A thing a week 2025, week 40

We're on the home stretch now, folks, with these four on-the-goal figs. Also of note, these four are all metals which I prefer and were pretty good fun to paint. These shots are a little blown out. Hopefully I can get that resolved for next shoot. 

First up we have Mal: Catfolk Warrior and Nicia, Tear of Vengeance from Warmachine: Protectorate a game that I notably don't play. We saw Mal way back in Week 34 of 2020 painted in oils and many iterations of my photography journy (I swear they look better in person). When I get the opportunity to paint the same figure multiple times, I usually paint them in different color schemes so Mal gets his orange cat energy on in this iteration. In retrospect, his armor should probably be in blue but in my defense, originally was going to paint him black. Nicea was purchased in 2020 on steep discount and I didn't notice that a) she was in like a million pieces, and b) that she has a dumb sword-gun thing. I like her pose and sculpt beyond that but the dumb weapon means she'll probably not get any screen time. She is the last of my unpainted 2020 offerings. 

These two are Chosen of Sekhmet and Daughter of Sekhmet and I've been looking forward to painting them for quite a long time. Kitty people are common in my world which I'm pretty sure I've typed before, but getting figs for them is surprisingly difficult. So when I found these two with spears and in metal I could hardly believe my good fortune. I thought I'd covered up all of the contrast paint basecoat but these shots prove otherwise. These two were otherwise in my happy place: not too big, not too detailed, and well sculpted. At some point when I'm buying figs again, I'd super like to pick up copies of these two.

2025 finished mini counter: 147, 2025 goal figs remaining: 6  

A thing a week 2025, week 39

Two more right up the middle this week and the two remaining bigatures for this year's goal. First up we have Nolzur's Young White Dragon. Astute viewers might note that this dragon is indeed not painted in white which is a notoriously difficult color to paint in. Indeed. I checked my collection of painted dragons and I a) indeed did not have a green one, and b) have a set of green paints/inks that I actually like. The decision was pretty easy from there. 

This week's offerings are (obviously) speed paints. I've typed quite a lot about my feeling about the Nolzur's line of figures and these have all of the issues that I usually rant about. The good news is that these are the last two and I very likely won't buy new ones. I didn't do a good job with the gajillion awful mold lines but I didn't want to not take advantage of all the texturing work that the sculptor left. 

This other guy is Nolzur's Young Red Dragon and painted in the intended color scheme. He's maybe a little more on the orange side but I clearly didn't do anything about it. 

Both of these guys are pretty simply painted. Since the Nolzur's lines  are "pre-primed", I started with a simple airbrush basecoat. From there we got a speed paint and/or contrast paint step to darken some stuff down followed by various levels of drybrushing. A few details were picked out like their bajillion claws and teeth and spikey bits and the bases were basecoated/drybrushed very simply afterward and that was it. Both were done in about five hours all told over several days. They look OK for the time invested but they're the best color: painted.

2025 finished mini counter: 143, 2025 goal figs remaining: 10

A thing a week 2025, week 38

The last few weeks we've been in slapchop mode with a various added techniques. That begged the question: how fast can I do an actual slapchop and how good are the results? Well, now I can answer both.

These four are Female Sector Enforcer 2 from Velrock, one of my favorite sculptors and I printed them this year. That has the downside of not being a 2025 fig goal but completing them means they're not kicking around my prepped pile. I picked these for this experiment since they're both sci-fi and armored sans faces which usually tie up a lot of brush time. Inspecting their armor, you can convince yourself (as I did) that they're mostly three colors. 

Starting with a fairly muted zenithal in warm tones, I did a two-step directional drybrush with an ancient pot of Reaper skintone followed by a very light highlight of Golden Heavy Body Titanium White. This gave a better treatment of the volumes and the second step picked out all of the exposed edges with a very  nice edge highlighting. After that, it's a careful but single coat of my favorite contrast paints which is why there are two in primary colors and two in secondary colors. Each of them is three colors two of which is shared across the group. I picked out zero details. 

