A thing a week 2020, week 48

More minis this week as promised and some of this is supremely lazy painting.  This is the big push to 200 for the year and these figs were mostly painted in the second week of November.  Given that this is going live after Thanksgiving, I'm starting to need to pile some stuff up.  Also true that I have a lot of other stuff that's going to get in the way of painting not limited to the cleaning I haven't done any of the year since I haven't had a single in-person party this year.  

Here's a pile of free, self-supported set of spiders printed at a half inch or so.  I use these a lot in my games but somehow don't have very many spider figs.  This is the epitome of lazy painting, really a couple dry brushes to pick out volumes with a colored candy coat over the top.  They won't get magnetized because I'm just not that worried about them--they can live with the other swarmers in a bin.  There are 15 in total but I can't really count them as full figs so we'll count them 3 to a fig weighing in at 5 total.  The effort involved here was maybe an hour for all of them.  I kind of want to experiment with this kind of painting more than I have any particular need for 15 more spiders.  Though, now that I saytype it, I know that the player characters are super bad bout needing piles of bads.  So there's that.  You should expect more of these in the future.

These four knights are 3D prints from a free model which I can't be bothered to look up.  They were printed pretty early on in owning my printer and even now I'm still fiddling with scale.  These are true scale which makes their heads and hands look really super duper small and look tiny even against a lot of my vintage 25mm figs.  I also snapped the swords of two of them, one never to be found and I didn't have a good replacement weapon in my parts bin.  The remainder of the hilt looks like a lollypop so we've got that going for us.  Also during the painting of them, I noticed that there are some pretty significant printing errors which shouldn't be that surprising since they were some of the first figs I printed.  They were shaded with an airbrush in like 2 minutes with a nuln oil wash and brush-painting of their tabbards.  We're under an hour for the four.

This guy is Reaper Bones Sir William the Peacemaker from Bones 4.  Like Ava Justina in week 46, I am not a fan of this sculpt.  The mold lines weren't a super problem but the guy is almost a cartoon and has similarly soft details.  Despite this, I put quite a lot of effort into this guy.  I wanted to experiment shading with true metallic metals and I did a bunch of lining to make up for the fig's softness.  The base metallics were shot through my airbrush in a "I should get more use out of this thing" kind of way.  I minorly adjusted this with Pro Acryl silver and pulling down with Badger Ghost Tint Midnight Blue.  About four hours got me here.  Some of that worked but I clearly need to push it further and the blue candy coat on his shield is pretty awful.  

You can cancel the search for the missing dark dwarf because he's here and found paint!  This Reaper Bones Dark Dwarf Striker from Bones 4 should have been on the victory podium way back in week 35 but sadly, he was lost and deprived of his glory...until now!  I found him several weeks ago in the bin full of figs that didn't require assembly and he made it through the priming gauntlet and onto the desk of painting.  He followed the same basic airbrushing with metallics as Sir Bill above but unfortunately we'll have to wait a bit longer to get the TMM at higher fidelity--this guy was a speed paint.  I did some but not much but he is done in the span of a couple hours all told.  

2020 finished mini counter:  182/50

A thing a week 2020, week 47

Last week I pushed the quality on a fig because I felt like I should.  This week we're back to speed paints because I can.  Also, because I'm running out of desk space.  Not sure when this happened, but I've started liking prep work.  Building, printing, priming, shading and all that jazz has somewhere become really interesting.  Maybe it's because I can bust through a lot of figs in not a lot of time.  Maybe it's because the stuff near the top of my work queue is stuff I'm not super interested in painting.  Dunno.

These are nine more 3D printed skeletons.  You may be surprised to learn that the seven skellingtons back in week 44 were only the second batch I've painted (the first were featured and photographed terribly last August from Bones 4 kickstarter).  With these nine I now have twenty (!) badly painted skeletons that I can use in my supposedly-in-person Saturday game whenever we can play in person again.

You may note that some of these guys have different shields.  The first batch of three failed on their shields because I didn't support them properly.  Did I mention that 3D printing is its own hobby?  Their shields smeared out and in trying to break them off, I pulled their freakin' arms off like a gundark.  Luckily, my bits box is fairly full so they got Bondi shields.  I'm getting better at the printing thing but it's a pretty serious effort still.

