That's a whole lotta figs

Most folks have a rough time with numbers.  I can say I painted 226 figs this year but when you lay it all out, it's much more impressive.  

That's a whole lotta figs.

2020 Crafting challenge wrap-up

The end of the year marks many things, two of which are gluttony and year-end wrap ups.  This post is the latter.  Almost exactly a year ago I wrote this post talking about all of the things I made for my inaugural "a thing a week" challenge.  This post would be this year's write up.  

As crappy a 2020 has been overall, it was a good year for hobbying.  I think I did well on this challenge, finishing up officially in the middle of August and blowing past all of my original goals. Working from home 3/4 of the year helped with this in no small way.  Officially:

• 226/50 miniatures painted
• 8/5 miniatures pushing quality
• 3/1 serious attempts at non-metallic metals
• 6/5 "buildings" of reasonable size pushing detail and quality

2020 Kickoff
Week 1:  paint rack #1
Week 2:  Nolzur's Human Female Ranger (crossbow variant), high quality mini #1
Week 3:  Reaper Bones Highland Heroine, high quality mini #2
Week 4:  Cedarwood neighborhood map
Week 5:  3 sketches
Week 6:  Cedarwood Playset (take 2)
Week 7:  2 sketches
Week 8:  Ending a Campaign (article)
Week 9:  Concept art categorizer program
Week 10:  Counter & chip holder, sadly unused
Week 11:  Four deck Golden Sun liftship token
Week 12:  Single deck Knarr token
Week 13:  Single deck Skow token
Week 14:  Single deck War Cog token
Week 15:  Three deck Cutter token
Week 16:  Five Warlord Games Viking Bondi in green
Week 17:  article on Bannerlord
Week 18:  Five Viking Bondi in blue
Week 19:  Five Viking Bondi in red
Week 20:  Five Viking Bondi in brown
Week 21:  Drow Wizard, Orc Smasher, Artemis Entreri, Deepwood Sentinel, Shield Maiden
Week 22:  Skow and Warcog liftships in foam, "buildings" #1 and #2
Week 23:  Immeril, 2x mimics, chest, stump, Seething Knight, Royal Pikeman, 2x Amazon Blademistresses, 2x Nightblades, Leech Medic, Liege Knight
Week 24:  Single deck Knarr liftship in foam + magnetized masts and Skow #2, "buildings" #3, #4
Week 25:  Three deck cutter, four deck Golden Sun, "buildings" #5, #6
Week 26:  Gauth, Gwyddis, 3x Gernadier Fighting Men
Week 27:  Bases, Hellhound, Hajad, Kogo, Dijoro, high quality minis #3 and #4
Week 28:  Dragonman, Juliette, Deladrin, Wererat Stalker, Wererat Assassin
Week 29:  Kelainen, 2x Wraith Slayers, Wraith Lord & Bodyguard, 2x Wraith Duelists
Week 30:  Dungeon & Lasers scatter x15
Week 31:  paint rack #2, painting rod holder #1
Week 32:  2x Clerics with Staff and Warhammer, 2x Thieves with Shortsword and Sling
Week 33:  painting rod holder #2, oil paint bottles
Week 34:  Mal, Shadoweyes, 11-010b paladin, 42-081d Frankish Command Set, 12-050a Elf Warrior
Week 35:  4x Dark Dwarves, 2x Giant Maggots, Animunar Winterbeard, Wizard
Week 36:  Dracolisk, 3x Drow Duelists, , 4x Nolzur's Ballista
Week 37:  2x Wrath of Kings Whitemane Duelists
Week 38:  Magic items video, Adventures in Mini Painting #5 and  #6
Week 39:  4x Macedonian Phalangites, Greek Hoplite Command (warrior & dual flutist), Bril Le Anti footsoldier, 2x Tabaxi Rogues
Week 40:  8x Greek Hoplites
Week 41:  13x Stark Sworn Swords
Week 42:  12x Viking Bondi
Week 43:  2x Landsnecht Command Frames, 2x War of the Roses fully armored chaps, 2x Reaper Bones Caryatid Columns, 1x Reaper Bones Gravestone of Protection, printed stump
Week 44:  7x printed skeletons
Week 45:  3x Nolzur's spiders, Bones 4 vegetable cart, 4x Caesar's Legions Command Sprue, 2x Imperial Romans:  Plastic Scorpion crew
Week 46:  printed elfdwarf archer, 2x Reaper Bones Town Guard, Aina, Justina
Week 47:  9x printed skeletons
Week 48:  15x small printed spiders, 4x printed knights, Sir William the Peacekeeper, Dark Dwarf Striker
Week 49:  4 sets of 6x small scatter, 3x Reaper Bones Bandits, set of small scatter
Week 50:  12x broken columns, 4x color coded levers, 2x printed Cat Rogues, 3x printed Night Cult Soldiers, Marine from Chainmail
Week 51:  Osprey v2 in Lego
Week 52:  3x Grenadier Fantasy Personalities, Vatanis Maggotcrown Warlock, 6x Graveyard Finials, Iron Maiden, Skull Candelabra, Iron Golem, Mono and Duodrone, 5x armored goblins, 5x color coded knights, 2x Nolzur's xorns and an abyssal maw from Chainmail

