated papers, is a completely different story though. The papers are thick, but still semi permeable…and they’re washable! Whilst both the palette and papers ARE pricy, the convenience of being able to run the whole setup under the tap and have it totally refreshed and ready to use again is VERY nice and something I now entirely rely on.

The other main thing that sets it apart is that it doesn’t turn into a tropical rainstorm overnight… which literally every single other palette and sponge combo I’ve used always did. When I drop the lid on the Redgrass and come back to work the next morning, the palette is always predictably dryer than when I left it. This means so long as I drop in a little overnight water, I can come in in the morning to paint that’s ready to use… rather than paint that’s practically at glaze consistency!

Yes it’s the same image with a different crop :P

I guess the logical next step to discuss is paints and this will probably be a long one… so I guess strap in?

Okay… so… I’m largely a display painter. My miniatures aren’t meant to be handled frequently or put in dangerous positions for the most part, so with that in mind, I almost entirely work with matte paints, and I don’t use washes or contrast paints often. This is why the vast majority of my work is covered by my tight, curated collection of Ionic paints. Around 50 bottles total does me for almost every situation I am ever likely to find myself in. There’s a few reasons for that.

Firstly I don’t like “painting systems” in the way that they’re largely dosed out. Fixed colour groups with prescribed recipes lead inevitably to samey looking colour renditions and whilst, yes, its less thinky… it’s also less creative and interesting to me. I like to play with my paint. I like to work with paint largely based around value, rather than hue and I mix A LOT. Ionic are very friendly to this approach - the paints go on really nice, they have a slight self levelling effect that’s really useful when working fast. They do all the things I like and none of the things I don’t.

That said, because they’re a fairly matte finish, they’re not the most durable, so I do make a point of also keeping a nice collection of P3 on hand for when I am working on pieces which I know will be handled a lot. I also like to turn to the P3s if I know I’ll be wet blending a lot, because they REALLY like to blend together easily.

Sidebar… does anyone share this peeve with me? I find myself automatically and uncontrollably annoyed by any of the brands that call their analogous sets of three paints “triads”. Triad already means something in art and it isn’t that. Stop it.

For washes and “contrast style” paints, when I do use them, I use AK. I don’t particularly enjoy any of the contrast paints in my processes. They take a lot of control away and leave a look that whilst not unattractive, is very identifiable as “that kinda paint”. I settled on AK largely because they were the last line of these type of paints I experimented with and I ended up owning most of them. The washes on the other hand are a very conscious choice. AK are literally the ONLY brand currently making an acrylic wash that is ACTUALLY matte when dry. Not matte relative to the shininess of other paints… but really flat, dull and lacking in reflection. For my kind of painting, if I’m going to use washes, these are the washes I need. The closest second would be Two Thin Coats, who are also making a wash I really like… just not quite as flat as AK.

I also keep a small collection of Mindworks Heavy Body Acrylics on hand at all times… but these really are only for the display work. They’re VERY transparent compared to normal miniature paints, but they’re WAY more matte than artists acrylic. This makes them incredible for slowly building up careful, deliberate transitions of colour but at the cost of having virtually no durability. You absolutely HAVE to varnish over them regularly, or they’ll come off whilst you’re working. That said, the finish is impeccable and has become a secret weapon in a lot of my display painting.

Nikon Z30 Camera

Another secret weapon that’s worth talking about is camera gear, and this’ll be two separate sections, because stills gear and video gear are very different things. Firstly let’s go over my video setup.

Cropped sensors are FINE for video (in fact a lot of the best cine-cams on the market still use cropped sensors)… you absolutely do not need to buy an all-singing, all-dancing full frame mirrorless camera to shoot good footage. Your encoding equipment will probably trail far behind your camera either way, so the smartest (IMO) thing you can do is buy a solid cropped shooter, with 4K output and a mature, good quality body of available lenses.

