Kitty-a-thon 2023, week 1 (2023 week 10)

This week we're starting our first theme of the year, the infamous Kitty-a-thon, which is a lot better than the normal "working through the prepped stuff on my desk." This week also continues the non-theme of working through my vintage backlog. 

These are 02-130 Dae-Shiru Commanders and 02-132 Dae-Shiru Regulars from Ral Partha and are among the first figures I ever bought, somewhere back in the heady days of the early 90s. These are OK sculpts and questionable molds as is common in figs from that era and I didn't take super good care of them over the last three decades. I don't recall ever using them in play and while I could contrive a reason to have them exist in my games I don't have any particular need to do such a thing. I bought them because they're cool and now they're painted. Early 90s me would be impressed.

For those who don't spend a lot of time with metal minis: the primer you use makes a big difference. Normally I use Badger Stynylrez which works great for all kinds of figures (it's even in the name) but not metal. Vallejo Surface Primer works on just about anything I'd use in the hobby. Stynylrez is inexpensive, has good leveling properties, and is paintable in about 15 minutes so far as I can tell. VSP requires about a day of curing time before painting. Also you might notice that I didn't add all the bejangles and other bits. That'd be because a) I didn't now how to assemble them (I don't still have the instructions and found them online too late) b) a lot of it is really fiddly with heavy metal bits, and c) I've just plain lost some of the bits.

Ultimately, I think this is an OK representation of them. Nothing spectacular here, just regular paint jobs partially done with the airbrush with some fancy detail work. I didn't have to call out the stitching on their armor and didn't do an especially good job on it anyway, but I did. These five were done somewhere in the 12-15 hour range for the batch and it's good to have them painted after all these years.

2023 finished mini counter: 72/104