A thing a week 2021, week 26 (cheap & easy painting)

Not all weeks are filled with high effort art. Sometimes, just sometimes, I spam out some of the crap I've had sitting around on my desk as quickly and cheaply as I can. (I like to pretend that this makes all the other painting I do all that much better.) Remember: just because it's cheap, doesn't necessarily mean it's crap.

These are two sets of Reaper Bones Bags and Jars and looking up the link took almost as long as it took to paint these. They count two to a pack for reasons I don't fully comprehend but they're done and that counts for something. These are zenithaled as normal (yes, I verbed that again) with Daler Rowney Payne's Gray from below and Pro Acryl Ivory from the top. It's a simple set of glazes with brown and terra cotta. They're highlighted minimally (which shows) but they were done to the tune of like fifteen minutes. I might feel guilty about padding my mini count if I weren't already over my goal. 

Next to them is an orby platformy thing, otherwise known as Tiny Terrain Seer's Stone. It's drybrushed and washed and re-drybrushed and re-washed ad nauseum. It's been on my painting desk for a while and I don't like that I can see the striations from the original print (it's a resin cast). I went back and forth with how I wanted it to look but I settled on a not-subtle-enough OSL over dark grey stone. All I know is it's the best color: painted.

Next up we have a Legend of Drizzt board game Handmaiden of Lolth. If I'm honest, I mistook it as a Roper and was all ready to lazy-paint it in a stone scheme. Well, joke's on me! Instead, the candle-like dirty yellow is mostly played by a mix of Pro Acryl transparent yellow and brown over the same zenithal above. Highlights were played by that with some random yellow and some random white. Because I (still) didn't want to spend a lot of effort on this fig, I only did highlighting around the eyes, top of the "head", and top of the tentacles. It's really obvious when you compare the front to the back. The eye is glossed with a Reikland Fleshshade Gloss which I use infrequently enough to forget that it'll pull up white paints. This was to avoid painting blood vessels but still keeping that bloodshot quality because again--lazy. Done in about a half hour, I'm not unhappy with this result.

This is a Sealed Sarcophagus that arrived with my Bones 4 pledge. It's the usual zenithal and anti-zenithal followed up with a wash and drybrushing. It's hollow which means I couldn't magnetize it but I figure it'll kick around with my other similarly sized terrain. I might hit it with  dullcoat if the paint starts to chip.

This scary thing is the other half of Harrowgate Shrines from week 23 and you can probably guess what's going on here. The only difference is the flesh to magenta to purpley color drybrush over the top. Why so many colors? I couldn't decide what I wanted and was having fun dry brushing. So there ya go. 

A thing a week 2021 halfway milestone:

• 148/100 finished minis
• 2/5 pushing high quality
• 2/5 serious attempts at OSL
• 4/5 "buildings"

A thing a week 2021, week 25 (double sided hex tiles)

If you tuned in last week you know that at long last we're playing in person again and for this campaign we're playing fully painted. In the campaigns that came before, just about any cheap-ass, stand-in, or bodged-together terrain was fine--nothing really looked good anyway. Of particular offense was my old 8"x8" hex tiles. They're stacked cardboard with a poorly-chosen tiling ground fill overlaid with a slightly squashed hex grid. They've always been a fiddly and they slide around on the table in the most annoying way and don't really want to fit together because I wasn't super precise when I cut them. Well now, I want slightly better and while we're at it, let's make them slightly more user friendly.

These are a play off of my last set of tiles back in week 13 just on a larger scale. They're a foam-core sandwich of single ply cardboard which end up at right around a half inch tall so they match the height of most of my other tiles. Like the week 13 ones, these are also magnetized in pretty much the same way. Two sides have ferrous roofing nails and two sides have magnets. Despite putting extra effort into precision cutting, cardboard and foam core just aren't precision-friendly materials and they're all slightly off. This means that the magnets don't hold super well across all tiles but they work well enough.

I still wanted hexes since my game was built for them and I'm not confident in my ability to freehand hex patterns over 640 square inches of tiles so instead of flocking & painting like I'd originally intended, I printed out some better chosen images and pasted them to either side. I think I would have liked the flocked/actually textured tiles better but a) flock gets everywhere no matter how well I've tried to seal it and b) grit on the other side isn't friendly to my very expensive gaming table. The gluing didn't go as well as I'd hoped and the PVA buckled the paper. 

I think these worked out OK. They're much nicer than the old ones even though they're basically the same kind of thing and the magnets are a nice value add. They don't entirely work since the placement of the magnets was rough and cardboard really isn't a precision material. Having ten instead of eight means I can do a 3x3 or 2x5 setup which is nice. The textures work OK though I'm not completely happy with them but the good news is that pasting over them won't be hard when I get tired of them, so I got that goin' for me. 

2021 finished "building" counter: 4/5

A thing a week 2021, week 24 (new campaign characters)

I started a new campaign in the every-other-Saturday slot not terribly long ago. The last one in that slot ran for just over a year and started the first weekend of lockdown. We thought we'd be playing in Roll20 temporarily but little did any of us know that it'd be more than a year until we could go back to playing in person. Well, that time is now (well, yesterday). Among other goals for this campaign, I want to play fully painted so here we go.

First up we have Akoroi, Ork skald played here by Nolzur's Human Cleric. This is not a great sculpt and like many of the Nolzur's figs, it's not a great mold either. I got most of the awful mold lines off but not all of them and more importantly, it was super clear that the person who sculpted this figure wasn't a painter since lots of the fig are hard to reach. This started as a wash->drybrush->glazes operation but quickly sidetracked to normal wet blending and layering. As a player character, I expect this fig to get a lot of screen time so figured it was worth the effort. I could have put more effort into the metallics but I'm not unhappy with this result in about three-ish hours of effort and if you're wondering why he's fleshtoned instead of green-y, it's because this is how he looks in his online key art.

