DVD Review - Miniature Painting Secrets with Jennifer Haley

Finally I had the time and the muse to write my next painting DVD review. As promised I will have a look at the "Miniature Painting Secrets with Jennifer Haley" from CMON. The set contains of 2 DVDs and says it contains about 6 hours of instructions in roughly 8 chapters.
By now you should already know who Jennifer Haley is, I did a tribute to her work a while ago.
The DVDs are in english and the painting footage is dubbed with music.
After seeing the trailer of this set I was really curious. If you missed it you can watch it directly here in all its beauty:

So lets dip into the DVDs.

The first thing I noticed while watching, is that Jen is using notes from which she reads what she wants to say. No teleprompter or fancy stuff. She also doesn't always talk directly into the camera but a bit upwards and left. At first this is totally annoying since one is used to be spoken to directly but you get used to it rather quickly, especially since the stuff she tells is pretty interesting and its clearly from her experience. And on her website she explains why this is done in this way (keyword Asperger Syndrome). 

Chapter 1 - Introduction

Nothing fancy here. Jen is introducing herself, and tells us why she paints miniatures. And she gives a small disclaimer that she only shows HER way of painting. First thing to note here: If you were annoyed be the rather techno-like music from Natalyas Set, you will be happy to hear that this one has more calm, jazz-like music while the painting is shown.

Chapter 2 - Tools & Preparation

This chapter starts with a short part about brushes and Jen talks about hair types, sizes and shapes of brushes and which one she uses. She also talks about cleaning of their brushes and as interesting side effect how long she can use their brushes tho. 

After ~4 minutes she starts talking about paints and shoes how to make a wet palette and which other palettes she uses. This part also includes the tools she uses for miniature preparation for example knives, modelling tools and putties.

At ~6.30 she shows us some primers and tells us how she primes (24h hours waiting until everything is dry: wow!), how she mounts here miniatures and a short introduction how she classifies painting techniques and how thick the color should be (which gets an in-depth view in a later chapter).

This whole part is only ~9 minutes long and is stuffed with information. But if you think this is all: FAIL. She directly dips into the next chapter:

Chapter 3 - Color Theory

As she says: Color theory could be a complete tutorial DVD but nonetheless she gives short introduction of the color wheel and explains basic stuff like how colors can be mixed together to achieve on tone, the color triad, complimentary colors and color saturation. She then gives a really short explanation how she chooses the triad with an example miniature which she later will paint.

For this she uses a pocket color wheel like the one I show you here. You could also use a small, free software, the Color Scheme Designer which I showed you some time ago.

All in less than 5 minutes. BAMM!

Chapter 4 - Basics

After all the theory the work begins. Jen repeats and broadens her explanation of paint consistency and how different paints may react to water thinning or how climate can change the way your color flows.

Then the hands on part starts! Jen explains and shows how she prepares miniatures which includes removing moldlines, filing done miscasts and pinning/mounting the miniature. After that she shows how to prime (both with spray and brush-on primer) and then starts basecoating and tells us something about brushstrokes while preshading the cloak of a miniature. 

Short break: Puh! Pretty much stuff in only arround 19 minutes. Remember we only watched 25 minutes of the DVD at this moment and already covered basic color theory, preparing miniatures and basecoating. And not in a rushed way! For me this is just right no boring 2 hours of watching how every single moldline is removed or showing of 200 different brushes. After all its a tutorial.

Chapter 5 - Layers, Glazes & Blends

Now follows the first long painting part of this set: Jen starts painting the skin tones of 3 different models. One with a rather western skin tone, one with a rather dark skin tone and one demonette with a rather pinkish tone (like shown in the teaser video). She talks about shading, highlighting and how to use the different techniques how to achieve different effects. Jen also covers her method of darklining the miniatures which I found pretty interesting (amazing brushwork there).

I don't want to go too much into detail here. She shows in these 1h 40 min pretty everything you can do with these techniques from basic shading/highlighting to smooth color blends/transitions. And it is really understandable what she is doing!

Chapter 6 - Working with Details

In this chapter the whole detail work for painting faces is covered. Again she uses her three models to show different ways to make a face stand out. The techniques from the former chapter are used as she paints eyes, makeup and  other details and the stuff from the miniatures. Again I won't go too much into detail, this 50 min chapter again shows here amazing detail work and her way of doing this stuff. No fast forwarding just real paint work.

Chapter 7 - Surface Treatments

This chapter I was really looking forward to. It is divided into three parts where Jen "finishes" every model shown in this DVD set.

The first part covers transparent cloth, NMM and painting the hair of her "Akanke". 

The second part covers the paint work done for her "Squall" and shows a bit more of "normal" shading and highlighting of clothing and the NMM for the bronze staff.

The last part is a bit mixed but she finishes her demonette and with painting the black leather. She also does the base for her Akanke and shows some cool pigment work on the cloak of the Squall.

This chapter is the longest with over 2h 30 min of video.

Chapter 8 - Conclusion

Jen talks about sealing and protecting your miniature with gloss and/or matt varnish and how to best store your miniatures. No rocket science here but a nice detail.

At the end she talks about how staying motivated and not to get a painter burnout.

Conclusio

So wow. Just have to catch my breath now.

If I should really compare the two painting DVD sets from CMON I just would say no. The two aren't comparable. Really.

But if I must: In my opinion Jens set CLEARLY plays in a different league than Natalyas. 

Not only aren't there millions of hours of boring footage but there are also clear and straight information about the stuff she does and why she does it. 

If I had to complain something I would say that she could go a bit more in detail with the color theory. And sometimes there are some odd pauses in the footage where nothing happens for about a minute: No talking, no painting, nothing. Seems the cutter missed some stuff here.

Is it the best available on the market? Definitely no. It is no "must-have" in your collection. There are better ones to get in my opinion but it is above average. But you wouldn't to anything really wrong with buying this. 

Now I have to get another coffee and give my fingers some rest :) Hope you enjoyed the review although it is again a big wall of text :)

So long,

Paradox0n