Gnollathon week 3 (2021 week 30)

This week we round out the 2021 Gnollathon with twelve, that's right, twelve figures. They're painted more or less the same way as last week's gnolls. This includes the typical prime-anti-zenithal-zenithal maneuver followed by an acrylic basecoat, oil wash, and minimal oil details. Bases were mostly Vallejo texture paste. I'm really liking this technique by way of Marco Frisoni.

These three are 3d printed Gnoll Chieftains, a part of the Gnoll Marauders set by Cult Minis which you can purchase on MyMiniFactory should you be so inclined. I scaled them down to be roughly in scale of other 28mm figures. Because I had to support them myself, this wasn't particularly more difficult than it might have been. These are modular which I like! They're also stupidly complicated, which I don't like, and they have lots of areas where I couldn't easily get a brush. They were also a pain to pull the oil wash off of given that they have so many negative spaces. Honestly, I could do with fewer pieces, details, and bejangles and whatnot. I like these guys, but not as part of a speed paint where they really don't fit. The normal gnolls were slightly less complicated and I'm sure we'll see more gnolls from this set here at some point.

These two are mirrored Gnoll FREE by Evgenii Tkachenko and as you might have guessed, it's a free model available on MyMiniFactory. I have mixed feelings about these. They're free which is nice, and they're OK to paint being fairly open but are a little derpy and I generally don't care for their shorts. Dunno, They work, I guess, but despite being gnolls, I'm not overly fond of them. I think they came out OK despite their derpitude. Possibly there's a better paint job in the far-flung future. Maybe a better basing job would help. 

These four are also 3d printed and are mirrored gnoll warrior male and gnoll archer by Velrock whose library is well worth checking out. They are free on Thingiverse and I like them a lot. Like the chieftains, I scaled them to around 28mm and since I had to support them myself, this wasn't a big deal. These are fun. They have just enough detail to be interesting but not enough to be a pain. I could have done without the bejangles hanging from their belts some of which didn't print super well. I may very well print and paint more of these, particularly the archers, which I never seem to have enough of. Have I mentioned that I like gnolls?

This is a gnoll barbarian print by XSpyroid, also free and available on Thingiverse. There's stuff to like about this fig and a lot to not like. I like the pose and the face. I don't much like the thickness of the straps which are crazy, and the pseudo-armor which makes almost no sense. The pose is fairly open which is nice but I'm pretty sure I'm going to snap off the spear at some point. I think this guy came out well but ultimately I don't particularly like this fig.

These are Blacktongue, Gnoll Archer, and Toghra, Gnoll Leader from Reaper Bones. They're good sculpts even if their molds aren't fantastic. These fit well with the other Bones gnolls I have which usually play the part of bruisers or bosses. Put multiple of them on the board to scare the fertilizer out of the PCs. Note: they usually win anyway--they're resourceful like that. Like all of the Bones gnolls, I like these guys a lot and wish I had more. They're nice, open, figures which are fairly easy to paint with good detail.

This will wrap up the 2021 Gnollathon to the tune of about nine hours for these twelve figures. I think this is a good result for the time spent (~8 hours all told) and feel that they'll make a good addition to my growing gnoll army.

2021 finished mini counter: 171/100

Gnollathon week 2 (2021 week 29)

Today we have a single figure, purpose picked as a high quality one because I haven't done one in a while. In particular, I wanted to see how much I'd learned about contrast on a fairly straightforward fig without a lot of embellishments. Our subject today is a gnoll which I suppose was a giveway with the title. He's a 3d print of a model made by the great Manuel Boria and you can find him here at MyMiniFactory for free. This is a good fig and a fairly easy paint which isn't true of many 3d prints.

We start with printing I suppose, followed by priming, zenithaling and anti-zenithaling. From there we get a layer of Pro Acryl transparents, a psuedo basecoat of the blue like last week's gnolls because I thought this guy was going to be a speed paint, and after that, layer after laborious layer. This is my typical try-hard approach with acrylics only slightly spruced up by a slight wash on the mane and wood. The wood is just the wash over the normal shading which I thought looked pretty good so I left it that way. 

The metallics are Vallejo Chainmail Silver with a coat of Badger Ghost Tint Oil Discharge (and no, I don't get kickbacks for these links). After that we get a stippling of random earth and orange tones for rust and a nice midtone of the same Chainmail Silver and a highlight of Golden High Flow Acrylic Iridescent Silver. This silver is super transparent which makes it ideal for glazing tasks like this. The silver over the top of the Ghost Tint shading gives some good control of the lighting in a non-metallic way with actual metallics. As a not-very-good painter, I like this because mistakes are harder to spot but I still get to practice my NMM without things looking like crap. In this case, I'm not sure it worked out well mainly because I wasn't sure what to do with the highlighting on the axe blade.

I think this is a good result weighing in at around ten hours over three-ish real days and the first day of going down a very different path. Despite the time I spent, I don't think the highlights are as good as I can do partially because I kept forgetting which way was up. Note, it was not up from the cork he was pinned to and he kept spinning around on his pin which made everything harder. I was also stupidly tired from a historic heatwave and all the life disruption that came with that. And for those who are wondering, yes, I do push a bow wave of posts here. Life happens, OK. I'm happy with this result nonetheless, though not particularly satisfied.

This marks the beginning of year four of my serious painting efforts and in that time I've painted north of 600 figs. That feels like a lot, 2020 quarantine notwithstanding, and I'll sum it all up in a future update. Fair warning: there might be some nostalgia in there. Three years is an awfully long time, after all.

