A thing a week 2020, week 30

More painting this week but less in the figure variety and more in the terrain realm.  This week has been a mess and I've got some bigger projects that need some sustained effort so this week's offering is mostly technique painting and most of it not very good.

I'm a sucker for scatter terrain and props, and in a world where we're able to play RPGs in person I love few things more than putting a thing on the board during an encounter.  I'm starting to forget what that was like, if I'm honest.  These items are from the Dungeons and Lasers kickstarter from last year and apparently I spent a lot of money on it.  This is a little baffling since I'm not a fan of tiles with tall walls but I have some ideas that may or may not turn out--anyway, that's not what we're here for.


I've got a handful of tiny droppers of Vallejo Surface Primer which I'm generally a fan of.  I've been using this both as brush on and through the airbrush for as long as I've been priming but looking at the volume of stuff on the way, I felt like this was probably not going to be sufficient.  Naturally, I overbought and ended up with a pair of 16 oz bottles of Stynylrez.  If you're not sure how much that actually is, a typical beer is 12 oz and on a heavy day I might burn through a tablespoon of primer.  I expect to never run out.  I like it well enough but cleanup is a mess-it apparently likes to dry in the paint cup which sucks.

I'm using these guys as an opportunity to burn through some of the old paints that I don't favor anymore.  My gripes about Army Painter paints are pretty well documented at this point.  It's less that they're lousy and more that a) they're not as nice as Pro Acryl, and b) my painting style (if you want to call it that) has changed and generally I'm no longer well served by a pile of paints of various shades of the same color anymore.  Of particular concern, Army Painter metallics are absolutely awful.  Metallics in general are pretty lousy and having a bunch of sci-fi terrain seems as good a place as any for me to use them productively.  Interestingly, despite the few hundred of figures I've painted, I've never run out of a single bottle of mini paint--yet.

These particular metal stairs are about as simple a paint job as you'll ever see.  They're primed, base coated with Army Painter something or other metallic and followed by a coat of Badger Ghost Tint Oil Discharge.  I wanted them to look kind of funky and janky and in retrospect they probably want some kind of rust or weather effect.  I might do that some day but for now they're done enough.  I do wish they'd stand a little easier so on that hypothetical some day, I'd be well served by weighting the base somehow.

In staying with the stairs theme, these are stone stairs.  These terrain pieces are in general pretty well sculpted but I really would have liked more stones on the top and front rather than the back.  Astute viewers will note that the back looks wrong.  That's because I painted them upside down and as a result the directional lighting is wrong.  Whoops.  I haven't glued them and maybe on another some day I'll fix that but I'm not super worried about it.


This guy was really interesting.  It's clearly a spike trap but the grooves in the wood grain are super deep and the splotches I interpreted as blood are really tall.  This was fairly challenging to paint.  In fact, many of these have the same issue--they've got multiple negative space places that want paint.  The spikes in particular were a pain to work around.  I would have liked this particular piece to be a little grungier but I'm not going to dwell on it.

The altar on the left is fun with candles and a recessed pentagram.  I was going to do something funky with OSL but then realized there wasn't really anything sticking up so it probably wouldn't sell.  The dwarven thingamadoo on the right is a fantastic marker/monolith/whatever that I like quite a lot.  I don't know that I'd use it super often as what it is but as a marker that stands in a space and marks a location, I think it'll have a lot of utility.  Yes, i realize that not all stone is grey but I have a lot of grey paint to get through.

This last guy is a fancy stone sarcophagus.  I didn't paint it in that orientation but I didn't think it'd shoot as well in the regular one.  It's interesting how often sarcophagi show up in fantasy RPGs.  I'd be curious how often they show up in published adventures compared to, say, dragons.  I imagine if they'd called it "thieves and tombraiders" that might have been too on the nose.

If you're at the bottom here looking for a finished mini counter, well, you're out of luck.  None of this scatter is complicated enough to qualify as a real mini.

A thing a week 2020, week 29

If you were expecting minis this week, then have I got a deal for you.  This week I'm pushing speed and working more with some of the tools I've accumulated of late.  First among these is the magnifying light I bought.  I like the light part more than the magnifying part but in its current configuration I whack the arm with my brush too often.  I'm sure we'll see more about that sometime real soon.  I'm also switching back and forth from shit brushes to much nicer brushes depending on what I'm doing which has been...interesting.  Enough preamble.