A thing a week 2020, week 52

And we're home!  This is the penultimate post of 2020's crafting challenge but fear not, you'll be getting a wrap-up and a new challenge for 2021 which I goddamn hope is better than 2020 (the year, not the challenge, but dare to dream).  

These three are from Grenadier Fantasy Warriors Personalities, specifically 5611 Barbarian, 5612 Fighting Man, and 5613 Foot Knight which I couldn't find a link to. I'm pretty sure they came three to a blister when I bought them which might have been in the mid-90s or the mid-aughts--I've had a lot to drink since then. They came with three polearms only one of which was ever found so the non-knights got spare spears that I had in my bits box. For all three I tried to push the contrast a little more than normal but all three required different approaches. The skin tones on the barbarian followed the same scheme as the marine above. I did some "sculpting with paint" to make up for some of the mold's misgivings. Like I talkedtyped about last week, a lot of the highlighting was done with a Vallejo Model Air light skintone at Vince's recommendation.  The foot knight was lazy-painted with an airbrush with a bunch of manual shadows and highlighting with metallics and Badger Ghost Tints respectively. All three weighed in at around four hours total though it's hard to put a real number on it since I've been bouncing around the pile of stuff on my workbench.  Oh, and if it looks like the spears don't actually fit in their hands, it's because they've been superglued many, many times over the years and I was too lazy to scape it all out.

I have very mixed feelings about this Vatanis, Maggotcrown Warlock from Reaper Bones. I purchased this figure to represent a player character and did not do anywhere near enough homework before I did so. That was late march when it still looked like we might play in person at some point. Mold lines on this particular figure are awful and they run over all of the difficult details, details of which there are way too many of most of which I don't like. He feels busy for busy's sake and I don't approve. He sat on my workbench for months until I finally got fed up enough to finish painting him and not particularly well, I might add. I should have worked the blends more. I should have been more careful with the washes and shading. I should have done a lot of stuff but I didn't and he's done and I'm not going to be sad about it. I wouldn't hazard to guess how long I spent painting this guy but it was way too long for where he ended up.  

Finishing out my Bones 4 pile of random collections of samey things are these six Graveyard Finial:  Skulls.  Given the problems I had with the last few of these sets, namely that paint didn't want to stick to them, I super washed these before brush priming and still had a lot of trouble with these.  Maybe because they're small they were hard to toothbrush but I scrubbed at them real good.  They were mostly drybrushed and washed like most of my bone things but I really didn't spend a lot of time on them--I just wanted them done.  

This stylish candelabra would be at home in any wizard's arcanum.  It's from the Dungeons and Lasers kickstarter and sat on my desk for most of the year.  With it is a Wizkids Deep Cuts Iron Maiden which was a gift from a pal a while ago.  This was fun because a) it isn't a thing I'd normally buy, and b) it gave me a real fun opportunity to weather and rust some stuff which isn't a thing I often do.  The candelabra is from Dungeon & Lasers kickstarter and took up space on my workbench for most of the year picking up paint when something appropriate was unused on my palette.  It's basically Vallejo Metal Color Gold covered with Badger Minitaire ghost tint.  

That brings us to Wizkids Deep Cuts Cage and Chains.  These are also things gifted to me that I normally wouldn't buy and super took advantage of lazy airbrush painting followed by fun weathering.  The base is detachable and was lazy painted in brown with a wash.  After weathering I did a slight drybrush in a lighter silver color to pop out some of the edges that might get hit more often.  I had a lot of fun with these--turns out that weathering stuff is really fun!  I suspect we'll see more of that next year.  

These three are the last gifts in this batch from the same pal.  When I had the airbrush out and metallics in the cup, they got paint too.  This is a Nolzur's Iron Golem and basically follows the same pattern as the Iron Maiden above.  The two gold fellows are Nolzur's Monodrone and Duodrone.  They're anti-zenithaled with purple which didn't go on cleanly but it doesn't show super well on the gold dudes and was mostly covered up with additional shadow work on the golem.  Beyond picking out details like cracks and eyes and whatnot, there wasn't much going on with these guys.  I was surprised to learn that I didn't have a golem before this guy because it's a monster I use quite a lot.  I'm not sure if I'll use the Monodrone and Duodrone in play but they're fun enough models that I'll be looking for a reason to do so.  All told the three of these were done in around four hours.  

