A thing a week 2020, week 35

More minis this week, some of them done a while back to make space for said larger projects that I really need to finish.  Also this week was a return to oils which I'm liking more every time I use them.

This guy is a Reaper Bones Irontongue Priest who came with my Bones 4 order.  I think of him as an angry and heavily armed railway worker.  Marco Frisoni did a fantastic video where he used metallics mostly through an airbrush to get some awesome results.  I'm always looking for reason to use my airbrush more so I gave that a shot with him, his cronies, and another dude that should show up someday soon.  He was part of a speed paint as a batch of other dudes, two of whom were in last week's post.

The other dorfs are the similarly-themed Dark Dwarf Smiter, Dark Dwarf Pounder, and Dark Dwarf Cleaver.  If you're looking for the Dark Dwarf Striker, you'll have to wait because I missed him when I batch painted these guys.  Overall I think these paint schemes work but they were way more detailed than I thought they were when I pulled them out of my Pile 'o ShamePotential. Like our railway enthusiast, these were mostly painted with an airbrush and overall they were around 1.5 hours each.




These two terrifying creatures are Reaper Bones Giant Maggots also from Bones 4 and were speed painted in oils.  Given that these two didn't have a ton of details, I set out with two goals:  paint them with convincing countershading (even though it doesn't make sense) and really spend time on the blends.  These two were painted over about three and a half hours with some of that time using up some paint I had on other figures.  I could have spent more time on blends but I had other things to do that day.  I think they came out OK.

This last guy is a Reaper Bones Animunar Winterbeard, Wizard, you guessed it, from Bones 4 and speed painted with oils.  All told he was around three hours with some of that time spent on antoher figure that'll show up here at some point.  Also, I'm noticing a distinct speedup as I'm leveling up with this medium.  I love two painting techniques in this hobby that I'm sure I've mentioned elsewhere:  wet blending and void blending and I get both by default in oils.  For that matter, I can't turn them off even when they're inconvenient, so there's that.  For this guy I set out to really nail the blends and I think I got it.  He's also a limited palette treatment (mostly phthalo blue) a'la your friendly neighborhood Gandalf so getting a high contrast was important.  While I think I can get a result this good with acrylics, I suspect that I wouldn't have the patience to do so.

2020 finished mini counter:  80/50

A thing a week 2020, week 34

This week we're back to minis and if you read last week's post, you know that I've been experimenting with oils.  I like learning new things and oils are both new and exciting.  Also, I got to buy new paints.  As a reminder, I am not a good painter but I am a big fan of wet blending and void blending and not such a big fan of doing a millionty ultra thin layers to build up a blend or effect or whatever.  Oils, then, seem right up my alley.

These are Reaper Bones Mal, Catfolk Warrior and Shadoweyes, Catfolk Rogue.  I love these figures and they were primed and zenithaled and ready to go without any other plans other than getting paint.  I painted him roughly as a Siberian Forest Cat and her as Tabby.  I also decided that even though she's supposed to be a rogue, that her armor was totally plate of some sort.  These are the first anythings I've ever painted with oils and they clocked in at around seven hours over two days.  If anyone's keeping score, I've now painted miniatures in enamels, acrylics, and oils and in two different centuries.  That and $5 will get me a coffee.  Mal at least, will show up again because I have a duplicate of him, I think in metal.  Watch this space!

I like a lot about painting with oils but like everything else, James Wappel makes it look easy.  It's not, at least not when you've got acrylic instincts.  I'll resist my urge to give an oil painting hot take here and paint a few more figs with them before giving more of my learnings but stay tuned, I'll get there someday.  Also of note, Shadoweyes' armor is painted in NMM which will count toward my 2020 challenge which completes it.  I should get a chievo or something for finishing early.

This gal is solo and one of two 11-010 Paladins who were my favorite minis for many years.  Her mate, sadly, is nowhere to be found.  I decided to go with a NMM TMM scheme because NMM still daunts me but I thought I could fake it with actual metallics to good effect.  Rather than doing a wash and highlight, I took it an extra couple steps going with cool greens in the shadows and whites in the highlights.  Some of it looks OK.  I spent a fairly long time on her face but I got to a place where I wasn't making forward progress so I stopped.  The rest of her is the standard fare and done in around four hours all told.  Notably, she was less detailed than both the rogues and clerics which is odd.