2021 finished mini counter: 159/100, high quality: 3/5

Gnollathon week 1 (2021 week 28)

I've been looking for new ways to speed paint and recently I ran into this video by Marco Frisoni using oils and gurdurnnit I haven't painted in oils in a long time. (This one's good too.) What would make that better? Gnolls! This week we kick off a new theme in a big 'ol batch for use in my every-other-Saturday game.

These are ten Frostgrave Gnolls, the first ten of whom were painted about a gajillionty years ago (ok, it was actually late 2018).  I love these figs and some day when I don't have a pile of potential in the four digit range, I will buy another box. These guys are supposed to be a speed paint. I feel like I type that a lot. Instead they were an experiment and I think it's turned out well.

We start, as usual, with a prime, shadows from below in Payne's Grey ink, and zenithal white from above. In a video I watched recently, someone noted that you want to zenithal that reads white from above.(Marco again? Can't remember). This matches pretty well with a thing that I noticed doing glaze speed painting--that my highlights aren't super bright. So for these guys I switched back to a white ink, Daler Rowney, like the Payne's Grey. This did seem to fix my zenithal problems but I pretty much painted over the whole thing anyway.

Next up I did a flat basecoat which is not normally a thing I do. I'm either starting with a Pro Acryl transparent base or a shaded basecoat which I like a lot better. Both of these add contrast cheaply and easily which is a better set up for the typical acrylic many layers method that I've been doing since, well, January, and it felt very, very wrong. I used an ancient pot of blue Reaper Pro Paints that I bought just after the turn of the millennium and a Vallejo Game Color terra cotta that I like a lot. The browns were played by my old (and terrible) Army Painter paints with backups in white from an off white Vallejo Game Color and metallics by Vallejo Game Air Chainmail Silver. In this case I was painting some 3d prints in the batch which fight with the normal Vallejo Metal Color Steel that I might otherwise prefer.

Now things got crazy. Re-activating my prepared oil paints, I cut up some makeup sponges, pulled out my q-tips, and found my eyeliner sponges (something like this and boy does my Amazon purchase history look weird). I slopped down an oil wash mostly in the right colors on the first fig and then wiped off most of it with the aforementioned wipey team. This mostly worked. The yellow and brown mix did not play nice with the blue mix as one might expect and the result was a mess but I soldiered through and even did some minor highlights. Every figure from there on out was washed in variations on the same color with a mustard-y wash for the base.

This was fun and they got better with each gnoll. There are three vectors to control here: the thickness of the paint, the length of time on the mini before wiping it off, and the color of the wash. I experimented with all three and by the tenth one I think I finally got it. Ten to fifteen minutes is what seemed to work the best for me in a relatively humid and slightly warm environment. This was just enough time to slop paint on three of them (the last three in this case) before going to wipe off most of the paint. You want to avoid pressing too hard on the fig even if you want to take off most of the wash, say, on their adorable gnoll-y faces, and if you don't let the wash set for a bit, capillary action will pull most of it off into the sponge. The consistency that worked well for me is around halfway between a well mixed Army Painter paint and a Vallejo Model Air. For the color, lighter colors were fine but the darker colors seemed to work the best, even on the blue base.

The last step was highlighting which I also did in oils after a day of paint drying on the figs. I'd considered waiting a couple days and finishing details with acrylics but wanted to do some sweet, sweet oil blends since I had them out. I also futzed around a bit with edge highlights but I don't think those turned out super well. Probably my paint was too thick.

This has been a fun return to oils and I suspect there will be more of these shenanigans in the near future. These guys were prepped in right around fifteen hours including assembly and painting was completed in around twelve of those hours. That seems good given the outcome and that I did a bunch of experimentation along the way. Next time should be faster! 

2021 finished mini counter: 158/100

A thing a week 2021, week 27 (desert forest)

And now for something different. My current every-other-Saturday game is in a desert and I didn't feel like deciduous trees would cut it. Turns out, it's really hard to get models of date palms and other desert trees. What you can get is coconut palms and most people wouldn't know the difference. One of my players is from Guam and does know the difference. I've sworn him to secrecy so we should be fine.

These are literally the least expensive coconut palms I could find on Amazon. Notably, today, I've found some less expensive ones but I didn't find them when I ordered mine. They are not great props but they'll work and they were inexpensive so here we go. Step 1: scrape mold lines. They're made in very soft and cheap plastic as one might expect but that results in some pretty heinous mold lines. I didn't bother trying to deal with the mold lines on the leaves which come off in separate pieces but dealing with the trunks wasn't hard.

Step 2: base them. This was slightly harder than you might imagine. The larger trees are large enough to want to fall over pretty commonly. I weighted the larger 32mm bases with some steel nuts I had lying around which make them almost stable. The larger ones are still a mess. These were all hot glued down to a base and textured with Vallejo texture paste which is my current go-to. While I'd normally throw some grit down on the wet paste to give it some variety; these guys are terrain and don't really warrant such steps.

Step 4 is washing the trunks. The leaves pull off so this wasn't hard. Step 5 is painting the texture paste. I didn't bother priming because I didn't think it was necessary and still don't have the airbrush control to not get it all along the trunk. Step 6 is black rimming the base and that's what we see in the "glamour" shot. These do break one of my rules: avoid obscuring the battlefield, but they're thin enough that I'm not super worried about it. These work and I'm counting them as "buildings." Maybe I should rename the requirement as "terrain" or something. Next year I guess.

2021 finished buildingterrain counter: 5/5