Get to know me a bit
"THE LAST PAINT DROP TELLS EVERY STORY."
The name is a reminder that the last decision is the one that matters. One more highlight, one more glaze, the drop that decides what a piece is actually saying. That choice belongs to whoever is holding the brush.
It all started with goblins...
I am Veli, and I paint miniatures in London.
I was 21 when I properly picked up a brush, painting a handful of WizKids goblins for our Lost Mines of Phandelver adventure, just so our D&D party had something to look at. That was 2018, and for years it stayed exactly that. Models got painted when a campaign needed them, and not much in between. A basecoat, a quick wash - bish bash bosh. That was enough for me back then.
Somewhere in there, that stopped being enough. I watched many tutorials, read whatever I could get my hands on, and followed painters' Patreons and YouTube channels. I made plenty of mistakes, and some months it felt like I wasn't getting anywhere at all. Then I found colour and light, and that changed everything. Once I understood how light actually behaves, I stopped looking at miniatures as a hobby and started looking at them as art. From there, practice became a rhythm: paint whatever model excited me, take longer sessions, read more, and take notes.
It became something else in 2022, when I started posting what I was learning. I made an Instagram account which I used as something of a portfolio. Last Paint Drop became a brand on 17 January 2024, and the hobby stopped being a side thing.
I paint hero characters, busts and anything with a pose worth looking at. Non-metallic metal is my favourite technique - I have almost stopped using true metallic paint altogether. Even though I must say those new coloured metallics look pretty cool.
Then came patreon...
By 2025, Last Paint Drop felt like a proper identity, but something kept nagging at me. On every reel, people asked the same questions. How did I get that transition so smooth? What's the trick to NMM? How do you even start with light? I kept typing out the same answers in comments and DMs, and at some point it stopped feeling efficient.
So in June 2025, I launched the Patreon.
It was overwhelming, scary, but also pretty cool. Sharing a technique in a 30 second reel is one thing. Actually teaching, laying out a full process step by step so someone else could follow it and learn, was a different beast entirely. And nobody signs up just because you ask them to. You have to show people you genuinely have something worth learning from.
Then I had my first student. That didn't feel like gaining a subscriber. It felt like passing on knowledge to another human being, properly, for the first time. That was the moment Patreon stopped being an experiment.
It's grown since then, one patron at a time, into a small but proper community. What I love most is people sharing what they're working on, the walls they've hit, the feedback we go back and forth on. Seventy paid members are now part of it, and I'd love nothing more than to see that number keep climbing.
But teaching people how to paint metal that isn't really metal is one thing. Organising the actual paint was a different problem entirely.
"I teach everything I know. Tutorials, breakdowns, the work in progress and the parts I got wrong the first time. If something that took me three months to work out saves you three months, that is the point."
But my desk got out of control.
But as the years passed and I improved in my miniature painting journey, so did my desk get out of hand. Paints I could not reach, bottles in all the wrong places, and a surface that had quietly run out of room. The choice was a bigger desk or a bigger room, and neither was happening, so I went up the wall instead.
That's how the idea for the Modular Hobby Plate came to life. I drew the concepts on paper myself, badly, but well enough to show how the rails and the modules would work together. Then I collaborated with a 3D design expert who took those drawings and made them real.
It then went through nine public versions, each one fixing something a viewer had raised. It funded on Kickstarter with 1,823 backers and £69,770 against a £4,000 goal. The files are here now.
"Lots of Paint, sweat and tears."
And that's where I am now.
All these years, I have gradually worked towards turning something I truly love from a hobby into something more. From painting and video recording, to editing and voiceover, to scheduling and posting, it has been a tough journey. Then the Kickstarter and all the challenges it brought with it. Blood, sweat and tears... that's what they say, right? Well, definitely not blood, but a lot... and I mean A LOT of paint.
The Modular Hobby Plate has marked a new chapter of this small business of mine. However, this is only the beginning. Miniature painting is the backbone of absolutely everything Last Paint Drop Studio is, and it will continue to be so.
Of course, absolutely none of this would have been possible without the love, affection, and support of my beautiful wife, who has been with me along the way.