Primed and basecoated/highlit with the airbrush were the first two steps as per usual.  I should have done more with the highlighting but I was lazy.  I'd planned on slapping a couple washes and some metallics and then calling them done but I went a little crazy.  I've never weathered anything...until now!  I don't think the rust sells particularly well up close but they work OK on the tabletop and more importantly, I learned a ton doing it.

The only other note is the bases which were printed with the minis.  I've started painting these kinds of things with palette sludge.  What's palette sludge?  It's the half-dried or super-watery things left on the palette from a week of painting.  I mix these into pseudo-desaturated shades and wet blend them into something vaguely stone toned.  I usually want two hues blending between and some highlight to catch edges but I don't think this particular set worked super well--I rather killed it with the wash.  Live and learn, I suppose.

Overall these guys were something like three-ish hours for the nine of them which is about as fast as I can go at the moment without, I dunno, super-lazy painting armor or stone or something.  Tune in next week when I lazy-paint some armored figs!  Also, it's looking a lot like I'll break 200 figs this year, 4x what I expected to hit, and probably not a thing I'm going to be able to do very often, so I'ma revel in it a bit this year.

Finished mini counter:  171/50

A thing week 2020, week 46

Last week we had lazy painting, this week we have less lazy painting.   I guess it's all about contrast.  As such, I didn't keep up my last few weeks' pace of more than one fig per day on average and I cannot be bothered to back-date something even though I'm like four weeks ahead at this point.

This guy is an elfdwarf archer which I printed.  He has the distinction of being self-supported which is great because I didn't have to do any real work to get him to print.  My best guess is that most of my collection is 28mm but it spans 25mm and 32mm and whatever the crap the ASOIAF guys are.  So when I print minis, I tend to scale them down to fit in with what I think is most of my collection.  Well, I scaled this guy down too far.  He's 28mm from his feet to the top of his bow which is way over his eye line.  So I've decided he's a dwarf and, yes, dwarves in my worlds have pointed ears like the ones out of Earthdawn so that works.

Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum here are Reaper Bones Town Guard from Bones 4 kickstarter and they are enormous.  I've got a pile of figs primed, shaded, and ready to go on my hobby desk and I'm (very) slowly working on a set of figs that I don't super want to paint.  Everything that's not those guys look much better than they might otherwise which cause them to get painted first.  These sculpts are good even if I didn't handle the mold lines super well and I spent more time than I might otherwise have on them.  I wanted to push the contrast on their non-metallics which worked...OK. At the time of this typing, now a few weeks after the painting, they don't really hold up under scrutiny and the metallics look really, really sloppy. These are OK at tabletop distance and finished in maybe five-ish hours over a couple of days.

This is a Reaper Bones Aina, Female Valkyrie.  I am not supposed to like this figure.  She has terrible armor, a bendy sword, and completely impractical long flowy hair.  Sometimes I just can't help myself.  Probably because so many of the last few were speedy paints, I spent a comparatively long time on this one.  I had high hopes of doing NMM and then didn't do any of that.  I really have to work on doing NMM like things in real metallic metals because my metallic shading on this fig was shit.  That sucks because I thought the cloth, her hair, and her face were well done, notably the first things I finished.  There are angles that I think she looks really good, notably the angle she's facing and for that I'm going to count her toward my high quality figs for the year.  Total painting time was somewhere around nine hours which at this point seems lavish.  

I started Ava Justina, Female Templar (from Bones 4) at about the same time as Aina and I wanted another crack at metallica shading.  The majority of the base coat is the same Vallejo Game Air Chainmail Silver with shadows of their Gunmetal and heavily thinned Badger Ghost Tint Oil Discharge.  The bronze is Pro Acryl with Ghost Tint Golden Yellow and this time I don't think it worked out very well and I'm not 100% sure why.  Overall, we're talking three-ish hours a bunch of which was her face and hair and I'm not super unhappy with the result.  I think the shading on the metallics worked OK which just means I need more practice.   I will say that I generally like stylized characters but I'm finding some of these chunky Bones 4 sculpts to be more clownish than awesome.  

2020 finished mini counter:  162/50, 8/5 high quality

A thing a week 2020, week 45

More minis this week and probably for the majority of the remainder of the year.  Gotta get through that pile, of shamepotential, yo.  This week we've got speed paints and almost in a theme:  "stuff that's easy to paint."  So there's that.

