A thing a week 2020, week 3

Like last week, this week we have a mini.  This is a Reaper Bones Highland Heroine and a fig I like quite a lot.  This was the original figure I wanted to take to the highest quality I could more than a year ago at the end of 2018.  She sat partially painted all of last year as a reminder that I had no idea how far I could take a figure.  She's painted for Finch, the northern warrior in my Saturday game and every time she took the field, I had to have a standin--another sad reminder.

Even though I had other projects going, I decided at the very tail end of last year to finish.  The cloak is wet blended at an OK level.  The lows and highs are good but the midtones are weak.  Her hair is many (many) layers including washes and drybrushing that doesn't really come through. 

And now I get to talkwrite about all the things that are super wrong.  Her sword is bent.  This is a common thing for Bones figures.  You can usually straighten that stuff out in very hot tap water but this one wouldn't.  Next up, I did a crap job with mold lines.  This is also hard with bones since they're mostly all white and they're hard to see.  How hard?  Well, I cut a bunch of the actual molding on her right leg with a very sharp knife trying to get rid of one.  I painted the strapping to make up for it but if you look close, it's clearly very wrong.  The paint is heavy in places because last year I didn't really know a) how to prime, and b) how to thin paint properly.  She might be one of the last figs I primed with rattle cans which I'm super bad at.

The fur on her cloak looks good as does the strapping minus where I had to make it up because I destroyed the molding.  The metal disks are super washed with Nuln gloss which really popped them out.  I also put real effort into tonal variation and color wheel balance.  Even though I didn't do any freehand (tartan or something would be appropriate), I think she looks good.

What I think went best was her face.  The eyes on the sculpt are already big so I painted them as big anime eyes.  Since they were so (relatively) big, I did lit colored irises in her eyes with a reflection point for the first time.  Her skin is well-shaded and I tried to account for a lower jaw sculpt that felt weak to me.  My shading doesn't hold up super well under scrutiny but  it works on the table.

Overall, I think this might be a shade lower quality than last week's offering but better than average.  I can only guess at the work time with a year's pause between but I'd go with 30-35 hours total, maybe 20ish of which was done in the last three weeks.  I'm pretty sure nothing of the original paint job exists.  She's better in person than in these shots which my phone super struggled with.  I might have to break out the nice camera in the future. 

2020 finished mini counter:  2/50