Cleaning old miniatures

Some time earlier, I realized that I have many models, which were painted long time ago. Miniatures, which I am painting now, looks much better than the models that I have finished four or more years ago. That is why I wanted to do something with the old ones. 

First thought was to retouch and improve the old models. Then I threw this venture. There were a several reasons. First one - there were too many miniatures to improve them all. It would take a huge amount of time to bring them in one line with my recently painted miniatures. Second reason - as I mentioned earlier, I really do not like to get back to already finished miniatures for retouching and improving them. It is a really an unpleasant feeling to return to something that was finished. I think that everyone in this hobby have similar feeling. The third one - I needed more models for already started projects. And it is much cheaper to use old miniatures instead of buying new ones.

So I decided to clean up old miniatures. Christina helped me with this idea. She gave me special fluid, which clears the paint away. It called - methylated spirit. It was extremely useful. This fluid helped me to clean up many miniatures.

However, it is only a part of my old miniatures. For now, I have two jars, which are fully loaded with the models. Here they are.

On the photos you can see, what figures did I put in the jars.

It is simple way to clear models from paint. All I have to do is to find spacious jar to put as many miniatures as I can. Then I added methylated spirit there and left jar for some time. It does not matter how long models will be in the jar, because this spirit cannot hurt or damage models. Some time later, I pulled out models and cleared the remnants of paint using old toothbrush. After that, miniatures looked like new ones.

To sum up, both of improving and repainting methods are time consuming, so I chose to repaint old figures. Soon I will start to work on these figures. I look forward to a good result.