A thing a week 2023, week 1

This year starts on a Sunday so you get three posts in one day. It also means that I've had to double-time it to get something not embarrassing in the front row of this year's wrap up post. The good news is that because it's the holidays I've had more than the usual amount of time to work on stuff.

First up we have a 3d print of Kitsune Ranger from Galaad. He's notably painted like an Australian Shepherd since he's a replacement player character for my in-person game. I have a couple gripes with what is otherwise a pretty good sculpt. The bracers' and anklets' negative space is IMO a little too pronounced which made them hard to paint. I also don't super like fur tufts like he's got since it makes picking out the larger volumes harder. All that said, he was a fun paint and despite the fact that the sculpt did most of the work, I'm calling him the first of the year's high quality jobs.

Next up we have a pair of nice figs, namely City Guard Elite Captain from Crippled God Foundry that I printed very badly. I like that this sculpt a) has a nice open pose, b) has reasonable armor, and c) has an expressive face. The last of those is why I painted these at all which I might not have otherwise. They're small, I think 28mm though I haven't measured, which made their eyes especially painful, but hey, that's good practice (always paint eyes). Someday I'll figure out how to work my printer to have fewer of these kinds of print failures. At that point I may revisit this sculpt.

This gal is Curiphaias Dragonborn Sorcerer from the D&D is a Woman campaign and sadly I can't provide a direct link. She's also really small, probably the same 28mm and came supported not terribly well so this print has more weird scarring and missed connection points than normal. She was a reasonable paint without too terribly many tiny details and completed in around three hours with the airbrush doing the bulk of the scaletone work. I'm happy with this rendition but not satisfied. Possibly she'll show up again sometime in the future.

This is Dragonguard Lady E from Artisan Guild and I super like this sculpt. Like Curiphaias, the bulk of the scalework was done with the airbrush though looking at the final shots here, I really should have done the metallics instead. I had some very lofty aspirations to do a bunch of shading on her armor that I clearly didn't do and I completely sidestepped any OSL for this round despite her obviously flaming sword. Even with the airbrush work, she represents something like six hours of effort done in about a day with a lot of attention to detail so I'm comfortable counting her as high quality #2 for the year despite the fact that the sculpt did most of the work. As a modular figure, you can expect future prints with said missing OSL sometime in the future.

What would be better than one flaming sword? How about two! Rounding out this group is, you guessed it, Dragonguard Lady F from Artisans Guild and no, she didn't actually come with two flaming swords. Astute viewers will note that the flames are going in different directions because through the magic of digital printing, I mirrored the right hand flaming sword so she could be extra rad. Or hype. Whatever the kids are saying these days. Clearly I also omitted any real OSL but I did work extra hard on her orangy cloak thingy. I really like this color scheme and I think we'll see a lot more of the blues and oranges this year since apparently last year was greens and purples. She'll count as high quality #3 done in about the same six hours as Lady E. 

2023 finished mini counter: 6/104, 3/10 high quality