In the running for one of my oldest figures, the guy on the left is named catchily as 42-081d Frankish Command Set by Ral Partha.  I like this fig a lot because his armor is fairly historically accurate for the middle ages.  I painted him in the scheme that I vaguely remember the Swadian Man at Arms wore in the original Mount and Blade.  I was tempted to do freehand on the shield and took one very poor crack at it but eventually tiredness won out and I painted over it.  He was part of a batch paint of a bunch of figs over several days, his share being somewhere around 1.5 hours.

This guy is an elf though you wouldn't know it given his helm.  He is known far and wide as 12-050a and is usually found as part of a set.  I went with bronze because I mistook him for a Spartan or Trojan or something.  In retrospect the warhammer should have been a giveaway.  His armor is Vallejo Metal Color Gold with a Badger Ghost Tint Golden Yellow gloss coat over it.  There's a lot of undershading that didn't really come through but that's OK.  I didn't catch the mold lines early enough to deal with but otherwise I think the paint job was pretty good.

2020 finished mini counter:  73/50

A thing a week 2020, week 33

This week like the last few weeks, I have a bigger project bubbling under the surface.  I also did some painting this week but I'll hang onto those to talk about later.  This week we'll start with an observation:  my work areas tend toward chaos over time.

I documented my new paint handles and the holder that went with it back in week 31.  Therein I mentioned that the smaller dowels were harder to manipulate so I wasn't really happy with them.  Since then I've used them quite a lot so last weekend on a trip to the hardware store I bought some slightly larger 1" dowels and made additional ones.  Those, naturally, need their own holder, pictured on the right.  These are much easier for me to manipulate and I threw some cork stoppers on top of two of them to allow handling sub-assemblies and whatnot.  Also, I learned and these new dowels are made of poplar which is significantly less hard than the 0.75" oak ones.

The aforementioned trip to the hardware store was specifically to buy tiles, some of which to serve as a dry palette.  Why do I need a dry palette?  Well, anyone who follows James Wappel knows that he's a big fan of oils.  This seems to be a trend in the mini painting world of late with many notable painters going down that path.  Well, I've gotten on the bandwagon too.  At the time of this writing, I've already painted two minis in oils which I will document next week.  The tiny bottles are 20ml and if I'd known the necks were so narrow, I would have bought bigger ones.  The palette is a neutral-colored 6x12 ceramic tile that was all too expensive at just over a dollar. 

A thing a week 2020, week 32

This week we're back to minis but with a special theme!  As I've noted the last few weeks, I've got some larger projects bubbling under the surface and we'll hopefully be able to catch up with that stuff soon.

I purchased these ADnD Adventures 11-002 Clerics with Staff and Warhammer somewhere in the early 90s when I started playing RPGs (2nd Ed ADnD, if you're curious).  They were some of the first minis I ever purchased and they're older than many of my current players.  When these miniatures were released, gas was 90 cents a gallon.  The 80386 was the fastest Intel desktop CPU you could buy running at a scorching 12MHz and big hair was all the rage.  Yeah, it was a different time.

I went with a Clyde Caldwell color scheme to match the era in which they were sculpted.  This is pretty much what fantasy art looked like in the days before most art was done digitally and shared on the intertoobs and it's one of the few things I have nostalgia for.  I did make one significant change, though.  I'm pretty sure these were intended to be pantsless which I think is just plain dumb.  Sane people don't go traipsing through the wilderness sans pants and unless the climate is so super hot that wearing metal armor would burn, I can't imagine these folks wouldn't cover up.  A thing that I wanted to change but didn't was her awful boob armor.  I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure boobs don't work that way.  At least she's not on stilettos.  

Despite my issues with her armor, I still think these are great sculpts faithfully capturing an all-but-forgotten age in the hobby.  There are a lot of details, many of which are quite hard to reach--a thing that modern mini sculptors try to avoid.  Despite intending them to be a speed-paint between other work I still spent six-ish hours on these two over a couple days with special attention to their faces.  I rather enjoyed painting these which helps explain the next two.

