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Read Me First: This got really long. Keep reading if you want a searchable image gallery of all of your minis. It will seem complicated because I took a lot of screenshots, but I learned everything here in 1 day. If you jump to the end there is a summary of everything WPAA+ will let you do. If you are like me you may have started off being able to keep track of all the minis you owned in your head, but it probably didn't take too long before you needed some help. Enter the spreadsheet. This worked for awhile, but after years of retail purchases, Kickstarters, and Patreons, trying to cross reference everything became nearly impossible. Do you have a female dual wielding ranger for the game next week, or don't you? And if you did where did you put her... What I'm about to go through won't help with the boxes in your closet but it will at least give you a visual way to see what you own. Even if you can't find it. The plan is to make things easy and free. Now when you think of a web page you likely think of something that is hosted on a server somewhere. And while this is true, it would be crazy to edit a page live and break it while customers are using it. As such there are offline tools to create, experiment, and learn what you are doing. We will be using one of these to create our inventory. Could you make this live and show the world your collection? After all is said and done you could if you want. So first things first, we need to be able to run our offline page. There are a couple of free options. XAMPP will make you feel like an IT guy. It straight up warns you that it has no security and is only for offline development. Unfortunately it conflicted with my PCs raid software. On to option 2. Local is designed specifically to run offline WP sites and should be straightforward for novice users. It had the same conflict for me, but has a built in workaround. Download and install Local, sign up if you want or not, and run it. You will get a screen that looks like this, minus the tutorial. That was something I made to learn what I was doing. In the lower left corner is a plus to "Add Local Site." Create a new site. Name it whatever you want. I expanded the advanced options, but you don't need to touch those. Accept preferred. Go with whatever you want. Just remember it since you will need it to log into your offline site. And done. You could "Open site" but there won't be much there yet. Instead go for "WP Admin." At some point around here it should automatically install Wordpress. After logging in it will take you to the dashboard. Basic WP is basic. Of course by now, someone has made a plugin to do exactly what we want. The trick locating a free one. Select Plugins and "Add New". Search for "wp photo album plus", install and activate it. There it is. You may need to refresh your screen, but "Photo Album" should appear at the bottom of the list on the lower left hand side as well as above. Now we need to change a few settings. Feel free to play around if you want. I'll be going from left to right on the Basic settings. First, under layout, increase the thumbnail font size. I went with 15, but YMMV. Eventually I'll be using "Photo of the day". I increased the frequency so I get a new photo every time I visit the page. For the thumbnails I find 100 pixels to be a little on the small side. Feel free to do whatever, but I doubled everything. Too small can't see/too big can't see many images at once. Here are the search settings. We can't do much yet since there is nothing to search, but at least make sure "include tags" is ticked. Before we upload any images, we need somewhere to put them. Under Album Admin "Add New." I created "Reaper Miniatures" and can now upload photos to it. You'll have some limits shown on how much you can upload at once. After uploading them you can "Moderate" them. First make sure the image has a proper name. Then this is where the magic happens. Whatever tags you add can be used later to search for them. Add as many as seem useful. In the example below I have an SKU as a tag, but later realized it would be better in the description. At first you will have to type in all your tags, but if you navigate away and come back they will be added to the drop down menu. Afterwords you can just select the old ones, though you'll have to keep adding new ones as they come up. I tagged 12 Reaper Minis I own and then created another album for Dark Sword so we would have two to work with. Now that we have a couple of albums we need somewhere to put them and a way to search them. WP runs on themes, which can be found under "Appearance". It comes with three but there are literally thousands to chose from. Of course, most of them you have to pay for if you want them to actually be useful. For now we will use "Twenty Twenty-One" as our demo since everyone will have it. If it is not active hover over