Miniature Painting Made Easy - Hardcover books

November progress report
7 months ago – Fri, Nov 28, 2025 at 09:16:04 AM

Hello everyone!

The last two months have been really productive for the progress of the project, and I'd like to share with you where we are standing at the moment and what to expect moving forward. Not everything is going as well as I expected, but overall I've made a lot of progress. Let's get into it.

Refunds

I believe I've already mentioned this a number of times, but I ought to write it as plainly as possible: at this stage of the project, I can't issue refunds. I have already committed the vast majority of it to paying artists, campaign ads, Kickstarter fees, and other project expenses, and the remaining funds are 100% reserved for the printing and logistics of the physical books. Issuing any refunds at this stage would risk the financial feasibility of the printing and that is something I simply can't and won't do.

Now on to the actual progress, on a simplified format that I hope will be easier to understand than before.

Volume 1

Done: Theory, 12/12 tutorials

WIP: Basing, brush and airbrush techniques.

Missing:  final review + integration (index, foreword)

The painter is working on the three missing chapters and expects to have all the text ready for me to edit and review next week. That will leave us with layout and maybe some additional photos to illustrate some techniques missing, in any case very close to the finish line. However, this has suffered a number of delays by now so I can't really promise anything until I have received all the materials.

Volume 2

• Done: 21/24 tutorials
• WIP: layout for 3 tutorials (photos and text editing 100% ready), small formatting details of 21 tutorials
• Missing: final review +integration (index, foreword)

I sent Adrián, the graphic designer I hired, all the text and photos to complete the layout of the missing tutorials and the details of the other 21. I expect this to be finished between next week and the week after that. This should have been completed earlier, as a matter of fact I was waiting for the delivery before publishing the update, but he's unfortunately suffered some problems with prior commitments from before I hired him so I've had to wait for him to be done, he will be able to dedicate a lot more time to our books starting next week.

Volume 3

• Done: 5/24 tutorials
• WIP: layout for 5 tutorials (photos and text 100% ready), layout and text editing for 7 tutorials (photos 100% ready), text editing for two short theory chapters
• Missing: layout, photos and text editing for 7 tutorials; final review +integration (index, foreword)

Just as above, Adrián has the text and photos for the 5 WIP tutorials, he will work on those immediately after he's done with volume 2. Given my past experience with him doing the layout for Volume 1 tutorials, this should go fairly quickly. Out of everything else, I'm only worried about 4 specific tutorials which will be tricky to edit, everything else should be relatively straightforward for me to edit.

Overall progress in numbers (tutorials only*)

• Text editing: 77%
• Photo editing: 77%
• Layout: 63%

While that 63% may feel a little bleak, I am confident this will advance a lot faster now thanks to the work of Adrián, he works a lot faster than I do and even if he didn't just the fact that it's two pairs of hands working at the same time instead of just one gives me hope that I will be able to bring you great news pretty soon.

*Tutorials only: Please keep in mind when this reaches 100% I will still need some time to finalise the order of the tutorials, prepare the indexes, and a few more details before I can send the books to the printer. However, I don't have a good way of estimating that numerically and I feel this is nonetheless a great estimate to give you a rough idea of where the project sits at currently for those who would rather receive information numerically.

Now, for those who'd rather see a few images of what I've been able to complete in the past several weeks, here's some previews of the latest layout:

I've chosen to depart from the previous style of rendered layouts that I used to share, as those take me quite some time to prepare and I'm not sure they really make much of a difference, I think I'd rather devote that time to more editing instead. Please let me know your thoughts on this matter in the comments!

Last but not least, I want to acknowledge the frustration expressed by many of you in the comment section. At this point in the project, there's very little I can do about it other than press on and continue working to deliver the books as soon as possible, and try to convey the progress of the project clearly and more often than I've done.

What I will say to all of you is this: I have never intentionally lied or said something that wasn't true. I have been overconfident at times, overwhelmed at others, sometimes I may have oversimplified something for the sake of clarity which could be interpreted in different ways, many times I've not disclosed what or who exactly was holding the project back because I didn't want anyone other than myself to be personally involved or attacked by someone else as I explained in another update, and probably plenty of other things that hinder the clarity of my communication with all of you that I don't know how to put into words due to English not being my first language.

In any case, I want you all to know that I remain 100% committed to delivering the books to each and everyone of you, to the best of my abilities and reaching the best possible quality I can, and I will continue to work on the project until I have achieved just that.

As always, thank you for your kindness and support, and see you in the next update, hopefully soon and bearing good news.

