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