These five are armored goblins, part of a pack of 6 with one featured at the end of last year unbeknownst to me.  More specifically, they are Armored Goblin Leader complete with Giuliani dentition, Armored Goblin Spearmen, and Armored Goblin Sworsdmen.  These didn't get painted at that point because they were in parts!  I'm not used to gluing Reaper Bones together and they proved more fiddly than I expected.  I painted them up as hobgoblins because it's a monster I use a lot and it felt more proper that hobs would actually find, keep, and use real armor more than normal goblins.  These were airbrushed in metallics with a purple anti-zenithal.  More shading on the armor and other details were done with brushes notably with Badger Ghost Tints Purple and Engine Oil, the latter of which I'm starting to like a lot more than Nuln Oil.  All told we're talking maybe six hours for the five of them including assembly.

Much like the hobs above, these five are from Bones 4 and required assembly.  They were also fiddly and airbrushed with a base coat of metallics and an anti-zenithal of purple.  The teal knight next to the black knight doesn't read super well but all of the other ones landed pretty much where I wanted them to.  I put extra time on their highlighting and shadows especially on their armor which mostly doesn't show in the photos.  These guys were a lot more fiddly than the hobs but I had some time to spend and knocked them out in about six hours total.  I think they work even if they're super big.

These rocky looking dudes are D&D xorns.  Two of them are Nolzur's and like most of the line look nowhere near as nice in person as they do in the renders, and one of them is from the Chainmail Box set and for some reason called an Abyssal Maw.  I might not have painted these guys yet except that a) they were prepped and ready to go on my workbench, b) they don't require a ton of effort, and c) I was close to breaking 225 and I'm all about over-delivering.  They were anti-zenithaled and the abyssal maw was zenithaled since he was primed all over.  The first coats were mostly a brown coat provided by Pro Acryl Transparent brown + some random palette sludge green and whatever I had laying around to give them more visual interest.  Some drybrushing, a wash, some details on their teeth and eyes and a candycoat on the eyes got them here.  This is fairly lazy painting and they took maybe a couple hours with another one thrown in as prep for the abyssal maw which had to be assembled.

That's going to do it for A Thing a Week 2020, folks.  Tune in soon for the wrap-up and A Thing a Week 2021!

Final 2020 finished mini counter:  226/50

A thing a week 2020, week 51

One more to go after today for 2020 which honestly can't be done soon enough.  In breaking with recent tradition, we're not talking minis today.  I'd feel weird holding a completed miniature done this year but counting toward next year so since I've got time off right now and I'm doing a lot of painting, we'll blow out 2020 with a flurry of hobbying...and some setup so that 2021 can start stronk.

This is a rebuild of a ship I built way back in 2020 which is a design from the comic I drew in the mid 90s.  It's interesting to think about all the stuff that's changed since then.  I'd only built three SHIPs, been to one show, and won one trophy (currently fourteen, ten, and eight respectively).  I've moved three times and changed jobs five times which is more of a reflection on the volatility of the games biz more than anything.  I've re-kindled my love of tabletop RPGs, built four-ish full systems (some variations) and finished three multi-year campaigns.  All of my mini painting this century is between these two points as is all of my BBQing and coffee roasting.  Seems like a lot when I writetype it out like that.

The original build was awfully fiddly and really didn't want to stay together at all.  I think I brought it to BrickFair VA 2011.  For the next four-ish years I've thought I should rebuild it.  In fact, when I moved to my current home in the Pacific Northwest and got my Lego area sorted sometime in 2015, I did try to rebuild it.  Badly.  I put maybe twenty hours into it trying to get the angles right and experimenting with getting the right proportions.  I may have gone through three iterations of different construction methods before chucking the thing with most of my dark blue collection in a bin and hiding it under a table.

Another five years would go by before I revisited the project.  This year has been demonstrably crap and my work from home desk is my Lego desk.  SHIPtember probably wasn't happening this year but it really couldn't without a real space to build.  My second table in this room is smaller and has been a dumping ground for Lego related stuff for years now.  Among other things, I made a concerted effort to clean it and low and behold, the Osprey prototype turned up.  I'd really like to build another SHIP, a really big and complicated one, so right around Virtual BrickCon this year, I got back to it.

Another twenty-ish hours in small chunks over a month or so solved most of the biggest problems I had.  It sits at an angle to reduce the weight on the wings which sags noticeably if the ship is horizontal.  Also, it looks like it's taking off which is cool.  I'm glad to have this guy complete, not just because it frees up quite a lot of brick in a color I quite like.  It's more that it isn't hanging over my head anymore which counts for something.