Helio

Q3 progress report
10 months ago – Mon, Sep 15, 2025 at 04:06:02 AM

Hello everyone!

Over the last few months I've been working on more editing, layout, and endless revisions. Today I'd like to share some of that progress with you all. Let's get into it:

Volume 1 is now pretty close to being done. We had already finished the theory section some time ago, and now the 12 tutorials are complete. The only missing part is the explanation of the brush and airbrush techniques and a small basing chapter, as well as a small introduction to each section which I will write once everything else is done to ensure everything is referenced in the correct order as it appears in the final version of the book.

Below you can find a few pages from some of the tutorials found in volume 1, the only detail they are missing is the correct page numbering but save that they are 100% done.

Changes moving forward

I've come to terms with the fact that I can't do the entire layout by myself. It would simply take too much time and I've already abused your patience beyond reason.

In past occasions I've had very strong reservations to bring someone else on board to help with layout, as I believed it would take me almost as long or even longer to prepare the materials and briefs for them to do the layout properly and then review and correct it as it would to simply do the layout myself. I've since tried outsourcing the layout of a few tutorials and I have to say I'm very happy with the work done by Adrián, the same graphic designer who designed pretty much everything else for Colorful Kraken Studio.

Some of his layout decisions are definitely different than I would have made, but his experience as both a graphic designer and miniature painter show through and the visual quality of his work matches my expectations for what the books should look like, so I will continue to work with him to speed up the process.

The pages you've seen above are the result of this collaboration, I hope you like them as much as I do!

Now we are moving forward with tutorials from Volumes 2 and 3, I hope to have something worth showing in that regard soon. 

Note about US shipping

The current political climate and logistic situation is uncertain, but I don't anticipate this should be too difficult to overcome. While many courier companies are currently not shipping to the US, my plan was always to freight ship all the US bound books together in a large shipping container, then distribute them from within the US using an american shipping company. While we may have to face payment of some additional customs and duties charges compared to my initial plan, it should still be fairly doable to ship everyone in the US their corresponding rewards. In any case, we will cross that bridge when we get there, as the current situation may still change a lot.

Last but not least, I want to reassure you of my commitment to this project, to finishing these books and to deliver them to each and everyone of you as soon as I possibly can, maintaining the highest quality I can possibly achieve.

Thank you again for your kindness and support,

Helio

Q2 progress report
about 1 year ago – Fri, May 16, 2025 at 11:02:05 AM

Hello everyone!

Time for a much needed update. We are moving forward!

Design, layout and editing

I've spent the last couple of months almost fully focused on Volume 1. The theory chapters are 95% done, we are only missing a couple of graphics and photos of models to illustrate certain sections, but the text and the bulk of the layout is done. At the moment, I'm working on  the editing and layout of the 12 tutorials contained in the book, and David and Jaime are working on refining the explanation of each technique used on the tutorials.

We have decided to structure the book in two main chapters. The first is the vast majority of the theory, along with explanations for all the tools and materials required and how to prepare your miniatures for painting, and the second is the actual tutorials.

The second chapter is divided into four levels, each level introduces the required techniques first and then shows the tutorials to paint three miniatures to that standard. Then the next level introduces a few new techniques and the corresponding tutorials, and so on.

Here are a few pages (95% done, may still get minor changes) of the book:

I've also advanced a little bit with Volumes 2 and 3, I will show the progress on those soon.

Pledge manager

I've seen comments from many of you requesting that I launch the pledge manager, and others questioning the existence of the late pledge option. I'd like to clarify a couple of things here that I hope will make sense:

About the late pledge, none of the late backers are being charged at this point. They are giving a pre-authorisation for a future charge once the late pledge closes and they provide their address for shipping and such. This is also the reason why they do not have access to the website whereas you as Kickstarter backers do, they have not paid anything, but instead simply agreed to pay at a later date.

As for the pledge manager, there's two things stopping me from launching it:

• First and foremost, even though it wouldn't take a lot of work, it would still take some work and that would slow me down a little bit from completing the actual books, which I feel is the most important task at this point in time. In my opinion, it makes more sense to take the time to fully set up the pledge manager once the books are in the printer for pre-press review.
• Secondly, if I were a backer, I would feel more comfortable if the pledge manager was sent closer to the shipping date, rather than as soon as possible. I wouldn't want to feel the shipping of the project is imminent if it wasn't, if that makes sense. I realise this is entirely personal and subjective and not everyone has to feel the same way.

Having said this, if there's strong agreement in the comments of this update that it would be a good idea to launch the pledge manager so you can lock your orders and provide your shipping addresses, I can set some time aside in the next couple of weeks and do that. Please let me know in the comments and I'll see what I can do about it.

