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.