First up we have Kelainen Darkmantle, Evil Wizard who I painted like Gandalf with OSL because I could.  The link goes to the Dark Haven Legends version but the one I painted was from Bones 4 Kickstarter.  I intended this to be a 3ish hour speed paint but, well, I made a mess of mistakes and ended up spending 5 hours.  The OSL isn't great though I do like the analagous color scheme.  I also painted the left bracer as metallic and then completely didn't sell this on the right bracer. Very early on I screwed up the coloring on his clothing and while I like the light tan for his normal clothing, the shading on it is shit and it generally looks bad.  I'd intended that
the interior of the smoke/effect/whatever that is to be light and I probably should have pulled it way closer to white to sell it.  The last thing I screwed up is the...whatever it is in his right hand which I imagined as metallic but also didn't sell.  The first thing I messed up was not dealing with the mold lines super well.  Overall, it's a good sculpt, a good mold, and an iffy paint job, but he's done and that counts for something.

Next up we have a return to batch painting.  These six came with my Bones 4 order, specifically Wraith Slayers,  Wraith Lord and Bodyguard, and Wraith Duelists.  Anyone following those links might wonder why I painted them if they were made of an awesome and more expensive translucent material.  Well, mine weren't.  They were made of the harder Bones Black material (I think), so they still wanted to be painted.

Since I got these last year I've had pretty lofty goals for them.  The sculpts are great and I really dig the details that came through.  While I'm not usually onboard with built-in bases, I like these quite a lot.  The rough hewn stone piles I think work really well.  They were going to be the bosses in my last campaign but that didn't pan out for narrative/pacing reasons.  Now they're the bosses in my current campaign but it's never 100% claer that the game will go that way.  That's the power of RPGs, I suppose.  In the intervening year or so that I've had them, I've had a pretty clear vision of where I wanted them to go and they've been prepped and primed here for around three months before I got to them. 

These were a speed paint and unfortunately, I think it shows.  They weren't particularly difficult models but I probably should have spent more time blending the purples which don't hold up super well under close scrutiny.  I also had high hopes for the metallics which went on real nicely (Vallejo Metal Colors are like that) but which didn't glaze/wash very well.  The bases could be painted better too.  Overall, I don't think the results are unacceptable and weighing in at about 10 hours for the batch of them over like three days, I feel like I got more than I paid for.

2020 finished mini counter:  64/50

A thing a week 2020, week 28

This week we have more minis since I've been on a roll and making good progress.  Given that I'm more or less working for bonus points for the remainder of the year, I'm sinking more time into deliberate practice.  In particular, I'm currently working on brush control, blending, and understanding colors better through a lot of mixing.  I've reached a point that I can crank out a finished piece reliably in a few hours so for a while I'm either going to push a little more in quality or on the other side, push similar quality in less time.

First up we have Reaper Bones Dragonman Warrior (no, not Trogdor) and painted for use as one of the player characters in my every-other-weekend-ish Saturday game should we ever get back to playing in person.  This fig is way more complex than I thought it was and thus it took a lot longer to paint than expected weighing in at around 7 hours over a few days.  His armor is technically painted as non-metallic bronze.  It sells OK on the table but doesn't hold up to scrutiny since it was done mostly as an afterthought.  As such, I don't think I can count it as a "serious attempt" even if I'm OK with the results.

This is a Juliette, Female Sorceress from Reaper Bones.  I don't recall buying this mini so I'm pretty sure she came as a freebie in one of my big orders.  This a small fig and not overly complex.  If I were any good at this and wanted to spend more time, I would have done some freehand on her dress or something but this started as a speed paint and I don't really know what I'm doing.  As I got going, I decided to push the quality a bit and put extra work into the details that are present and into her face which I think turned out well.  All told she was not quite five hours including a partial and very rough basecoat done months ago.  I think the results are good so she'll count as the 5th of my high quality figures.

Number three this week is Deladrin, Female Assassin, also from Reaper Bones.  This is one of the first figs I bought, prepped, and primed and boy does it show.  The mold isn't great and more than a year and a half ago when I prepped this fig, I did a lousy job of dealing with it.  The dagger in my fig is quite different than the one in the mold.  This is a side effect of a very sharp knife and not understanding how soft Bones material is.  Furthermore, most of my attempts to deal with the many mold lines really just resulted in the model being very frayed.  I fixed some of this when I finished painting but there was way more than I could effectively deal with.