Here are three Nolzur's Marvelous Unpainted Miniatures:  W1 Spiders and they are terrible.  I've talkedwritten quite a lot about my growing disapproval of the Nolzur's line.  This is particularly due to the difficulty in painting and the lousy mold lines.  For these figs there's also their spindly-ness and resulting difficulty in gluing them to their bases.  I have no idea how they expected these guys to fit on the supplied 1" bases.  I based them on 35mm bases and they barely fit.  The colored banding was painted first with a candy coat of Badger Minitaire Ghost Tint Brown which was followed with a Vallejo Dark Grey Wash, and no I don't get kickbacks for these.  I opened the blister containing these creepies years ago and they were such a pain I stuck them back in and in a pile but they're as done as they're likely to get now.

These four are a Hail Caesar Caesar's Legions Command Sprue since renamed.  I'm pretty sure these guys were built improperly.  I mean, one guy has two swords for crying out loud.  Beyond that, they're painted very simply as glazes over a zenithal+anti-zenithal.  The shields were painted separately and glued after the fact and I wish I'd paid more attention on how they attached so I would have painted the backs of them better.  The whole batch (these four plus the next two) were painted over two-ish days to the tune of about six hours total including assembly.

These two are the crew of Imperial Romans:  Plastic Scorpion which I bought mostly for the scorpion.  I had a need for ballista, these guys were on sale, and I was already buying stuff.  Subsequently I bought 4x Reaper Ballista which fit the bill a little better featured way back in Week 36.  The scorpion itself has been based but has yet to be painted so expect that at some point in the unforseeable future.  These guys were part of the previous batch's six-ish hours and they'll be based with their equipment.  Watch this space!

This is a cart from Reaper Bones 4 kickstarter and I can't find a real link on their site.  It's been partly done on my workbench for many weeks and at one point I had the right colors out so I finished it.  I didn't put a ton of effort into it which probably shows.  Once I'd finished I started thinking through Bones 4 and I don't recall having any spare horses or other beasts of burden in there.  Reviewing the core set, this cart is pulled by a pig!  The pig has been located and will show up here at some point.  More lazy painting.  Hooray!

2020 finished mini counter:  157

A thing a week 2020, week 44

As discussed for the last few posts, several weeks ago I broke down and bought a 3D printer.  It was round three or four of my roughly eight month cycle of "wow, that'd be fun to build stuff with" and "I have too many hobbies and stuff already."  I knew I would eventually break down but it seemed like most of the hobbying media I consume started talking about how awesome resin printers were right around the beginning of the summer.  I suppose I'd already lost that fight. I've got some pretty lofty goals for it which is going to require me to do some 3d modeling and I've got to say that I'm finding Blender to be an awful, unintuitive beast of a thing.

3D printing is its own hobby and has its own learning curve and despite the fact that most of the goods are digital, they can still be super spendy.  The seven skellingtons are a free set that mostly printed correctly.  Properly supporting figures is an art form and one I'm not good at.  Luckily, these guys came pre-supported but were a goddamn pain to de-support after the fact which is evidenced by the fact that many of them still have some of the supports still attached.   I hid these ineffectively as spearpoints sticking in the skellington.  They're a speed paint as one might expect (I mean, they're skeletons, what do you want?) and I think they look OK.  

The bases are Green Stuff World texture rollers over Extra Firm Super Sculpey with some sand stuck to the base.  I was going for a "dark temple floor with faintly glowing red runes" which, I dunno, almost sells.  I could have sold it more with some OSL but I wasn't super interested in doing that for these guys though I certainly could have.  Base coat was skeleton bone and washed with home-made wash adulterated with matte medium and made forever ago for terrain.  Overall, including basing which happened over several days (glue takes time to dry, yo) these were done in right around six hours total which is about how long they took to print.

You might also notice a lighter background in these shots. I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to improve the shoots here and picked up a bigger piece of supposedly-black poster board. I might print a cradle for the camera to avoid my awful shaky-cam shots. The small dollar store tripods I've been using are a little too tall, still, and I've got more work to do to sort out my lighting.

2020 finished mini counter:  147/50