Overall, they look pretty OK and were done in less than two hours for the group of them. Notably, they read a little better on the table than they do in these close-ups and the satin-y finish of the Contrast paints is working for us this time. These might have been a little better with additional thinning of the Contrast paints or swapping for Speed Paints which are in general thinner, but I'm not unhappy with the result. This sculpt can certainly take a higher level effort, so don't be surprised if they show up again sometime in the unfroseeable future.

2025 finished mini counter: 141
 

A thing a week 2025, week 37

Like last week, these guys are on goal for the year. Unlike last week, these guys are definitely not metal. In fact, like a lot of the Runewars figs I've painted, these were a real mess. A couple weeks ago we had big kitty cavalry and I typed about them being a relatively quick pseudo-slapchop job. These guys were mostly a slapchop job and it shows. Because the sculpts and molds are sus and because I don't expect them to see a ton of screen time, I didn't feel the need to do a lot of work on them. 

I did do something fun with them, however. I took the opportunity to experiment more with different colors of metallics. In this case, I mixed Vallejo Metal Color Aluminum with various Golden High Flow Acrylics and got mixed results. The blue turned out really nice, probably because the pigment is strong but transparent. The Teal is probably the worst with its not-quite-metallic sheen. To pick out more of the shadows, I hit them with a candy coat of Badger Ghost Tints far too thick in places to mixed results as well.

Despite all my speed painting attempts, they still took a couple hours per fig and, if I'm honest, a sub-par result. 

2025 finished mini counter: 137, 2025 goal figs remaining: 12
 

A thing a week 2025, week 36

A small showing this week as I've been very busy prepping for BrickCon but both figs are on goal which is nice. Both figs are also metal which is also nice.

First up we have Balzardor, Cleric from Reaper's Dungeon Dwellers line. If he looks familiar, that's because we saw him about twenty months ago back in Week 1 of 2024 in green and boy am I happy that I didn't paint him in the same color scheme. This version was in pieces and because he's metal, he had a lot finer details that were a mixed blessing. His eyes in particular were very challenging. His shield and arm fell off early in the painting process and I took the opportunity to paint the shit out of the inside which no one but me will ever see. He was done in a few hours, most of which was spent blending on his cloak. 

This is Alaine, Female Paladin and as the turnaround implies, she's going to count as a high quality figure for the year, number 11 as it were. I like this sculpt a lot. The molding is somewhat sus. I spent a lot of time on her face and on shading her armor. Probably more effort should have been spent on everything else. And if you notice the nose ring chain thing going on there, that was a mold line that I wasn't sure what to do with. I didn't dare use a sanding stick and didn't trust my knife skills so I painted it gold like it was supposed to be there and I do not regret that decision. Her waistcoat could use better highlighting and her hair is a little flat and her fantasy sword is a little indistinct but otherwise I'm pretty happy with this effort. Done in something like five hours, I'm hoping I can obtain another one sometime in the unforseeable future.

2025 finished mini counter: 133, 2025 goal figs remaining: 16, high quality: 11/12

A thing a week 2025, week 35

This week we have four more figs on target. These folks are Runewars Leonx Riders and I am a big fan of big kitty cavalry. I bought two sets of these (one saved for later) when they came on sale because the game was being sunset. If they look or sound familiar, we saw their game-mates, the Outland Scouts, way back in Bonus Week 53 of 2023. 

These aren't fantastic sculpts and the mold lines were a real mess so I didn't feel like spending a lot of time on them. I did a pseudo slapchop on these and looking at the glamor shots, I really should have gone higher on the highlights. The kitty parts of these I like well enough. The armor and elf sides I like less so. They were done in a few hours for the lot of them which is fast enough to field an army if I played such games. Either way, they're painted and that counts for something.

2025 finished mini counter: 131, 2025 goal figs remaining: 18

A thing a week 2025, week 34

Following last week's offering we have these four as the red team. They're the other half of the Gotha Knights box and TBH, I was super done with these guys. The fur is pretty OK if patchy but the red parts, especially the big dude's cloak are really phoned in. I did some shading on the metallics but not much. 

As I noted last week, these guys probably won't see any game time so I didn't super feel like putting a ton of time into them. I especially disliked their spikey bits and the fact that they wouldn't stay on my large painting handles. My normal painting handles are magnetic with some putty on the top which hold pretty well for single magnet setups. These guys are too big to have a single magnet so they don't work on those. Also, their bases are way, way too big to fit, so they go on the "I can make no assumptions about the configuration of magnets" larger handles made out of ancient and empty paint pots with only putty on top. I don't like using these because they're not super secure and this didn't help. 