Since I don’t do YouTube anymore, I’ve been able to strip my video lens collection right back to just a basic “kit lens” (which for the non-camera-head types is a zoom lens that goes from wide angle to a short portrait length). This is mounted on a Nikon Z30 which is a 24mpx APS-C camera that puts out 4K at 30fps. Why only 30fps? Because I wasn’t willing to spend hundreds on a capture card that does 4K at high frame rate, when YouTube compresses the shit out of video anyway and most people watch it in 1080p. I use an Avermedia USB-C 4K capture card and it does me fine.

Remember however that all I’m shooting these days is top-down only hands tutorial camera work for Patreon. If you want to actually produce nice, sexy YouTube b-roll… you will at least want some better lenses that are sharper than my little kit lens. You might well want a better camera too - just be wary of one trap that a lot of people miss.

MOST camera companies these days release two versions of their budget models. One that they market as budget, and the other that they market as enthusiast, when it’s actually the same camera just with a viewfinder above the screen. In the case of Nikon, the Z30 just has a back screen for framing shots and the Z50 has the viewfinder… but they’re quite literally the same camera. Same sensor, same software etc.

If you’re buying a camera just for video, you won’t use the viewfinder. See if you can save a bob or two by buying a cheaper model with the same specs, but no EVF. Stills on the other hand… that viewfinder will be a BIG consideration.

Canon 5D Mark III

This is my stills camera. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Without me, my stills camera is nothing. Without my stills camera, I am nothing. (bonus points if you get the joke)

This is the Canon EOS 5D Mark III. It’s the best camera I’ve ever owned, despite being a venerable 14 years old at the time I write this. It cost me a little over £300 and yes, for another £150 I could have had on paper a much better camera in the Mark IV, but at the time this was what I could afford, so this was what I bought. I have zero regrets. This camera is the tits.

Before I gush about it… here’s a pic from it.

Seagull friend! Follow my photography Insta!

See when it comes to stills…cameras have been solved for a long time. A single frame of 35mm film has more resolution potential than any digital camera currently on the market, if the scanning technology is there to milk it out of it. That said of course, shooting your minis with a film camera would be a pretty tedious process… especially as a business that needs to put those photos online. You’re going to buy a digital camera, or you’re going to use your phone. I have a whole article on why I don’t like phones and some of the shitter pictures in this very article are phone pics, so I’m not even going to get in to that rabbit hole here.

Basically… if you want the best quality mini pics you want a full frame camera and a prime lens. Resolution is not the answer. It never will be. The 200mpx flagship phone cameras STILL can’t produce as nice a pic as my 14 year old Canon without AI mutilating the image beyond recognition…at which point, who’s taking the photo? You? or the brain in your phone?

A full frame camera is going to give better dynamic range and low light performance, meaning that you don’t need to flood your camera out with bright light to get a clear image and you have WAY more control in the editing process over how much of that light you present in the final photo. A prime lens (that is a lens with no zoom and only one focal length) is going to be sharper than a zoom, which will help with showing off detail.

Now you don’t necessarily need a macro lens for miniature photography… in fact, a macro lens can make minis look kinda weird but if you DO wanna be able to get super close, go for a macro lens with a fairly tight focal length. I use a Tamron 90mm F2.8 macro and whilst officially it can focus from as close as a foot away, in reality I can get clear focus even at 6 inches, so it does a great job for me. Alternatively a 50mm standard prime is a great option and what I was using in the past, since they also usually have a pretty close minimum focal range.

Either way, investing in a good stills camera will do wonders not just for how pretty your miniatures look, but how you perceive them too. In a world where phones oversharpen and mess about with your images, minis often look way rougher than they do in reality…a good camera will fix that.

An actual miniature, shot with my Canon

Now obviously there’s a ton of other bits of gear I use. Small things like nippers, my dremel, sanding tools, glues… hell even my desks, computer setup etc. All of that is essential to my daily work, but I don’t think any of it makes a significant enough difference to be worthy of talking about in this article.

With that said if there’s anything I haven’t spoken about here that you are curious about, his me up in the comments and I’ll gladly chat about it!

I hope this was a fun little insight in to why I choose certain things and what I feel I gain from them. I hope you found it useful and interesting and I look forward to hearing what you think.

Cheers gang!

Stu