If you don't count prepping and priming done sometime in 2018, I started painting this figure in earnest about the same time I painted the Highland Heroine way back in January.  She was supposed to be the third high quality fig for the year but even though I spent a lot of time there and has my first lousy attempt at wet blending, issues with the molding kept me from finishing until now.  I don't remember how much time I spent at the end of last year but if the Highland Heroine was any indication, it's probably in the dozens of hours finished up this evening in about four.  There were lots of issues here mostly dealing with problems I created earlier.  This is the first time I'd stuck so much paint on a fig that I had a real problem, on her face no less, which wasn't super straightforward to resolve.  If the mold had been better or my prep had been better, I think I would have pulled this fig into the higher quality levels but as fate would have it, I just wanted to be done and have to settle for "OK".

And rounding it all out are a pair of wererats from Reaper, specifically Wererat Stalker in blue and Wererat Assassin in red.  As I mentioned in last week's post, my game has a lot of anthropomorphic races in it and it's often hard to find figs that are in the right ballpark.  These two represent two more of the player characters in my Saturday game and I intended to speed paint them.  In retrospect, I should have known this wasn't going to go well because they weren't going to be in the same color scheme.  The sculpts ended up more complicated than I thought they were so I spent a couple more hours than I intended to bring them all out.  I think the result is good and the two of them were done in about five hours.  Also of note, I bought a magnifying light which is great once I get it adjusted.

2020 finished mini counter:  57/50

A thing a week 2020, week 27

Starting out for this week I've got bases.  This isn't anywhere near all of them and I don't think they're even the best of them, but this is what I had pictures of.  None of my figs were based--heck most of the bases weren't even painted but now due to James Wappel's tutorials, I've fixed that.  Over the last few weeks I've magnetized, painted, flocked, and otherwise finished every fig I've painted to date.  Luckily for me, that's not very many (~200 or so) and while they're not all winners, they are all done.  Moving forward I'd like to base figs as part of the painting process so we'll see how that goes. 


This is a Reaper Bones Hellhound and a fig I expected to use in a campaign at some point several years ago.  I don't think I did, but as the fig was primed and on the workbench, I figured it was time to paint it.  All told it was around three hours of speed paint.  I was tempted to do OSL but since the creature is casting light and I wanted it to be the focus, I did pretty minimal lighting on the ground.  I think this worked OK but I can't help thinking that I want the darks to be darker and the lights to be lighter.  I probably need to get some fluorescent paints to experiment with which a) hopefully unlocks fun effects, and b) feeds my paint buying addiction.  Watch this space!

This is a Reaper Bones Hajad and speed painted in about three hours over a couple days.  I started with Pro Acryl Transparents which are rapidly becoming my favorite paints while painting some of the bases above.  This was lightened a bit with an off white to finish a shaded base coat.  A couple hours of detail later, this is where I landed.  I've now come full circle on brushes.  I started with ultra cheap synthetic brushes, started buying much more expensive fancy brushes which I still like, and now I've returned to even cheaper synthetic brushes (Wappel's One True Brush(TM), and these awful liners if you're interested).  I have no idea what it all means except that I don't have to worry about destroying brushes anymore.  "Caress the brush, don't crush it," James says.  I literally snapped the ferrule off of one of my favorite brushes I was concentrating so hard.  I pinned it, it's almost good, now.  


Over the last few days this weekend I've been working on this foxy group.  Pretty sure the "fox" came from Reaper Bones Familiars as a dog.  Why paint it like a fox?  The other two figs are in the same color scheme so I figured, why not?  The sculpt isn't particularly good and the mold isn't really helping it at all but it's painted now and that counts for something.  Also, at this point, it's probably clear that I've hooked up my fancy camera.  That should make the shots a) more consistent, and b) less crap.  Next step:  fix my lighting.


Next up we have a Reaper Bones Kogo, Male Kitsune and Dijoro, Female Kitsune.  These are fantastic sculpts and as canine anthropomorphs are both rare in mini form and prevalent in my game, I bought a few of each.  These were primed a really long time ago in preparation for my last campaign which ran about a year and weren't graced with painted versions of these two. 


As I got through the shaded basecoat and into glazing/details I decided to go an extra level.  The two of them (and the "fox") were a total of nine-ish hours over several days and I'm happy with the results.  I got to the point that adding more paint was messing things up so I stopped.  I can see some stuff that's wrong that I'd fix but I don't think I have the skill to fix them.  Right at the moment, I don't think I can do any better than these two.  I'd like to revisit them in the same color scheme in a couple years since I've got dupes and it'll be a good comparison.  My only real gripe is that the Bones molds are so iffy.

Interestingly, the year is halfway done and I'm more than halfway done with my 2020 challenge.  I'ma add a stretch goal for bonus points:  let's hit 100 mins this year anyway.

2020 finished mini counter:  52/50, 4/5 at high quality, 0/1 serious attempts at NMM