These two rogues were bought around the same time; maybe in the same transaction.  I don't like 11-005 thieves with shortsword and sling as much as I liked the clerics but these were primed and ready to go so I figured this was as good a time as any.  These are also highly detailed and probably also intended to be bare legged but I see no reason to give up on my "Pants For Rat Catchers" campaign yet.  Their armor is similarly cringeworthy but I didn't let that get in the way of doing what I could within about seven hours over a few days.

It's worth noting that these are in something approaching 25mm scale which means they're considerably smaller than contemporary figures which are usually done in 28mm or 32mm heroic scale.  This makes all of the tiny details that much harder to deal with.  Luckily, being made of metal, all of the details are still crisp which helps quite a lot.  It's a pretty stark distinction from Reaper Bones figs which tend to be soft and muddy, though the Reaper Bones Black figs are going in a better direction.

2020 finished mini counter:  68/50

A thing a week 2020, week 31

This week we have a break from painting less because I didn't paint anything and more because like I mentioned last week, I have larger things going on in the background.  Also, as I've saidtyped at least a few times here that I like making tools so here we go.

I generally paint my minis and other bits stuck to the top of spice jars.  These might seem big but I like them a lot.  I also go through a lot of spices.  Unfortunately, when I have to paint something near the base of the mini, the large tops get in the way.  Sharp-eyed readers may have spotted a dowel among these recently.  While dowels allow more angles of attack, I find them much harder to manipulate with my comically big hands.  I also hate that I cut them so terribly unevenly with my razor saw because I don't have a more proper tool.  Sanding them flat might work but these are oak which is difficult to sand and even then a big metal fig on the top is still pretty likely to tip over.  This tool keeps the figs upright and means I can be lazy and not sand them.  Win-win!

These are pretty much what you might expect.  A couple layers of chipboard with holes cut in them are glued to the top and bottom of a couple pieces of cardboard.  I also took some chunks of square-ish XPS foam to the inside corners to give a little more strength.  So far this guy has been working pretty well.

Way back in the heady days of January of this year, full of hope and optimism before 2020 went to shit, I built a new paint rack to replace the older jankier one I'd built a year and a half previously before I started binge buying paints.  It's served me fairly well since then though I ended up doing a serious revision after my Pro Acryl expansions arrived in slightly larger bottles.  I ripped the glued-in racks out on the left side and remade them in pseudo-configurable format with a long horizontal piece and a shorter piece at the height of the paint bottles vertically.

The idea was that the paint bottles end up holding most of the weight and that the dividers are really there for organizational purposes.  This worked less well in practice partially because there's no guarantee that there are lots of bottles in the correct sizes in a given row but mostly because I re-used the chipboard dividers which are nowhere near rigid enough.  It also got extra annoying when all of the larger bottles were in play and I had to put them back.  This situation was passable, if just, for the last few months.

I kept the idea that the dividers should be configurable, sort of future-proofing them from variably-sized paint bottles for the future paints that I'll inevitably buy.  I swapped the chipboard for Readi-Board which is a) cheap, b) relatively easy to work with, and c) something I have a lot of on hand since I use it enough.  It isn't ideal for this usage, sadly, since it is not super rigid and has more thickness than I'd like--3/16" if you're wondering.  The middle support shares the load with the two ends which has so far prevented a lot of sagging.  A section of craft stick glued to the bottom of each support keeps everything reasonably flat.  

Construction is basically a double thickness cardboard backing with taller 1 1/2" walls which makes taller bottles a little more secure.  The previous two versions had a glued footprint but his time around I left those off and it leans back on something sturdy.  A coupla piles of blue tack keep it upright which I'm sure will fail hilariously some day and I'll regret everything.  This has the added benefit of freeing up desk space which I always seem to be short of. 

This frame should be configurable enough to not need to be rebuilt for a while.  The only thing that'll prevent long-term use, the most likely thing as it were, is if I buy way too much paint to fit. Someday if I can get my hands on the gear and materials, I'd like to replace the dividers with something more appropriate.