it and select "Activate". Next go to "Pages". You will see two default pages. Feel free to delete them then "Add New". You will see something like this. It needs a name so we can keep track of it. Hit "Publish" twice to active the page. Repeat a few more times and we now have Home, Dark Sword, Reaper, and The Eagle. The WPAA+ search function says it wants a landing page so that is what the last one is for. Now that you have some pages you can create a menu if you want. The option is found under "Appearances". Unfortunately it appears nice menus is something developers use to get you to upgrade to paid themes. I won't be making use of them. And there it is. By the time I'm done my menu will reach down to the floor. Before we set up any searches let's designate our landing page. "Edit" it. In the upper left hand corner of the WP edit screen is a blue plus. It will open a sidebar with all of your widgets in it. There they are. An an example I have placed a button on the page, though it isn't really necessary. The WPAA+ results will have navigation built in. Look around until you find the "shortcode" widget. It allows for simple commands without the possibility of inserting malicious code. In this case we are just pasting what WPAA+ says should be used to designate it's landing page. Just cut and paste [wppa type="landing"] Now that we have a landing screen we can go back to the WPAA+ options and set it. Once again, make sure tags are searchable. We have made a couple of galleries but they need some place to live. Edit the Reaper tab and go alllll the way down on the widget menu to find "WPAA Gallery" Here are the options I used. If you now "Preview" the page you can see what it looks like. Really narrow, but that is due to the theme. You can see each image displays its name and the SKU I put in the description. The "Delete" option you can make go away back in the WPAA+ options. You will see it's gone later. To our home screen! You can see there is a basic search option, but we don't want to chose that one. We will be using the WPAA one. Here you see the default search bar is still here (don't install) as well as the WPAA search bar. I'll show the options for that in a second, but first add three columns below it. There is a bit of a jump here because GIMP crashed and I lost some screenshots. In the first column I placed the "Pages" widget so I have a list of all my pages (rather than using the menu), in the center I inserted the shortcode for the WPAA Picture of the day - [wppa type="mphoto" photo="#potd" size="0.5" align="center"], and in the left column I inserted the WPAA tagcloud. For both WPAA Search and WPAA tagcloud the first step is to add a WPAA gallery just like we did before. Then you need to select "A search/selection box" as shown below. Then for a search box select "A search box" or for a tagcloud select "A tagcloud box." For search you can set the landing page again, though we have already designated it. Now let's take a look in preview! We have a search, a page list, a tagcloud, and a photo of the day. This theme doesn't look very good though, so let's work on that. Go to Appearance - Themes. Since we're keeping this simple and free let's add "Hello Elementor" to see how that changes things. Go to Appearances and "Add New" theme. (Elementor is a Free/Paid step up from the basic WP editor. Hello is their super basic intro page). Activate it. Now that "Hello" is active we can "Customize" it. In the preview you can see how the page we built looks different with the new theme. It is wider and whiter. Now if you clicked "Home" at any point on one of the albums, you may have noticed you ended up somewhere strange. This is because WP defaults to taking you back to your most recent post. We want to change that. Go to "Homepage Settings." and set the homepage to "Home". Now you will always come back to the page you see below. OK, we've built it and we know we can browse it, so let's try searching it. First search, "Male". This brings up every image that I have tagged as "male". We see their name (you did give your pic a good name didn't you), description (SKU), manufacturer (because that's how I named their album), and what they look like. But I can already do that using the tagcloud. Let's try something more specific, "male monster" Here are all the images I tagged with both male and monster. At this point you have a functional offline website. If you go back to Local, you can now select "Open site" to go directly to your site. And there you have it. We now have the ability to: Use the page list to visually browse by manufacturer. Use the tagcloud to search by a single tag, i.e "archer" or "bugbear" Use search to narrow it down even further using multiple tags. Obviously at this point you can play around to make it look nicer, install different themes, upgrade the editor, hide the page names, etc, but your WPAA+ based organization is underway.