My thinking about the massive delay

I know many of you are frustrated with the delays and the scarce communication on my side. I am too, and I'm sorry. I would like to offer you some explanation as to why this project is taking me longer than I expected.

I've worked on other projects and other books and most of them have been delivered either on time or at the very least suffered much shorter delays. However, in those projects I was "just" the project manager, whereas here I'm also responsible for the vast majority of the layout, editing and administration of the project and this has taken a serious toll on me and my capacity to plan ahead.

And what I feel is the most important reason, other projects that I've worked on were not educational in nature, and the same can be said about other miniature books that are out there. The editing, review, correction, and feedback processes in general are taking me a lot longer than I anticipated because these books are not about the artists and their painting styles, but rather about YOU learning them. 

What this means is that I can't simply take what each artist sent me, do a nice looking layout and be done with it. I need to edit it to use consistent language, make it as easy to understand and follow as possible, have the original author review it so we can make sure it conveys what they wanted to teach, edit their corrections if they had any, review it again... and when I'm not sure about the end result, send it to folks with different levels of experience who can review it on their own and let me know whether it makes sense or something needs further clarification.

At this point, I don't know whether this is beyond what I initially promised, simply what everyone expected, or something in between. What I do know for sure is that I'm extremely proud of each and every tutorial that we've finished up to this point, and I want to maintain the same standard throughout all three books and all tutorials in them. This does mean it's taking me a long time to finish each tutorial, but it's not a consistent time because it depends a lot on the clarity of the original explanation from each artist.

Final note

Many times over the past year and a half I've felt a sense of helplessness when I've had troubles receiving materials from some artists involved in the project. Many times I've felt like I should just tell you X or Y person is not sending me their materials and so I'm removing them from the books. However, time and time again I've come to the decision of not pointing anyone out. I don't feel comfortable doing that, and I feel the ultimate responsibility lies with me alone. I will certainly not work with some folks ever again, that's for sure, but I will never publicly call out anyone. I'm sure each individual person had their reasons for their delays.

In any case, I just want you to know that I remain committed to finishing this book collection as soon as I possibly can, to the highest quality I can achieve.

Thank you for your continued patience and support,

Helio

Q1 progress report
over 1 year ago – Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 05:59:56 AM

Hello everyone!

Much needed and requested update ahead. Let's get into it!

Content production

All content for Volume 2 has photos, final text edits happening within the next couple of weeks and we should be done with that! I'm also adding a short 1-2 page section titled "How to use this book" and still deciding the exact order of the tutorials, I'm undecided between two ideas. The first and probably easiest is my perceived order of difficulty, i.e. easier tutorials first, more difficult tutorials later. The second is some sort of "thematic" chapters, because we have several tutorials that have common approaches or ideas, or similar enough subjects tackled in different ways. I think I'll probably opt for a combination of the two, trying to group similar tutorials together when possible but still ordering them easiest to most difficult.

As for Volume 3, all painting is finally done too! I'm going over some text edits with a few of the artists and it should be done too. However, the content of this book is a little bit more complex than Volume 3 so it will take a bit more time do wrap up the layout.

Layout and editing

I'm slowly but surely crawling through all the material, still some way to go for Volume 3 especially but I'll get there eventually. Here are a few of the last few pages I've finished:

Extra content

I think at some point I've mentioned this, but I wanted to actually show you what it actually means. We reached a few stretch goals to add extra pages to Volumes 2 and 3, and what that translated into was small expansions of already existing tutorials, or additional tips and tricks in some cases. These small expansions are things like colour variants, additional details that you can apply to the leader of a squad or a character, and other small things like that. Not every tutorial includes these, but a lot of them do.

In some cases, this means I've needed to re-do the layout for the original tutorial, because I already had it done or almost done before the Kickstarter funded, and it's taken a lot of back and forth to get it right. I'm getting a lot better at these adjustments now, as I gain more experience with the software and the actual process, and I think it's turning out great. Below you'll find a couple of examples, the Death Company marine added to Arnau's Blood Angels tutorial, and the glowing orb added to his Overgrown Necrons tutorial (check the French section below).

In other cases, this has caused a large delay in me getting the content due to poor planning and wrong assumptions on my part. I had already negotiated these small additions with the vast majority of the artists involved, but I got the feeling that neither many of them nor me thought we'd actually need to get them done because the project wouldn't be as successful. Consequently, most folks got their base tutorial done and moved on, and when I asked them for these additions later on it took way longer than I expected.

