Is that FDM or resin? If it's FDM, that's extremely impressive! They're great regardless, a big fan of classic red skeletons, but on FDM that would be a mighty feat.

I'd still say Citadel's contrast paint has a slight edge over Army Painter, even their 2.0 formulation. That said, I actually don't know if I'd say I would recommend Citadel's contrast instead of AP2.0 for newcomers, for a couple of big reasons:

1. Cost - Army Painter is about half the cost. That means twice the amount of paint for the same price, and that means more colours to choose from. For a lot of beginners, the quality of the paint isn't the limiting factor, it's the colour choices. You quickly realize that if you want to paint a variety of different minis, you need a variety of colours, and that adds up pretty fast if you stick with just Citadel.

2. Settling - Contrast is notoriously quick to settle on the bottom of the pot. With some colours it's bad enough that I have to use a stick to stir up the bottom of the pot. If you're painting infrequently as a newcomer, you'll likely experience this every time you paint. No matter what paint you use, you should probably shake your paints, but in the case of Citadel contrast paints, sometimes it's multiple minutes and still no homogenization. Blender balls help, but those are yet another cost barrier to entry, as Army Painter includes those for free inside their paints.

3. Flow - For experienced painters, the flow properties of Citadel contrast is nice, as it allows for wet blending. It's a criticism of AP2.0 that they dry relatively quickly. For newcomers who won't be doing wet blending, this is a benefit you pay for with Citadel's higher price, but don't get to take advantage of. Like buying the highest end graphics card just to play Minecraft, for instance.

4. Pot vs Dropper - This is a subjective thing, but having used both pots like Citadel's, and droppers like Army Painters (for use with palettes), I find the latter to be much easier to use. Citadel pots sometimes don't stay open, close while you're using the paint, and because their "paint lip" can only hold a small amount of paint, you have to refill the lip frequently or dip directly into the pot. You can pour paint out onto a palette, but there is a reason the "spilling nuln oil all over your desk is a right of passage" meme is a thing.

5. Consistency - Citadel contrast colours vary tremendously in their flow properties. Some colours are very watery and thin, and flow like water, and others are thick and viscous and dry slowly. Some contrast significantly into a kind of hue gradient, others contrast straight to black, others contrast barely at all. It's a learning curve for sure, but Army Painter's speed paints are generally all more consistent with one another and have a much more consistent result. The skill ceiling is lower, and the effects you can get are much less pronounced, and thus AP2.0 paints do tend to give a certain "look" that you can't change much, but as a beginner, this is probably preferable.

As for the painting handles, YMMV. I own one, but as other hobbyists will tell you, the handle does restrict the base, which you do usually paint. It's also kind of expensive. Personally, while I have one, I end up sticking to just grabbing a dowel from the hobby store, or any other handle shaped thing, and sticking a bit of blue tack (sticky tack, teacher's tack) on the end and plop the mini that way. You could also use a metal rod and put magnets on the base of your minis as is common, but that's a bit of a higher barrier to entry.

Really, I think your best bet is to buy a basic D&D set of minis, as they're accessible and cheap, and you usually get two or three, and then buy a few individual colours from either company to test how you individually like them. You can always use both, for example, and I find that I still really like to use Citadel's "Skeleton Horde" for all my skeletons, but use AP2.0 for most other things.

Just make sure if you do test out individual paints, that you're getting the AP2.0 formulation specifically, as I'm not sure how widely available the new version is.

I would actually recommend something else entirely! For beginners, one of the best types of paints to ease into the hobby is a type of paint known as a "contrast" or "speed paint". There are a number of brands that have paints like these. The paints are a bit thinner than normal paint, and pool into recesses of the model, creating a natural gradient of shade on the model that simulate highlights and shadow. Citadel is Games Workshop's brand of paints, and they're quite well regarded, but otherwise fairly expensive. For beginners, I'd recommend Army Painter, as they just released a new line of "speed paints" (their contrast paint equivalent) called "2.0" and my personal experience with the line has been very good for the price.

https://www.thearmypainter.com/shop/us/wp8059p

I'd recommend giving at least one Citadel contrast paint a try, just to experience it, but I'd definitely avoid the Reaper stuff as it tends to be very low quality and overpriced for what you get.