At any rate, these guys are done and I'm happy with that. Also, you might be wondering why I've got four figs here and my countdown has been decremented by five. Well. As part of the normal prep, the figs in whatever pieces they come in get taken out of the box. I do a dry fit then remove mold lines and whatnot, and then glue them together. Well, one of them was missing an arm. I hope he wasn't too expensive, but I can't exactly assemble him sans arm so I'm taking him off the list entirely. 

2025 finished mini counter: 127, 2025 goal figs remaining: 22 

A thing a week 2025, week 33

Moving right along, we have more House Goritsi figs from Wrath of Kings, this time half of the Gotha Knights box (next half coming soon). Like last week's specialists, these guys are also really big and because of the hard plastic used in these and their very spikey fantasy weapons, they were also really pokey which made them harder to paint.

I thought the first two were the same guy but they're actually different poses. The last two seem pretty distinct, I guess the cloak guy being an officer or something with his very weird fantasy weapon. I don't hate these sculpts and I get that games want to have a distinct visual style but at the same time I long for a more realistic portrayal of these obviously fantasy characters.

These are painted as dark grey wolves which I thought fit the subjects well. In retrospect, I should have done black wolves as a point of practice for painting black furred characters. I'd really wanted to do these as a batch paint but a) they're really pokey, b) they're really big and didn't fit on my normal paint handles, and c) they're super detailed. I did an OK paint job but got to the end and really just wanted to be done.  I don't expect they'll see game time but I've been pretty bad at predicting these things but I'm glad they're done either way.

2025 finished mini counter: 123, 2025 goal figs remaining: 27

ed) not sure what's going on with the formatting here but I'm far too lazy to hack the HTML directly.

A thing a week 2025, week 32

...and this week we're back on track. These two were purchased in the heady days of the spring of 2019 as  the Wrath of Kings: House Goritsi - Specialist Box #1 from CMON and a game that I notably don't play. We've seen the Whitemane Duelists from way back in 2020 week 37 as my first really high quality attempt and my first real NMM attempt. These are from an expansion pack that I got on steep discount as the game was being sunset and at a time when I was desperately trying to find canine anthropomorphs for my in-person game. The good: they're painted. The bad: they're really, really big, like 65mm so they tower over most of the character figs in my collection. I also don't know what's up with their gear which seems to be a mishmash of cyberpunk and artist fantasy hallucinations.

While not a speed paint, I also didn't go out of my way to really pick out the details though their size lent themselves to a fairly clean result. Due to their size, they ended up taking something like five or six hours each which is way more than I like to spend on a non-player character, non-high quality effort. They are on the 2025 goal list and despite my misgivings, I like the way they turned out.

2025 finished mini counter: 119, 2025 goal figs remaining: 31 

A thing a week 2025, week 31

This week we take a short break from our 2025 goals because, well, I had a need to paint something else this week.

First up we have a Duck-Billed Platypotamus from CobraMode. Did I technically need this guy? No, but he's been kicking around my prep table for far, far too long and since I'm at a point of cleaning the danged thing, I took the opportunity to paint him. My fantasy world is populated with silly double creatures like the ones out of Avatar so I got excited when I stumbled upon this guy. He's pretty simply painted in about  mostly with the airbrush. A wash on his bill and tail and a bunch of the normal brush-on details finished him off in about thirty minutes. 

These two are Weasel Witch Hunter Flamberge1 from Goon Master. It's super hard to get anthro figures for weasels which sucks because in my fantasy world, weasels are very common and well-loved by my players. The actual need for this week was we're having a special guest star playing the guy with the hat. The guy without the hat was printed at the same time earlier this year so I took the opportunity to paint him too. This is a great sculpt painted fairly quickly and I did not realize how glossy they'd come out until I was shooting. The base coat was provided by a mix of Pro Acryl Transparents and Speed Paint 2.0 and I've been trying to keep the low values in addition to the saturation for these kinds of characters. I think I got that but somewhere lost the really high values, especially on the reds. Still happy with the results here but certainly more work could have been done. They were completed in about four hours all told.