Hello and welcome to the Repository of Paint Arcana! After all this time being here on the forums, I've come across a lot of excellent tips and innovative methods for using paints, and I've been trying to collect what I can for my own use. I thought that it might be a good idea if we all had a central thread where we can post all the interesting things that we've come across. While the majority of posts would certainly be about Reaper paints, I welcome suggestions about any kind that you have. Know a paint that would be a great base for a certain colour? Post in this thread. Know a mix that makes a really vibrant hue? Put 'er right here, pardner. Got a link that shows steps to make a great effect? That's right, you know where it goes. I know that every one of you has something cool that you've come across, and I would urge to to put it here. 09124 Adamantium Black: If you use this to highlight a black basecoat, it serves well to make things look like a beetle carapace. Tamiya X-27 Clear Red + UHU Glue= Bloody gore Also, A nice little tip from our illustrious @Mad Jack: These are just examples but feel free to give the community any great tips that you have!

Hi all, First time posting and first time painter. Just started painting recently, and while I'm waiting for my Reaper and KD:M minis to get here, I'm practicing on my The Others: 7 Sins ones. I've only painted 5 minis up until now (3 Age of Sigmar starters and 2 The Others), and have noticed the following difficulties: - proper placement of highlights - proper amount and placement of edge/extreme highlights - proper way of applying dry brush. Any tips are welcome. I'm using deerfoot (?) brushes for dry brushing, because regular ones were too flexible, and rhe other cheap ones I have are too rigid. Link to minis: https://goo.gl/photos/Arkd9kVm9XYeNrEF9

So hear is a loaded cannon for every one; How do you paint fabric to make it look realistic. I personally tend to build up many layers of highlights and shadows and that how I do fabric, I may free hand a designee on but that really about it. I've notice wile going threw some of last years winners for reaper con that some of the fabric was painted in a almost stippled effect and it look more like a hand stitched/hand made dress or tabard. I have been trying to replicate this with no avail what so ever and going back threw old work I seem to have gotten something close back when I was learning to paint and I have no idea what I did to get that textured look. Any advice out there on how to get this look?

I've been painting for a little under a month now, and just wondering what you guys think I could do to improve! Sorry about picture quality, all I have is my phone at the moment.

Hi Everyone! I'm wondering if one can achieve a reasonable blonde from the Chestnut Gold through Buckskin Pale triad. This is the most yellow/brown paint I have and from what I was able to discern from Google...blonde needs an undertone of brown...so yeah...will this work?

Hello everybody! Some time ago I asked on a suggestion for placing a thread about alternatives to many materials that you modellers in the "first world" use and take for granted, but are more difficult to find when you are away (and shipping ends up being more expensive than the material itself). It was suggested this subforum, so here it is where I am posting. But I intend to make it even more than a simple "materials alternative" thread. As I thought about placing it in the WIP subforum, I realised... all these tips and stuff are very intimately related to one particular Work In Progress: myself, as a miniature painter/modeller. So, I cannot warranty entertaining posts, but at least a dumping place for a lot of stuff I came to realise, mostly on my own, and that can perhaps stir in you, fellow hobbist (hobbier? urgh), an urge to try something, if you haven't already. First, a word of caution: my native tongue is Spanish. In many ways Spanish, as a language, is more twisty and flowery. Please forgive me if my English, other than being grammatically wrong at places, is also full of twisting sentences. Sometimes language is more a rhyme than a simple statement; if you don't understand something I say, please, speak up and let me clarify. To start, allow me to -briefly- describe myself. I am Argentinian (Argentina is a south-american country waaaaay to the south, reaching into the South Pole area lengthwise), 32 years of age, married, one daughter, and a degree in Aeronautical Engineering. I work in an airline, corporate official, which allows me to browse the web when the job is "slow". I love airplanes mostly because of their grace, of their aesthetic glory. That some fascination comes with certain forms of art; and since I could never draw well some time ago (about 10 years ago or more) I did some miniature painting (stemming out of my RPG hobby; I've been deeply involved in that for about 15 years). I was never that good, but I loved to learn about techniques and trying to apply them. I converted every Space Marine I was about to paint (and that is the reason I never had more than a dozen of them painted). I painted alone, for I could never find a group to paint with, to learn and share ideas. But of course Internet is there to teach us, in a way. This is the first community I actually post to because it is so nice, and so full of people not only willing to teach, but also willing to learn. And I find that is when you do not fear to give your opinion of something you learn the most, out of your own suggestion, and out of other people's. So, sorry for the lengthy intro, and soon I will be posting about alternate materials, and things I find valuable in this modelling hobby. It goes as a given, but anyone that feels like sharing, please do. Take over the thread if you want, the more stuff for thought/experimentation, the better!

I discovered yesterday that Simple Green works amazingly well to remove the oil/grease/mold release agent/whatever it is that is on resin miniatures/bases/parts. I dipped an old toothbrush in some undiluted SG, and scrubbed for maybe 30 secs, and the piece came out nice and clean, ready for primer/paint. I am doing an experiment to see if diluted (with water) SG will work as well. Results in a few days.