Next up we have Muchasi, Athari shaman played here by Nolzur's Aasimar Paladin. Another player character and one fairly well distinguished by vibrant plumage, this fig also embodies the Nolzur-ness issues. An additional grievance was the wings which were molded in clear plastic that did not want to stick to paint. The saturated colors were played mostly by Pro Acryl and lightened by Daler Rowney inks. That's proving to be a pretty dang good combination since both are highly pigmented and both are thin. Everything else on the character is suitably subdued and done in another four-ish hours of effort.

This is Vheela, Elven scholar and another player character played by Reaper Bones Ostarzha, Elf Cleric. Like a lot of Reaper Bones figs, this is a good sculpt let down by not stellar molding. I did what I could to clean the mold lines but didn't get all of them, the worst of which were on her hair and chin. This is about a three and a half hours of effort about half of which went into her face. The sculpt has really big eyes which is great! I love painting eyes and this gave me an opportunity to put a colored iris, pupil, and well placed reflection point. The leather bits were adequately handled by Pro Acryl Transparent Brown and while I could have cleaned them up some, I didn't feel the need. 

Kyeh of the Waves is a waterbender and yeah, I made my own world and borrow all kinds of stuff. She's played by Nolzur's Female Human Wizard and the first of two NPCs we'll look at today. She was painted over three days in about eight hours, a lot of which was on her face. Nolzur's figs tend to be more realistically proportioned than heroic and such they have very, very small faces. The flowy bits are a mix of Pro Acryl blue and green  (or just blue) highlit with Pro Acryl Turquoise (iirc). The brown bits were mostly Pro Acryl brown and that's it and I thought they looked good enough to leave like that. The waterbendy piece is a layered wash/drybrush with Pro Acryl blue and my ancient pot of Reaper Pro Linen that is almost out. I think she turned out good enough to count her as my second high quality fig of this year.

Last up we have Rokoru the Blade, bestest kitty NPC in this campaign. So far. He's played by a 3D printed cat rogue which are again really hard to find after the fact and featured way back in week 50 of last year. Poor Obeng fig never got to see play in person but I suspect that Rokoru will. This fig is pretty small and I tried to match the key art I've been using for online play. There are freehand stripes on his shoulders which pretty much don't show and despite spending a lot of time on the shading on his clothing, I don't think it shows super well. He's not a bad paint job squeaking in right around four hours all told.

2021 finished mini counter: 140/100, 2/5 high quality

A thing a week 2021, week 23 (misc figs)

This week we're back to painting and we have "figures that I had on my desk that didn't fit a theme." Also, because I'm a dummy, I forgot to shoot and post this yesterday. I've cleverly back-dated it to hide my mistake. I've got quite a lot of figs on my painting desk at any one time and while I don't plan it out this way, I usually end up with batches like this. Also, I'm really trying (and failing) to take better pictures. Some day.

These two guys are old figs from Earthdawn, one of my favorite RPGs of the 90s that no one played, and yes I know they're still developing it. I won't go down the halcyon path of talking about what a Horror is or what space these guys fill in their pantheon of badness, but these are a pair of Wormskulls, not to be confused with numskulls. If I recall correctly, I bought these guys circa 2004 or so at cash-only sale at a game store that was shutting down. I would have likely bought more if I'd had more disposable income at that point. These metal figs were made by Heartbreaker Hobbies & Games in the mid 90s and I have a few of their figs. These are not great paint jobs but they are done to the tune of a couple hours and that counts for something.

This guy is the cooper from Bones 4's Townsfolk III set and he is also a pseudo-speed paint. He was mostly painted as glazes over zenithal and his blister-mate, Ben Franklin look-alike was featured way back in week 1 (the milkmaid will be along at some point). Knowing I wanted to play the glaze speed paint game with him, I hit him with a dark wash and a drybrush first and then he sat around for many months until today a couple weeks ago when I finally got around to finishing. I think he turned out OK to the tune of a few hours though I can't say that with certainty.

Hailing from Townsfolk II, this Friar Tuck look-alike had been on my desk primed for quite a while and was also a speed paint. Like the cooper, I'd intended a glazes-over-zenithal job but ended up doing a lot more. I especially like the green cloak action which is an ancient pot of a dark green Reaper Pro paints lightened with a light fleshtone that I had on my wet palette. He was done in like two hours at the end of doing some other work and for that expenditure, I think he looks pretty good.

The tall one is one half of a Reaper Bones Harrowgate Shrines and is the epitome of lazy painting. After priming, we anti-zenithal with Daler Rowney Payne's Grey which is rapidly becoming my favorite anti-zenithal ink. After that it's a zenithal with an off white (Pro Acryl Ivory in this case though I think I like Pale Yellow better for this application). Next we get a homemade grey wash and a dry brush with a light warm grey and we're done. The little token-y things are tokens that came with spider figs that I can't be bothered to look up. They'd been sitting on my desk for quite a while but now with various levels of dry brushing and washing and generally taking up space. Well, this is the time and now they're done!

These last two are 3d prints of a free STL and boy is it hard to find these after the fact. They're scaled roughly to 28mm which, after many difficulties, is starting to be my scale of choice. They were printed at the end of last year (yes, I record this stuff) and like many of the figs sitting on my table, I painted bits and pieces of them as I was winding down with paint of the right color on my palette having finished with something else. It's interesting to note that my normal go-to for metallics, Vallejo Metal Color, didn't perform super well. I think it has to do with the tiny ridges left by the printing. The thinness of these paints which I usually prefer mean that they don't fill in the gaps and thus, the surface isn't as shiny as I'd expect. 

2021 finished mini counter: 135/100