2025 finished mini counter: 117

 

A thing a week 2025, week 30

Another special one today but not quite as special as last week's offering. This is Gauth from Reaper Miniatures Bones 4 and he marks the last of the Bones 4 figs that I'm painting with a couple caveats that we needn't dwell on. 

I had serious gap issues on this guy like the guy last week and mostly for the same reason: large bones white plastic molds warp terribly. I also had a differenter fun problem with this guy that I didn't have last week: he was super front heavy since he didn't really come with a base. In retrospect, it looks like his legs (which were individual pieces for reasons) are warped forward which a) puts his face really near ground level, and b) made him tip over prior to basing such that he snapped in half and needed to be re-filled. 

The paint job itself isn't super interesting consisting of a prime/zenithal/basic basecoat with the airbrush followed by some minimal washing. Several rounds of fairly heavy drybrushing popped out most of the texture on him and minimal amounts of brush painting filled in the details. Like last week it's a high drama, low effort piece of work (my favorite!) and I think he came out pretty OK. 

The basing is also a high drama, low effort operation. It's obviously stacked layers of cork with some minimal washing and drybrushing. You don't see all the effort I spent layering joint compound so it would look less like cork and probably didn't even notice all the random rocks I threw down to break up the edges some. You probably did notice the half teaspoon of gold glitter I glued down. Many sins are hidden by that glitter and I'm stoked to have another reason to use it since the last time in like 2019. It's the basing equivalent of working in a pop color. 

2025 finished mini counter: 114, 2025 goal figs remaining: 33 

A thing a week 2025, week 29 (+Seven Years of Painting)

Today we have a special one and just because I can, we're going to jam some extra special commentary in here too.

This is the Blacktooth Terror from Reaper Miniatures Bones 4 and sadly, I don't think it's been released to the public yet. It's one of the nicer sculpts in Bones 4 and I'd kind of like to have another one. This is my favorite kind of painting: high drama, low effort. He's mostly painted with the airbrush which established most of the skintones and the nice fade from orange to tan. The dark brown of his stripes and on his craggly back is an undiliuted Cygor Brown Constrast Paint which pretty much always shows up as black when shooting on a white background. I did minimal drybrushing to pop out the highlights and a bunch of work on the details on his scaryface. I specifically under-highlit the base to keep the focus on the dino but the last wash made that a lot less distinct in addition to adding the shininess which wasn't intended.

In addition to being a striking addition to my painted collection, he's also my 2,000th painted figure at least as far as I've counted correctly. Notably this neglects a handful of vintage Star Fleet Battles metal ships that have almost nothing done to them but does include a dozen or so battlemechs painted with enamels in the 90s. I recognize that I paint an unusual amount but over the years I've gone the full spectrum from hate painting to kind of liking it to obsessing about it on a regular basis. 

So in those seven years, what have I learned? If you're a regular reader here you'll notice some themes, probably.

First up, contrast is king. Provided that you have a good handle on the details of a fig and have a relative level of competence in prepping, nothing will make a fig stand out more than contrast. I really started focusing on this in year like 3 and trying to do more with it has really improved my results. Normally we discuss value contrast which is the lightness or darkness of an element (usually 1 being the lowest lows and 5 being the highest highs) but we should also consider texture, tone, and temperature as well. In addition to the normal color theory composition thought I put into a paint scheme, I'm now also varying the temperature (warm vs. cool, see: beloved Cat Captain's epaulets and shirt vs. her coat, boots, and pants) in adjacent elements as often as I can in addition to popping out or adding texture when I can with hashes, slashes, dots, and other painted-on detail (see: Ragna's cloak). Tone is something I stumbled upon mostly accidentally when trying to work out how best to do red/green color combos without characters looking like Christmas pageant extras (see: Highland Heroine's desaturated cloak vs. her red elements). These things have leveled up my work mostly for minimal cost in planning.