A thing a week 2020, week 50

This week...minis.  No one should be surprised at this point, I suppose, but first:  some housekeeping.

I forget when these columns were painted but the date on the source photos is from early May.  I'd also forgotten that I'd taken the pictures so imagine my surprise to find out that I indeed had these to show for this year.  These are assorted Tiny Terrain columns which I'm pretty sure are resin casts of a filament print.  These were washed and drybrushed as much of my stonework and I feel comfortable counting these as three toward my 2020 numbers.

These four color-coded levers are from the Dungeon and Lasers kickstarter from last year. I quite like these and expect to use them in my in-person games quite a lot when that's a thing we can do again. Not much to say here; they're pretty straightforward and spent most of the year sittng on my workbench picking up random bits of paint when it was available. Best guess for total paint time is a couple hours for all four which seems really slow.

These two are 3D printed cat rogues.  Well, at least, I hope that's obvious.  As has been established previously, there are a lot of cat people in my games and this guy's STL was free which is right up my alley (no pun intended).  These guys had several challenges that mostly went OK.  His fur is black which is already rough, but his coat was also supposed to be black with a yellow shirt.  I wanted to differentiate these two as warm and cold greys but I think I over did it.  He reads as a blue cat wearing a purple cloak.  The yellow is played by yellow ochre.  Everything was pre-washed with Pro Acryl transparents and finished off with other Pro Acryl paints.  I've been spending a lot of time painting with terrible paints so this was a special treat.  In all, we're talking around five hours for both of them which I'm not unhappy with.  I'm pretty sure I'll print these guys again so next time around I think I'll try to desaturate the dark colors a little more--they're a bit stark.  

These three are 3D printed night cult soldiers I also got for free.  I think they go to a wargame that I don't play but they were a) fun looking, and, b) free so I picked them up, printed, and painted them.  I didn't need them to be all the same color so they aren't, though I'm a little disappointed in the level of details on them.  That said, I think they turned out pretty well given the time spent and I could see printing a few more to represent cultists or something.  They were a speed paint done in around three hours for the lot of them, blasting past my extended-extended 2020 goal.  One notable experiment with these guys is that they're highlighted with a blend of the base color and a light skintone as recommended by Vince.  This works amazingly well even on the ochre color and I'm really starting to prefer this to highlighting with warm off whites.

Right around the turn of the century, Wizards of the Coast reached back into their backlog for a thing to capitalize on. Chainmail is arguably one of the foundational works for all of tabletop roleplaying. It was a set of miniature wargame rules from a time when miniatures were a) primitive, b) limited, and c) made of lead. This buff lad is the marine from the starter set. He's painted not particularly well but then again, I don't particularly like this figure. Best way to get yourself killed in a real fight? Don't wear sufficient armor. At any rate, this guy's been sitting on my workbench for a while and I need to clean up some space for the beginning of next year's festivities. I experimented quite a lot with his skin tones which worked out OK even if my color choices were poor. All told, he was around 3 hours from start to finish.

2020 finished mini counter:  202/50

A thing a week 2020, week 49

Welp, on the week I was working on this, somewhere in the middle of November, I was trying to get the point that I could clean off one (really, both) of my hobby tables.  As part of this exercise I tried to work through the veritable army sitting primed and shaded on my workbench.  I've also been really busy so I'm bummed about having finished most of my lazy painting figs already.

These six...whatevers these are Reaper claims to be Graveyard Finials: Mystic and came through Reaper Bones 4.  I think they look like lumpy globes but I figured they were magic so I painted them thusly.  This was mostly a speed paint through the months as I had the right color paints around.  I wouldn't hazard a guess to the painting time if I'm honest but for some reason paint beaded up off of them even after priming twice.  I'll probably use them as puzzle pieces if we ever get to play in person again.  Bones 4 counts the six of them as one fig so they'll count one toward my total.

These six are clearly gargoyles and also came from Reaper Bones 4 but I can't find a link to them.  In actuality they were painted forever ago but I need to stop pushing quite so much of a bow wave since we're running out of year.  These are the epitome of lazy painting:  basically primed + wash + drybrush and *blam* stone, or at least something that passes for it.  I toyed with the idea of tinting them but ended up not and they also only count as one toward my goal.  Curse you Bones 4 mini counting incongruities!  Painting time for these is probably counted in minutes.  

These six, similarly, are Graveyard Finials:  Orbs and similarly six linkless flamey pots. These guys also had the seriously distressing feature of paint not sticking to them even after serious priming.  I have no idea why but it was super annoying.

I did the same color coding as the finials above for the same reason:  painting them all the same color seemed lame and also as stated above, I have need of color-coded tchotchkes for various puzzles and markers I use in my games.  

