A thing a week 2020, week 22

And now for something completely different.  The campaign I started this spring involves airliftships, the online 2D assets of which are well-represented here.  Some day we won't be relegated to online play only and I was pretty sure that building nice props would be fairly involved.  Turns out, I was right!

These are the first two I built and they involved a lot of experimentation before settling on a general construction scheme.  I build similar curves in Lego which is a lot less forgiving of a medium and I ended up using many similar techniques.  I started with a piece of Readi-board with a template pasted to it.  Once cut out, I texture with a pen or wire brush and then use scrap pieces to rough out a shape.  For these two I built the keel first and matched the planking to it.  For other builds I built the planking first and attached the keel to that.

Readi-board is not well known for its strength so craft sticks were glued to the bottom of the deck to strengthen it.  These are for play, after all.  After that, it's a matter of adding planking to form the hull.  The basic shape is filled with scrap and whittled away to give the right angles.  For the first one, I started at the bottom and worked up then cut the edges clean at the top.  For the second one I started with the top row.  I like the look of the first more but it took a lot more effort as each plank needed to be shaped to even remotely line up correctly. 

Like all of my foam crafts, these got a coating of Mod Podge + black craft paint to seal and strengthen.  This was followed by a golden brown base coat with the aibrush and a couple layers of homemade black wash.  The hulls were then drybrushed with final details applied with normal brushes.  I used mini paints on these rather than craft paints.  I don't like throwing stuff out and I'm trying to productively get through my Army Painter droppers before I binge buy a bunch more.

You've probably noted that there are no masts or other fiddly hang-on details on purpose--these are game pieces first.  I settled for painting on the locations of masts and stairs because I don't want that stuff to get in the way of getting figs on there.  This is the same reason I don't put walls in my buildings.  I may explore modular ways to attach these that can be removed during play but it isn't a strict need and I don't think I'll get to it anytime soon.  I've got more of these in the works and unsurprisingly they're becoming more intricate.  These qualify as "buildings" for my 2020 challenge. 

2020 finished buildingsstructure counter:  2/5

A thing a week 2020, week 21

This week (actually, a couple weeks ago; I've got a backlog) marks a significant shift in how I'm painting.  Two weeks ago I mentioned discovering one James Wappel and being mesmerized by his style.  I've now had time to digest at least some of his approach and it's made a pretty big difference.  I still can't claim to be any good and might never be able to claim so, but this is going a lot more in a direction I like than stuff I've done so far.

All of these figs are speed paints.  The first elf is a Drow Wizard from The Legend of Drizzt board game.  The sculpts of these aren't bad but the molding is lousy.  I had to guess at a lot of the details.  The elf was done in a single sitting in about 2 hours after value sketch and was my first attempt at Wappel's shaded basecoat approach.  It photographed very poorly.  In particular, the eyes don't look quite so lousy in person.


The "bugbear" is an Orc Smasher from the Wrath of Ashardalon board game (oops) and was done in about 3 hours from the same state over a couple days and it photographed much better than it looks in person.  I ended with some glazes that were far too heavy knocking out a lot of the highlights.  I certainly could have fixed this but didn't feel it was necessary.   Also, the metal medium really didn't work over the teal mail as expected.



The dude with the sword is Artemis Entreri also from The Legend of Drizzt board game.  It's also a three hour paint job with way too much of it spent feebly attempting NMM.  I gave up and blasted over it with metallics as should be obvious.  To be fair, Vallejo Metal Colors are awesome.  I'm also noticing in the shot that the Army Painter paints I used for the awful glazing on the cloak went glossy.  I shoulda known that would happen.


The blonde gal is a Deepwood Sentinel from Mage Knight Lancers.  When I started painting For Realz(TM) it was before I had the thousands of unpainted figs I do now.  That summer I stripped a couple dozen figs that I intended to practice on.  This fig and the next one sat badly stripped and badly primed in my "todo" pile for the last two years.  I spent extra effort on the eyes which have distinct pupils, irises, and a reflection point.  The photography, naturally, doesn't show this super well.


The gal with the shield is a Shield Maiden also from Mage Knight Lancers.  Her original paint job featured a lot of metal and a bare midriff which makes no sense whatsoever.  I thought the plate sculpt looked better as cloth so I painted it thusly.  The green that keeps showing up is from an ancient pot of Reaper paints that I bought in like 2004 on the other side of the country.  I like this fig despite the shield arm being bizarre and definitely not how one might carry a shield like that.

There's a lot to like with this approach--I'll break it down some other time in more detail.  The painting in general is much easier and I can stop at relatively low time investments with something presentable.  It encourages a focus on light and overall composition in ways that are way easier to visualize than the far more typical "many layers on a specific feature"--both things that I've struggled with.

I think if I'd found James' stuff in 2016 during my last failed attempt to learn rather than the more traditional stuff, I probably wouldn't have been scared off for two years.  To be fair, I'm helped more than a little by a reasonable foundation from my studies of Vince's approach but they're both lining up in similar directions.  Not ironically, it was one of Vince's Interview with the Artist videos that started me down that path.  You should watch at least the first like fifteen minutes of that if you like mini painting at all.

2020 finished mini counter:  27/50

A thing a week 2020, week 20

As telegraphed last week, this is the rest of the batch of 20 Viking Hirdmen from the last couple weeks.  And if you're wondering, I have 12 of them in reserve and not at all because I'm tired of these guys.  These were actually finished last week but I've got longer-running projects going so I'm happy to have a backlog. 

As I've said before, these are not good paint jobs, but as Shoe likes to say, "the best color for a miniature is painted."  All told these...five...took a total of maybe eight hours including prep, priming, value sketch, faces, and other colors.  That's a heck of a lot faster than I usually go.  Notably, the axe guy showed up for the group shot. 

Like I mentioned last time, I've been trying to clear my workbench for other projects that these guys were in the way for.  Some of that is more minis which will show up here eventually.  Some of it will hopefully be some model building which I've been wanting to revisit since my last building was more than a year ago.

2020 finished mini counter:  22/50

A thing a week 2020, week 19

I've been on a painting kick this week partly because I finally have unencumbered time in which to paint and partially fueled by the discovery of one James Wappel whose painting style is both interesting and amazing.  These figs don't show any of that since I'm still trying to figure out how he does what he does.

Like I've noted the last couple weeks, these are not good paint jobs--they're not supposed to be.  This is speed painting at its most basic.  I've been trying to clear my workspace to build some stuff out of foam which is hard with a couple dozen figs about.  If memory serves these guys finished up in around 10 hours total.  I put extra effort into the value sketch up front with the intent to do simple glazing to get the appropriate variation.  That kind of worked.  My glazing game isn't great. 

There's another batch of these guys done which we'll probably see next week.  It also occurs to me that these guys are missing their shields so we'll get a group shot in too.  Banking these allows me to work on more involved projects so hopefully we'll see some fun stuff in the next month. 

2020 finished mini counter:  17/50

A thing a week 2020, week 18

This week we're back to painting.  There are two more batches of 5 in various levels of done-ness so you'll hopefully see those soon.  Like the last batch I'm relying on detailed faces done several months ago to a reasonable standard.  The speed paint job done this week on the rest of it is a half step up from the ones I did two weeks ago.  There's some shading on the clothes and hair but not a ton and generally, the wash obscures all of that. 

I said it last time and I'll repeat it again here:  these are not high quality paint jobs.  They're averaging something like 2-3 hours each all told but a) I have a lot of minis to paint, and b) they're taking up space that I need to start other projects. 

2020 finished mini counter:  12/50