Next up, I now super value pre-painting prep. I've mentioned it before but I hate dealing with mold lines when painting and I've started to really dislike large gaps that make figs look less like proper representations in a miniature world and more like the toys they actually are. It's one of the few places I care about immersion in my gaming as if that were a reasonable thing. This big dino had a shitton of gaps which I filled with and old and way past its good-by date Perfect Plastic Putty. Large molded pieces tend to have big gaps, particularly anything that assembles in bones white plastic and for reasons I don't understand, this guy had the big craggly back piece as separate. It's hidden OK in the sculpt but it was also part of why I painted it in such a dark color. We'll see some figs in the near future that I wasn't quite so careful in filling and they look less cool than they might have. I'll also add to this that undercoating with a zenithal or nadir shading with the airbrush is pretty much second nature for me so I get that part almost for free.

Basing is the other big pickup that elevated my painting. I started deliberately building, painting and flocking bases several years ago and went back and re-based just about everything I'd painted in 2021 IIRC. Occasionally I'll get into a "just slap paint around" mood and painting bases is a great way to channel that energy. The try hard ones are the fun freehand sci-fi jobs (see: Cuddy Grey's) or painted bark rockery (see: Ork Gal). I haven't done a big batch of fun bases in a while which is a good indication that I should do so and not just because it means I can be lazy later. Added bonus: I should do more freehand.

Last but not least: don't buy more than you need. I started hate painting because a) I got super tired of playing with nondistinct white Bones plastic and b) because I had bought so freakin' many figs. By the time that Bones 4 fulfilled in mid 2019 I was well on my way to a four figure collection. At the time of this typing (about a week prior to posting), I've got around 640 figs left in my pile of shamepotential and print something like 75 figs every year which means that at my current average (~285 for the math-inclined) it'll be another two years before I get close to the end (assuming I don't kickstart or buy any more, obv). As I typed before: I paint an unusual amount and it's damned good thing that I mostly enjoy it. 

 

 

 

 

A thing a week 2025, week 28

We finished up an in-person campaign recently so we needed new player character figs. I took the opportunity to clear more of my painting desk so we have only one shot on goal this week. 

First up: our shot on goal. This is an Angel of Shadows from Reaper and mine is in the soft white bones plastic. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to do OSL on this one since she's carrying a lantern but being mostly a speed paint it mostly didn't come through in these shots. It's better in person FWIW. She's the only one this week toward my 2025 goals and I probably could have adjusted this shot a bit. 

This is Desyra Littlebow by Tabletop Terrain and a sculpt that I kickstarted at the end of 2022. I liked the sculpting of her face and her pose but was sold on some pretty nice renders that masked some of the sculpting sins. In particular, I hate her shoes. No one should be running through a forest with a bow in platforms. There also seem to be some proportion issues and I really wish she had some sculpted tone on her arms rather than looking all the world like wet noodles. I still spent a crazy amount of time on her and despite my misgivings, will count her as high quality number nine on the year done in about a dozen hours over the last few months. 

Next up we have Tabaxi Bandit from Vae Victis. The player (naturally) wanted a weapon that wasn't in the modular set that the STL came with so I kitbashed a fancy spear on him from a completely different kit. I kept the saturation on his hood and short cape but kind of lost the highlighting which I'm not super happy about. Not sure how it went so glossy in these shots, either. The highlighting on his sleeves looks better and I really should have used a lower value off white on the stitching. I was originally going to go with black claws which IMO would have been better. He was done in a few hours. 

This is Landsknecht Girl also from Vae Victis painted (obviously) in Ironlily colors. Occasionally I run into a sculpt that does a lot of the work for me and this one is one of those. The details are nicely separated and nothing is particularly fine, indistinct, or close together. The highlighting here is pretty minimal though I did edge just about everything I could. Overall it sells the piece as higher effort than it actually was. I maintained deep separation between all of the major elements and took the extra step to highlight her breastplate since she only had the one piece of metallic armor showing. She was done in something like six hours and is probably one of the more complete pieces I've done. And if you think the black lininig is heavy in these shots--it isn't and sells well on the table. She'll count as high quality number ten on the year.    