You can grab a few miniatures on eBay fairly cheaply, but if you want, I have some models I can send your way free of charge as well, if you'd like something to test your painting skills on, as the Army Painter sets don't include miniatures by default.

Reaper miniatures are a bit rough, and don't lend themselves to beginners due to the age of the sculpts.

I'm not sure if nerdswire.de is exactly a reputable news site. While this is a real article, and a real interview, the original news and interview is from SemiAnalysis .

Honestly, I wasn't impressed by the first round of speed paints, the original formula, because they had a tendency to smear and reactivate. This second round though, I'm very happy with. The 2.0 formula completely fixed the reactivation and slow drying issue, but as a result, the paint dries extremely fast. For 15mm, since you're using much less paint, this does mean that you get little working time and have to be generous with your amount of paint, but very careful in application (so pooling goes where you want it to go).

Compared to contrast paints, which have been my go-to, its hard to pick one over the other. I really like the consistency of the AP 2.0 paints. They flow well, and more importantly, all the paints I've tried flow the same as one another. The paints also dry more consistently, and streak much less. Citadel contrast paints, however, probably have better, well, contrast, and some colors, like skeleton hode, create much more unique color shifts from recesses to highlights; AP2.0 pallid bone or bony matter, for instance, feel more translucent and the colour shift more one-tone.

In general AP2.0 is more translucent though, and it takes multiple coats mucn better, and you need multiple coats more often. As a result, their paints also doesn't separate nearly as bad as Citadel contrast paints, which have a habit of completely separating in only a few days of being unused.

Altogether, I prefer some handful of colors from Citadel and the options for more advanced painting methods and styles, and I prefer a lot of the "just sit down and paint" usability of AP2.0, not to mention the lower cost and color selection. If someone told me to pick only one to suggest to a newcomer that wants a lot of colors to start with, I'd probably recommend the AP2.0 mega or complete set over any Citadel starter packs, but my real recommendation is to experiment with one or two of the AP2.0 paints, and see if your painting style fits the worktime and scale limitations.

If you're a more advanced painter, you'd likely want to use Citadel contrast and more "normal" paints because of how limiting AP2.0 can be, even if the results out of the box are very, very good. Better yet, use both in different circumstances when one works better than the other!

My biggest bother is that the resin base the model has built-in resists sticking to green-stuff, so the seams between the two are fairly large. I'd like to mask it with some flocking of some kind, but I also do generally like clean bases and I tend to paint to a "tabletop ready" standard rather than anything fancy. Or maybe the seams aren't that bad, who knows!

Most miniature painters I know usually go without, at least with 28mm miniatures. I've usually stuck with that scale due to accessibility, it's just way more common, but I've fallen in love with the cost and space savings of 15mm, and the board feels much bigger when you play to boot.

With this scale, and 10mm, I always use a set of magnifying glasses with a light and flip-up lenses. They came with both headband and glasses-like adapters but as I wear glasses, I stick with the headband. They've been honestly one of my best purchases for painting and I even find myself using them with 28mm work as well!

Thank you! I'm still debating how I'd like to base these guys since they're a bit "built up", and they definitely need a dry brushing, but good paints do heavy lifting!

I'm a big Tabletop Simulator / Tabletop Playground guy myself, and it tends to be the easiest way to get a bunch of real-life friends together when we can't actually be together. I tend to like longer form slower paced games that can be played passively, like 4X games; it's just a more fun environment when you just want to chill and chat/play.

For fun competitive games where chatting is secondary to the competitive experience, probably Age of Empires 2!

And I just purchased a domain from them. GoDaddy is not great and while Squarespace is a fine company, no worse than Google at least, more consolidation of domain providers doesn't seem like a good thing.

This is just another side effects of the proliferation of AI generated text that is difficult to distinguish from human generated text. Obviously, SEO optimization has always been an issue, but more now than ever, distinguishing the fluff and nonsense from the valid is a significant challenge. I can only imagine small businesses are going to find it even more difficult to stand out when pumping SEO optimized sites requires only a few clicks. How can you compete when the tools are ubiquitous, easy to use, and available to all and the game values the results of these tools rather than the product or company themselves?

That's a sleepy kitten!

Hey, I recently opened tabletop.place as a go-to non-generalized instance for communities dedicated to stuff like that. There is currently a 3D printed minis community there that may begin to be what you're looking for.