Next up we have scatter from Dungeons and Lasers kickstarter from last year. Stairs and other scatter showed up in week 30 and these were painted, photographed, and forgotten about right around then. The two statues were painted just like the gargoyles and the barrels were drybrushed then glazed.

The sword and the stone (minus the metallics which came after) and the dragon skull were washed and drybrushed like the statues.  The hardest part was the coffin, especially since the lid fits on it and I couldn't super easily drybrush the skellington within.  There's no good accounting for these but four toward the goal seems appropriate.  

These three are Reaper Bones Brigands from...yeah, you guessed it:  Bones 4.  These are also very cartoony figures but I like these a lot more.  I paid quite a lot of attention to detail and really wanted to push the contrast on these guys.  The green, an ancient Reaper pot, was highlit with a Vallejo Air Beige which did some real work lightening the dark green.  I'm not great at layering but this one was awfully fun as the highlights built up.  Next, I took the browns and tans of the rest of the fig to a relatively high contrast. I think this worked OK.  The faces were actually done first as I'd done a "facing" pass on many of the figs on the work bench.  All told these three less-than-savory creatures were done in around six hours total.

2020 finished mini counter:  193/200

A thing a week 2020, week 48

More minis this week as promised and some of this is supremely lazy painting.  This is the big push to 200 for the year and these figs were mostly painted in the second week of November.  Given that this is going live after Thanksgiving, I'm starting to need to pile some stuff up.  Also true that I have a lot of other stuff that's going to get in the way of painting not limited to the cleaning I haven't done any of the year since I haven't had a single in-person party this year.  

Here's a pile of free, self-supported set of spiders printed at a half inch or so.  I use these a lot in my games but somehow don't have very many spider figs.  This is the epitome of lazy painting, really a couple dry brushes to pick out volumes with a colored candy coat over the top.  They won't get magnetized because I'm just not that worried about them--they can live with the other swarmers in a bin.  There are 15 in total but I can't really count them as full figs so we'll count them 3 to a fig weighing in at 5 total.  The effort involved here was maybe an hour for all of them.  I kind of want to experiment with this kind of painting more than I have any particular need for 15 more spiders.  Though, now that I saytype it, I know that the player characters are super bad bout needing piles of bads.  So there's that.  You should expect more of these in the future.

These four knights are 3D prints from a free model which I can't be bothered to look up.  They were printed pretty early on in owning my printer and even now I'm still fiddling with scale.  These are true scale which makes their heads and hands look really super duper small and look tiny even against a lot of my vintage 25mm figs.  I also snapped the swords of two of them, one never to be found and I didn't have a good replacement weapon in my parts bin.  The remainder of the hilt looks like a lollypop so we've got that going for us.  Also during the painting of them, I noticed that there are some pretty significant printing errors which shouldn't be that surprising since they were some of the first figs I printed.  They were shaded with an airbrush in like 2 minutes with a nuln oil wash and brush-painting of their tabbards.  We're under an hour for the four.

This guy is Reaper Bones Sir William the Peacemaker from Bones 4.  Like Ava Justina in week 46, I am not a fan of this sculpt.  The mold lines weren't a super problem but the guy is almost a cartoon and has similarly soft details.  Despite this, I put quite a lot of effort into this guy.  I wanted to experiment shading with true metallic metals and I did a bunch of lining to make up for the fig's softness.  The base metallics were shot through my airbrush in a "I should get more use out of this thing" kind of way.  I minorly adjusted this with Pro Acryl silver and pulling down with Badger Ghost Tint Midnight Blue.  About four hours got me here.  Some of that worked but I clearly need to push it further and the blue candy coat on his shield is pretty awful.  

You can cancel the search for the missing dark dwarf because he's here and found paint!  This Reaper Bones Dark Dwarf Striker from Bones 4 should have been on the victory podium way back in week 35 but sadly, he was lost and deprived of his glory...until now!  I found him several weeks ago in the bin full of figs that didn't require assembly and he made it through the priming gauntlet and onto the desk of painting.  He followed the same basic airbrushing with metallics as Sir Bill above but unfortunately we'll have to wait a bit longer to get the TMM at higher fidelity--this guy was a speed paint.  I did some but not much but he is done in the span of a couple hours all told.  

2020 finished mini counter:  182/50

A thing a week 2020, week 47

Last week I pushed the quality on a fig because I felt like I should.  This week we're back to speed paints because I can.  Also, because I'm running out of desk space.  Not sure when this happened, but I've started liking prep work.  Building, printing, priming, shading and all that jazz has somewhere become really interesting.  Maybe it's because I can bust through a lot of figs in not a lot of time.  Maybe it's because the stuff near the top of my work queue is stuff I'm not super interested in painting.  Dunno.

