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