I heard there were these special French paints

Once upon a time, while I was wandering the streets of West Lafayette, Indiana, I noticed a shop called the Game Preserve. Thinking to myself "I can always use something else to distract me from the homework I'm not doing," I went inside. I assumed that I would see a shelf somewhere that had Dungeons & Dragons materials, which would at the time have been enough for me to decide that the place was cool.

I was instead confronted with a glass case that contained what seemed like hundreds of exquisitely painted miniatures. I knew that some people used lead figures to represent their D&D characters, but this was different. Even though they were clearly fantasy figures (elves, dwarves, et cetera), many of them were organized in military units, marching in rank and file. It was breathtaking.

That was my first introduction to Warhammer Fantasy Battles. I started to pick up some figures, paints, and brushes, and tried to paint my first miniatures. They were terrible. No matter what I tried (then) my minis looked (to me) like flat, paint-by-number blobs. They didn't look anything like the figures in that magical glass case.

Particularly impressive to me were a group of five miniatures standing by themselves near the front of the case. They looked to me like a combination of fantasy and sci-fi, laden with guns and swords, power armor and horned helms. I eventually learned that these models were Chaos Space Marine Terminators from Warhammer 40,000, but at the time all I could see was how incredibly well painted they were. It looked to me like they weren't painted at all, that this was simply a tiny window into the world where these terrifying soldiers stood menacingly on the battlefield.

I needed, desperately needed to know how I could make my miniatures look like these. I didn't know enough then to ask the right questions about technique and materials, about the best ways to learn composition and style. What I actually asked must have sounded something like "How did he paint them like that?" I say must have, because I vividly remember the manager's response:

"The guy that painted those is from France. I think he was using some special French paints."

Years later, after I had unwittingly befriended "the guy from France," Matthieu ChanTsin, and learned that he'd painted those models, I pumped him for information about those special French paints. "I don't know what you're talking about," he told me. "I painted those when I was working for a Games Workshop store, and I just used Citadel paints."

The punchline of the story is that when I asked that manager (Mister Carlos Fernandez, gaming celebrity) about his response all those years ago, he didn't remember it at all. A simple throwaway comment had me convinced for years that special, perhaps imported, but definitely expensive materials were required if I wanted to paint beautiful miniatures.

The moral of the story is that you can do anything with any tools, as long as you know what you want to do, and know how to get it done.

Special thanks to Matthieu ChanTsin and Carlos Fernandez, for providing me with the material (anecdotal and neurosis-related) for this post.