I assumed because these were fairly simple and small things they wouldn't take very long to do, maybe a day or two at the most, but I didn't take into account that many of the painters could be booked months in advance as it happened in some cases, or didn't have the miniatures they painted for the tutorial at hand anymore, or many other things that life threw at us along the way. With so many different people involved, all sorts of things have happened.

The good news is that I finally have all these materials at hand and I'm working as hard as I can to incorporate everything into the books so I can get them finished as soon as possible.

French edition

As I think I've already mentioned, Seyni N'Diaye is working on the translation, and he's quite far along, he's translated about 95% of the material I've sent him so far and is working very diligently. I'll only get into the layout when I'm done with the English layout to avoid having to work twice on assets that will be common across languages, but it shouldn't take very long after I'm done with the English version. Nonetheless, I've done the layout for a few pages just to be able to show you something extra:

All in all, I'm very close to wrapping up Volume 2, Volume 3 still needs more work but it's getting there, and Volume 1 is being worked on by David Arroba and Adrian Sarrio and I'm confident we'll be done with it soon as well.

For the time being, I'll keep working on layout and once I'm closer to the final printing date I'll provide you all with an actual delivery estimation. I know it's being a frustrating journey, and my poor communication is making it all the more frustrating for everyone, and for that I can only apologise and strive to do better in the coming weeks.

Catch you in the next update!

Helio

End of year progress report
over 1 year ago – Tue, Dec 31, 2024 at 04:40:44 AM

Hi everyone!

This is not the update I would like to be writing at this point, but as many of you have pointed out, some news is always better than no news, so without further ado, let's get into it.

Content production

We are done with the painting and process photos for Volume 1, as well as the vast majority of the theory chapters, so that's some great news. It should be wrapped up soon.

Volume 2 is only missing photos for one last tutorial, it should also be wrapped up soon.

Volume 3 is missing some photos for two tutorials, but the core of those tutorials is done so I'm hopeful it will be wrapped up soon too. I have been chasing these two specific artists for an update for quite some time at this point, so even though I'm hopeful, I'm not 100% confident to be honest. I already have a solution in place for one of them (I have hired someone else for the extra photos), the second is more complex as it is a larger figure with riders and we are still missing the riders, I can't simply hire someone else because I don't have the creature itself. I trust I will be able to get the artist to finish the job soon.

Layout and editing

I have progressed a lot more slowly than I would have liked in this front, as sometimes the quality of the original explanations needs to be improved a lot, and sometimes I find it more difficult than others to convince the tutorials to fill full pages, and I'm not comfortable leaving a half page blank if that makes sense. I'm working closely with my graphic designer to solve these issues though!

How we got here

You are probably wondering, and rightfully so, why have I incurred in such a long delay. When I first started the project, I was really confident that I would be able to manage the tasks of others really well and be able to meet reasonable deadlines, because I had a lot of experience doing that. This has been largely true, but there's been a few issues along the way.

The most important one is that, as it turns out, I'm really good at managing other people's work, but I'm terrible at managing my own workload beyond the actual project managing tasks. Layout and editing has time and again proved impossible for me to estimate, and for that I'm sorry. I can only tell you I'm doing my best and I really trust that you will enjoy the final product, but I can't give you an estimate of how long it will take me to wrap up because I have failed to meet every deadline I've set, be it public or private that I set for myself. We'll get there as soon as possible, but I'm not really sure when that will be.

Other than that, there's been a couple major issues that have affected the project in significant ways. The first one is the terrible storm that happened in early November in Valencia. It did not affect me personally, but my graphic designer lives in Valencia and his home was flooded with almost 2 meters of water and mud. Fortunately, he survived in good health and all his friends, family, and animals are ok too, but for obvious reasons we had to stop work for a few weeks until he was able to sort out his living situation and tried to recover some of what he had lost in the flood.

The second is that the company I hired to develop the website and provide access to the digital version unilaterally decided to stop working with me a couple of months ago, as they wanted to focus on bigger clients. This left the website completely unattended from one day to the next, and it has taken me a long time to understand how it works and how to manage it. Consequently, I've halted any development on that front until the books are sent to the printer, because doing otherwise would cause even more delays in getting the physical books produced and that is unacceptable to me, especially since we have already incurred a very significant delay due to other reasons.

I want to thank each and everyone of you for your patience and support, I know it's not been the easiest journey so far especially due to my poor communication, but I'm really confindent about the latest progress we are making and I feel we are approaching the printing date steadily.

I hope you all have had the opportunity to spend some time with your loved ones, and that the new year brings joy and painted miniatures to your homes.

Helio