Hey guys! So, I'm 100% new to the mini scene, and finally getting into it after I've wanted to for so long. I, probably very stupidly, went to Games Workshop and bought a Galadhrim Warriors set from the LOTR series, and a couple paints to get myself started. The problem is they are insanely expensive and I know I can find cheaper stuff and even better quality. I'm on a college budget and would love to know where I can find a really good starter paint set with good brushes and paints that will last. Does anyone have any suggestions? And any other tips or advice you have for me as a newbie please let me know! I've already painted like 4 of my minis (Very horribly), so I may post them later.

Hello, If you could send a letter to yourself at the time that you took up painting miniatures what would be the three advices/tips that you would give him/her?

Hi, I'm planning on painting one of my Bones II dragons as a white dragon. I'm thinking of using Factory White and some Snow Shadow for the underbelly and wing webbings. Anyone have any tips for painting white. I guess my big questions are, Should I undercoat the white? What color should i use as a wash? Should I wash it? Any tips would be much appreciated.

I'm kicking off my 5e game tomorrow night *joy!* set in my own home brew world. Starting in a city tavern (city is based on attack on Titan city) and then leading into the first "dungeon" of the lost minis of phandelver. I've asked them nicely for the first couple of session if they could bite my adventure hooks and once we have a firm grasp on the rules it will be a free for all in the city (and beyond) I've got a bunch of stuff prepped like 5 different weapon brands and a few things like that. Is there any last minute tips you would recommend me prepping or anything? I have run 3 campaigns (all 4e) and I'm pretty good off the cuff but I want this one to truly be something special (as I like the system a lot and want my players to be *wowed*)

Hello great and wise painters, I hope I can have a moment of your time for some advice on Paints. About a year ago I got quite some bones from the first Kickstarter for tabletop playing. They arrived a little while ago and now I would like to paint them as well but I am new to the painting scene. Currently I am in the process of picking what paint I want to use. Unfortunately the local game store mainly got GW paints and some of the Vallejo paints but no Reaper paints. So I'll be getting my paints directly from Reaper. For my initial paint selection I want about 30 paints but I have no clue which ones I will be using often, I think I saw a list somewhere but I can not find it any more. So can any one point me to this list or advice me on what paints I should get to get me started. Thanks in advance!

Hello everyone, my brother and I have recently decided to pick up miniature painting for our Pathfinder games so we have a little more control over what our characters look like. I currently have 3 miniatures being shipped and we are also waiting for the LTPK to arrive as well. Definitely looking forward to learning the art and I've been watching videos and reading the pinned topics at the top of this page to get an idea of what to do in terms of painting. Now I have decided to post here to ask the more experienced (and by that I mean you have actually put paint to miniature unlike myself :P) what are some things you wished you had known or done before you started your first miniature. Maybe some tips or products that you didn't think about being useful then, but now you couldn't do without. Even some paints (or paint brands you might recomend to buy or stay far away from) that are really important to have in a collection (I already know about browns being useful for the obvious reason of skin and what not) Any tips or help would be greatly appreciative and I'm definitely looking forward to getting into this hobby.

Is there a list of things to be aware of when prepping and paintinig bones that you might not come up with paintin a metal mini? Apparently... -Cleaning them is more important than with a metal mini -They don't require primer -most files won't work for getting the mold lines out. Are these right? Anything else to be aware of?

I've been painting a little while and have a few metallic paints, both Reaper and GW. Any way, I was blown away by the miniature pictured next to Julie Guthrie's shark greens. Specifically, the miniature's helmet looks so shiny you could shave in the reflection. These photos inspired me to experiment with media and varnish. I came up with a medium that is 2 parts Liquitex Gloss Medium, 1 part Winsor and Newton Flow Improver and 1 part water. This I mixed 1 for 1 with my metallic paints. Then I experimented with various varnishes and found Liquitex Hi-Gloss Varnish to be pretty nice. Still, I doubt I'll get anything as shiny as the mini in those photos. Any suggestions? Also, does anyone know if that was that one of Julie's figs next to the sharks, or did somebody else paint the knight in question? I've reposted the photo here for ease of reference.