2025 finished mini counter: 112, high quality 10/12, 2025 goal figs remaining: 35    

Knight-o-rama week 9 (2025, week 27)

And we're across the finish line (and the crowd goes wild...probably). These five are the last of the archers and have almost OK highlighting. Overall most of this batch was speedpainted (obviously) to the tune of maybe a couple of hours per fig which as I'm typing this, doesn't seem particularly fast. Then again, my normal characters weigh in at like 6-8 hours so that's a significant speedup. It'll also be great if my counts line up which they didn't so it looks like this one's off by one but I trust my spreadsheet more than my maths in these unhallowed pixels and I can't be bothered to go back and figure out where my error was.

While these aren't my best work, I like that they're done and they've been added to my pantheon of baddies that will likely get table time over the years. Next up, some crazy.

2025 finished mini counter: 108,  2025 goal figs remaining: 36

Knight-o-rama week 8 (2025, week 26)

We're on the straightaway and hurtling toward the finish line this week to continue our lousy racing analogy from last week. These dudes firing are my favorite archers from the set and I kind of wish there were more arms like these. I could have kitbashed them if I'd wanted to, but I didn't. By this point in the painting process my wet palette was quite ripe with a lot of mostly cured puddles (piles?) of paint that I kept trying to re-activate. The green and white I like are patchy to begin with but re-activating dead paint really makes them awful in these close ups. Luckily, they fare better on the table.

2025 finished mini counter: 104, 2025 goal figs remaining: 41

Knight-o-rama week 7 (2025, week 25)

Rounding the corner and onto the straightaway, we have more archers today, and yet again another casualty of the "for sure there are extra melee arms in this box!" gambit. I mean, lookit that guy on the right. He's totally conflicted! Why the visored sallet for an archer? The body and legs are one piece and I thought that guy looked a little weird with armor on top and not on the bottom regardless, but this combo is just plain weird. 

2025 finished mini counter: 100!, 2025 goal figs remaining: 45

Knight-o-rama week 6 (2025, week 24)

We continue our theme with another four archers. I'd intended to do some of these guys in melee but as mentioned last week, I ran out of melee arms and didn't really want to kitbash these. 

Lots of these guys got a wash of my old Army Painter washes which I like but which made them go a little more satin-y than I'd like. This generally goes unnoticed until I get the close-ups which annoys me. I feel like I did a better-than-average job of removing mold lines on these guys but lots of them had them splitting their face as in the guy on the right. Also notable that some of these heads were really squinty and I only forced eyes onto some of them. They read OK on the table FWIW. 

2025 finished mini counter: 96, 2025 goal figs remaining: 49

Knight-o-rama week 5 (2025, week 23)

This week we pass the midpoint of our heavy-metal theme. At the time of this posting, they've been done a short while but as folks probably know already, I keep a backlog of stuff that hasn't shown up yet. That keeps posting smooth for things like BricksCascade which happened last month and/or when I have time-intensive pieces that would benefit from a longer-than-a-week effort. 

These dudes begin the round of archers that were in the box. I don't think I realized there were quite so many archers when I bought them but possibly that's because I stole a bunch of melee arms for earlier kitbashing expecting that there would be extras (hint: there weren't). One of the dudes coming up looks rather silly as a result but these guys are fine. 

2025 finish mini counter: 92, 2025 goal figs remaining: 53

Knight-o-rama week 4 (2025, week 22)

As promised last week, more knights this week. 

Here we have the remainder of the bill hook dudes and rather than the usual four, we have five this week! I probably would have done more melee dudes but apparently I'd stolen some of their parts for other figs and I was far too lazy to kitbash these any more than I did. Pretty happy with the yellow padded shading and I note again that the Reikland Fleshshade I slopped on the leather to move the tone dried glossy again.

The flocking is a little frizzier than I'd like and less glued down than I'd like. It looks OK, tho. 

2025 finished mini counter: 87, 2025 goal figs remaining: 57

Knight-o-rama week 3 (2025, week 21)

More knights this week...and next week...and probably the week after that. I like making progress but I've been pretty open about not liking big batches.

These would be the spear dudes and one sole bill hook dude. Not 100% sure why I've only got three spear dudes but I've only got those three so the bill hook dude fills out the rank. These are at least partially painted like their historical intent, at least the color choices. It looks like the wash on the red and the green ended up more satin-y than I intended. Note for future reference.

2025 finished mini counter: 82, 2025 goal figs remaining: 62