It begins! As these are the figs in the first row of the big end of year shot, I put a bunch of extra time in for these. Also true that most of the work was done at the end of 2024 but I didn't finish the work until this week.
First up we have Ronin Arts Workshop's Spitfire Jen. This is a sculpt that I like a lot and I regret having scaled her down to 28mm, a habit I've now been disabused of many times. The sculptor had a thing in mind and I've learned that I should respect that even if the fig stands a little proud on the table. Anyway. I had a heck of a time gluing her together, particularly her gun hand and obvious glue artifacts, probably because each part was soooooo small. She spent quite a long time on my painting desk partially prepped and I only got to seriously painting her near the end of last year. The highlighting on her dark clothes doesn't sell super well on the table which is one of the difficulties of painting black, hence the black cat challenge. I also note that I really like painting sci-fi characters because it gives me an excuse to paint weird hair colors. She'll count as high quality #1 on the year. She will likely show up here again sometime, possibly in her 54mm incarnation.Next up we have Trista Female Warrior from Reaper Bones, a sculpt I like a lot but which is let down badly by bendy white bones plastic. Notably, I purchased this particular fig in 2018 before my moratorium on purchasing bendy white bones plastic. I wanted to take her to a high quality but the mold really made that hard so I put a lot of effort into her face and the rest of her is kind of phoned in. I also had ambitions of NMM rather than TMM which would have made a lot of the decorations on her shield and armor easier to sell but clearly that didn't happen. She was done in a few hours which feels OK for the result. Lastly, we have a pair of Battle Mages from Galaad and we've seen this sculpt before, way back in week 12 of 2022 where I noted that we'd probably see more of her in the future and that it's a sculpt that can support a higher quality paint job. Well, we live in the future and yes. The older print was done on my old Mars Pro. These are printed on my much newer Saturn 2 and that made a lot of difference in terms of print quality. I had a lot of fun painting these two, particularly their faces and the color shifts on their armor. Notably their faces are deliberately different which is a good example of sculpting with paint.
There's certainly more work that could be done here. Particularly, the metallic bits are phoned in some but I did go back with a Badger Ghost Tint wash to highlight them some. Their pants could also use better highlights but that didn't really stand out to me until looking closely at these close up shots. Their staves and bracers have gem-like protuberances that I've yet to gemify and the globes on the end of their staves have filigree that I've never sufficiently picked out. The patterning on their armor also could be done better so no one should be surprised if they show up here again. All told they were somewhere in the ballpark of 12 hours for both and there's a lot more work that could be done on them should I be so inclined in the unforseeable future. They'll count as high quality #2 and #3 for the year.
2024 finished mini counter: 4, 3/12 high quality