These are nine more 3D printed skeletons.  You may be surprised to learn that the seven skellingtons back in week 44 were only the second batch I've painted (the first were featured and photographed terribly last August from Bones 4 kickstarter).  With these nine I now have twenty (!) badly painted skeletons that I can use in my supposedly-in-person Saturday game whenever we can play in person again.

You may note that some of these guys have different shields.  The first batch of three failed on their shields because I didn't support them properly.  Did I mention that 3D printing is its own hobby?  Their shields smeared out and in trying to break them off, I pulled their freakin' arms off like a gundark.  Luckily, my bits box is fairly full so they got Bondi shields.  I'm getting better at the printing thing but it's a pretty serious effort still.

Primed and basecoated/highlit with the airbrush were the first two steps as per usual.  I should have done more with the highlighting but I was lazy.  I'd planned on slapping a couple washes and some metallics and then calling them done but I went a little crazy.  I've never weathered anything...until now!  I don't think the rust sells particularly well up close but they work OK on the tabletop and more importantly, I learned a ton doing it.

The only other note is the bases which were printed with the minis.  I've started painting these kinds of things with palette sludge.  What's palette sludge?  It's the half-dried or super-watery things left on the palette from a week of painting.  I mix these into pseudo-desaturated shades and wet blend them into something vaguely stone toned.  I usually want two hues blending between and some highlight to catch edges but I don't think this particular set worked super well--I rather killed it with the wash.  Live and learn, I suppose.

Overall these guys were something like three-ish hours for the nine of them which is about as fast as I can go at the moment without, I dunno, super-lazy painting armor or stone or something.  Tune in next week when I lazy-paint some armored figs!  Also, it's looking a lot like I'll break 200 figs this year, 4x what I expected to hit, and probably not a thing I'm going to be able to do very often, so I'ma revel in it a bit this year.

Finished mini counter:  171/50

A thing week 2020, week 46

Last week we had lazy painting, this week we have less lazy painting.   I guess it's all about contrast.  As such, I didn't keep up my last few weeks' pace of more than one fig per day on average and I cannot be bothered to back-date something even though I'm like four weeks ahead at this point.

This guy is an elfdwarf archer which I printed.  He has the distinction of being self-supported which is great because I didn't have to do any real work to get him to print.  My best guess is that most of my collection is 28mm but it spans 25mm and 32mm and whatever the crap the ASOIAF guys are.  So when I print minis, I tend to scale them down to fit in with what I think is most of my collection.  Well, I scaled this guy down too far.  He's 28mm from his feet to the top of his bow which is way over his eye line.  So I've decided he's a dwarf and, yes, dwarves in my worlds have pointed ears like the ones out of Earthdawn so that works.

Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum here are Reaper Bones Town Guard from Bones 4 kickstarter and they are enormous.  I've got a pile of figs primed, shaded, and ready to go on my hobby desk and I'm (very) slowly working on a set of figs that I don't super want to paint.  Everything that's not those guys look much better than they might otherwise which cause them to get painted first.  These sculpts are good even if I didn't handle the mold lines super well and I spent more time than I might otherwise have on them.  I wanted to push the contrast on their non-metallics which worked...OK. At the time of this typing, now a few weeks after the painting, they don't really hold up under scrutiny and the metallics look really, really sloppy. These are OK at tabletop distance and finished in maybe five-ish hours over a couple of days.

This is a Reaper Bones Aina, Female Valkyrie.  I am not supposed to like this figure.  She has terrible armor, a bendy sword, and completely impractical long flowy hair.  Sometimes I just can't help myself.  Probably because so many of the last few were speedy paints, I spent a comparatively long time on this one.  I had high hopes of doing NMM and then didn't do any of that.  I really have to work on doing NMM like things in real metallic metals because my metallic shading on this fig was shit.  That sucks because I thought the cloth, her hair, and her face were well done, notably the first things I finished.  There are angles that I think she looks really good, notably the angle she's facing and for that I'm going to count her toward my high quality figs for the year.  Total painting time was somewhere around nine hours which at this point seems lavish.  

I started Ava Justina, Female Templar (from Bones 4) at about the same time as Aina and I wanted another crack at metallica shading.  The majority of the base coat is the same Vallejo Game Air Chainmail Silver with shadows of their Gunmetal and heavily thinned Badger Ghost Tint Oil Discharge.  The bronze is Pro Acryl with Ghost Tint Golden Yellow and this time I don't think it worked out very well and I'm not 100% sure why.  Overall, we're talking three-ish hours a bunch of which was her face and hair and I'm not super unhappy with the result.  I think the shading on the metallics worked OK which just means I need more practice.   I will say that I generally like stylized characters but I'm finding some of these chunky Bones 4 sculpts to be more clownish than awesome.  

