A thing a week 2020, week 23

This week we're back to minis.  These were done over a couple weeks around other larger projects like last week's liftships.  These are continuing the theme of "stuff I've had on my workbench for too long."

First up we have Immeril from the Temple of Elemental Evil Boardgame.  This is a fig that got a lot of play as a player character a few years ago and it's a surprisingly good sculpt so it's been good to finally paint him.  This, like many of my other more recent works was a speed paint over zenithaled primer.  I was apprehensive about OSL but I'd just watched one of James Wappel's patreon videos on the topic.  Also, he's holding a freakin' fireball.  I think it worked out for what I put in which isn't super much.  Overall it was about four hours over a couple days.  I will almost certainly do more OSL work in the future and I'm happy with this first attempt.

These guys are a bunch of random bits that I'd purchased recently that needed paint.  The two on the left are (obviously) mimics, one of my favorite bads.  The next one is a badly-molded chest that I paid too much money for and the last one is a stump.  I generally don't like buying stuff I can build and both the stump and the chest are treading into that territory but I was already buying stuff and close to the $100 free shipping at Miniature Market.  The chest's casting is absolutely abysmal and no amount of paint was going to fix that.  I could have used Green Stuff to fix it but I didn't.  These were speed painted in about four hours all told.  The yellows are probably too bold and the lighting isn't great on these but they're painted and that counts for something.

Next up we have a Seething Knight and Royal Pikeman from Mage Knight.  These guys had been stripped badly and primed badly for a couple years so I was happy to finally get paint on them.  Like many Mage Knight figures, these guys have bent weapons.  I replaced the top part of the Pikeman's weapon with a piece from another fig.  It's super glued on--nothing fancy gong on here.  They photographed poorly despite changing up the background and lighting which is an indication that I should both fix my lighting and use a better camera.

The third shot is a group paint.  These folks are also from Mage Knight.  From left to right:  a pair of Amazon Blademistresses, a Nightblade, a Woodland Scout, and a Liege Knight.  These figs were in pretty poor shape.  The crap they painted them with really did not want to come off so some of the fine features got melted in addition to leaving crap in the details that I wasn't able to fully remove.  I replaced the sword of the Blademistress on the left again supergluing a weapon from a different figure.  The Nightblade is in teal and purple as an experiment that I don't think worked out super well.  I like the scout best of all of these sculpts but unfortunately, it suffered the worst of all of the figs during stripping.  Her sword has also been replaced.  The Liege Knight shows one of the super-bent weapons that are so common for MK figs.  He was partially painted for a good long time.  These five were maybe eight hours over two-ish days from where they were to this level.

The last one is another Nightblade and one that I spent entirely too long with.  I shouldn't like these figs given their dumb fantasy getups, bad proportions, and lousy stances, but I do.  This one's been altered quite a lot.  The stance is held by the blocks glued to the base and is under considerable pressure.  Her left arm has also been removed, shortened, and pinned though I left the lousy sword as is.  Her paint scheme is pretty much the same one the fig came with and I used it as practice in painting black leather.  This, like the others, was also a speed paint though some of it was done quite a while ago.

These should round out the Mage Knight figures that I'm likely to paint this year.  I've got a few that are almost stripped unmounted but I think I've run out of interest in working on these.  I suppose if I stumbled upon a better way to strip them I might revisit but at this point I don't think that's likely.  These re-taught me a valuable lesson:  I tend to get bogged down with stuff that I'm not excited about or that seems tedious which means I spend less time painting, a lot more time procrastinating, and thus I get a lot less done.  I'm reminded of last year's Regault Battlepods which is the last time I re-learned this lesson.  I think my strategy moving forward is working in smaller batches and only on stuff I think will be fun.

Painting-wise, I've done a lot of experimenting with these so 2018 me should be pretty pleased with that.  I'm starting to grok Wappel's shaded basecoat thing which is definitely speeding up my work and, I feel, boosting the quality ever so slightly.  I'm also doing a lot more mixing and planning of colors.  I super like getting rough blocked colors on the fig early in the process.  It's way easier seeing if a thing is working out especially when thinking about contrast across texture, color, and warmth.  I think if I end the year hitting my thing a week goals and have developed a solid foundation, I think I'll be going in a good direction.

2020 finished mini counter:  42/50