2020 finished mini counter:  162/50, 8/5 high quality

A thing a week 2020, week 45

More minis this week and probably for the majority of the remainder of the year.  Gotta get through that pile, of shamepotential, yo.  This week we've got speed paints and almost in a theme:  "stuff that's easy to paint."  So there's that.

Here are three Nolzur's Marvelous Unpainted Miniatures:  W1 Spiders and they are terrible.  I've talkedwritten quite a lot about my growing disapproval of the Nolzur's line.  This is particularly due to the difficulty in painting and the lousy mold lines.  For these figs there's also their spindly-ness and resulting difficulty in gluing them to their bases.  I have no idea how they expected these guys to fit on the supplied 1" bases.  I based them on 35mm bases and they barely fit.  The colored banding was painted first with a candy coat of Badger Minitaire Ghost Tint Brown which was followed with a Vallejo Dark Grey Wash, and no I don't get kickbacks for these.  I opened the blister containing these creepies years ago and they were such a pain I stuck them back in and in a pile but they're as done as they're likely to get now.

These four are a Hail Caesar Caesar's Legions Command Sprue since renamed.  I'm pretty sure these guys were built improperly.  I mean, one guy has two swords for crying out loud.  Beyond that, they're painted very simply as glazes over a zenithal+anti-zenithal.  The shields were painted separately and glued after the fact and I wish I'd paid more attention on how they attached so I would have painted the backs of them better.  The whole batch (these four plus the next two) were painted over two-ish days to the tune of about six hours total including assembly.

These two are the crew of Imperial Romans:  Plastic Scorpion which I bought mostly for the scorpion.  I had a need for ballista, these guys were on sale, and I was already buying stuff.  Subsequently I bought 4x Reaper Ballista which fit the bill a little better featured way back in Week 36.  The scorpion itself has been based but has yet to be painted so expect that at some point in the unforseeable future.  These guys were part of the previous batch's six-ish hours and they'll be based with their equipment.  Watch this space!

This is a cart from Reaper Bones 4 kickstarter and I can't find a real link on their site.  It's been partly done on my workbench for many weeks and at one point I had the right colors out so I finished it.  I didn't put a ton of effort into it which probably shows.  Once I'd finished I started thinking through Bones 4 and I don't recall having any spare horses or other beasts of burden in there.  Reviewing the core set, this cart is pulled by a pig!  The pig has been located and will show up here at some point.  More lazy painting.  Hooray!

2020 finished mini counter:  157

A thing a week 2020, week 44

As discussed for the last few posts, several weeks ago I broke down and bought a 3D printer.  It was round three or four of my roughly eight month cycle of "wow, that'd be fun to build stuff with" and "I have too many hobbies and stuff already."  I knew I would eventually break down but it seemed like most of the hobbying media I consume started talking about how awesome resin printers were right around the beginning of the summer.  I suppose I'd already lost that fight. I've got some pretty lofty goals for it which is going to require me to do some 3d modeling and I've got to say that I'm finding Blender to be an awful, unintuitive beast of a thing.

3D printing is its own hobby and has its own learning curve and despite the fact that most of the goods are digital, they can still be super spendy.  The seven skellingtons are a free set that mostly printed correctly.  Properly supporting figures is an art form and one I'm not good at.  Luckily, these guys came pre-supported but were a goddamn pain to de-support after the fact which is evidenced by the fact that many of them still have some of the supports still attached.   I hid these ineffectively as spearpoints sticking in the skellington.  They're a speed paint as one might expect (I mean, they're skeletons, what do you want?) and I think they look OK.  

The bases are Green Stuff World texture rollers over Extra Firm Super Sculpey with some sand stuck to the base.  I was going for a "dark temple floor with faintly glowing red runes" which, I dunno, almost sells.  I could have sold it more with some OSL but I wasn't super interested in doing that for these guys though I certainly could have.  Base coat was skeleton bone and washed with home-made wash adulterated with matte medium and made forever ago for terrain.  Overall, including basing which happened over several days (glue takes time to dry, yo) these were done in right around six hours total which is about how long they took to print.

You might also notice a lighter background in these shots. I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to improve the shoots here and picked up a bigger piece of supposedly-black poster board. I might print a cradle for the camera to avoid my awful shaky-cam shots. The small dollar store tripods I've been using are a little too tall, still, and I've got more work to do to sort out my lighting.

2020 finished mini counter:  147/50

A thing a week 2020, week 43

I've now had my 3D printer for a couple weeks, this one, if you're curious.  As a result I've been spending quite a lot of time trying to make it work which I'm sure I'll talkwrite more about sometime later.  What better time for some lazy painting?

These two are a pair of Pike & Shotte Landsnecht Command Frames.  They were painted mostly with an airbrush as they are mostly covered in plate armor.  I'm pretty sure I bought these on sale at the end of last year.  I bought two of them and I suspect that if I'd realized they were a single character per frame I wouldn't have bought them as they're over my typical $4 per fig limit.  They got primed, shot from below with a mix of dark blue and dark metal, Vallejo Metal Color Steel from 90 degrees, and a brighter color from the top.  Details were picked out with a bronze-y highlights from back in Week 40 painting hoplites and everything covered with a gloss wash.  Overall, less than an hour for both and I like the results despite my less-than-even spraying.  

These two are from the Perry Miniatures War of the Roses:  Infantry (1455-1487) (since then, rebranded).  This is a set of 40 figures only four of which are fully-armored men at arms--when I bought them I thought they were all full plate figures.  At an extremely affordable less-than-one-dollar per fig, they make up for my Landsnecht Command Frames above.  They were painted pretty much in the same scheme above at the same time, even.  The bases are rolled-out Extra Firm Sculpey rolled out with a Green Stuff World texture roller (this one, I think). They're glued to a normal 25mm base with some coarse sand and painted with washes to dirty them up.  I was going for a busted up temple floor thing which worked OK.  Ironically, I spent more time on the bases than painting the figs.  

In keeping with the lazy painting scheme, these are two are Reaper Bones Caryatid Columns and a single Reaper Bones Gravestone of Protection.  I use golems like these quite a lot in my games so I was pretty excited to paint these.  I use a fairly predictable recipe for stone.  Prime + dark wash + drybrush + lighter drybrush--lazy painting at its finest.  I didn't even get the opportunity to base them reasonably because I quite like their built-in bases.  Total expenditure:  less than an hour for all three including prep. 

I sometimes don't count terrain toward my figure goals but this one is for sure going to be counted.  When I got my 3D printer I tried to print the test model that came with the device...which failed.  I also made a giant mess trying to clean stuff up.  So it wasn't a particularly auspicious beginning to my 3D printing.  I was pretty sure I'd messed something up until I started reading stuff online and it turns out that there's something wrong with the test model.  The next print I tried was this guy which printed perfectly.  In fact, every subsequent print has been good minus stuff I screwed up.  So this is officially my first successful 3D print which is now painted.

2020 finished mini counter:  140/50

A thing a week 2020, week 42

I've been trying to justify buying a 3d printer.  This is a fairly useless effort because I know that I'm going to buy one anyway, but it didn't stop me from cataloging my minis in near totality.  I've excluded my Star Fleet Battles figs for...reasons.  For fun, I also added counts for all of the unfulfilled kikckstarters I've backed.  What I'd hoped is that I'd come out with a "mostly done" kind of number.  I don't know why I thought that.  What I got was a big number completely dwarfed by an even bigger number.  Turns out I'm just over 20% though a pile of shamepotential of close to 1600 figs.  So I got that goin' for me.  

Because my backlog is so large and the pile of boxes is becoming difficult to step over, I decided to work through some of the partially-done boxes that are taking up space.  These are the final 12 Viking Bondi that we saw earlier this year completing the set of 32.  With the other 16 guys of the exact same molds named Saxon Fyrd Warriors, I have a veritable army of these guys. 

Instead of building what seemed fun, I took stock of the existing guys to see where more representation was warranted.  That ended up being some bowmen, some dual wielders, and a few dudes with warhorns that I don't have rules for (yet).  One of the archers ended up with a bow kitbashed from elsewhere because I was short one.  He shouldn't be hard to spot.  The weird poses were because there was a distinct shortage of left arms that could take a weapon.  The color scheme was basically "what would look OK that isn't already represented" which translated to "teal, purple, and golden brown delicious" so if they look a little garish, that's why.  I also used a couple new Pro Acryl metallics to see if they're any good and the nicest thing I can say is that they're not as good as Vallejo Metal Colors--accept no substitutes.  

These were based in place prior to painting and done as a batch over several days.  I recorded the building time for these guys and I was surprised to find it was around 4 for the dozen of them.  I wouldn't have guessed I spent this long building and scraping mold lines, especially given how lousy a job I did of both.  While the last batch of 20 seemed very tedious indeed, these seemed a lot less so and didn't take nearly as long per fig despite being done to a higher quality.  No fancy tricks here, really, just another batch paint on the heels of last weeks' Stark Sworn Swords running around 21 hours from clipping the first parts off the sprue to the end of painting.  I think these are fine overall for a speed paint and I'm happy to complete the box.

2020 finished mini counter:  132/50