Blacklist backlog week 4 (2024 week 7)

This week we finish up the theme as I finish up the last of the Blacklist Fantasy Series 1 and simultaneously challenge my ability to take something resembling reasonable photos. The majority of these are "get 'er done" kind of paint jobs and they have the added difficulty of being large or very large. This also challenges my idea of what a "large" figure as it is especially given my goals this year so here we go.

First up we have a shambling mound and demon lord and both are speed paints. They're mostly Pro Acryl Transparents with a bunch of work to pick out details. I thought the orangey mushrooms on the shambler were a lot more saturated when I was painting him and they look really washed out here. I spent more time than I expected picking out details on it. The demon lord could really have used another ten or so hours in addition to the ten or so I spent on him. His large size made him difficult to work with in addition to all the negative spaces on him. I'm not sold on the fleshy sword thought he sculpt really insisted on it. Ultimately I don't use many of either of these dudes so other than increasing my painted count, I don't know what I'm going to do with them. The shambler was done in a couple hours in total.

These next two are ogre and troll and I don't know what the sculptor was thinking on the ogre. Other than skipping more than a few leg days, the musculature on his left arm is a mess that I struggled to work with. I can overlook the dumb spikes on his mace but the ever-present mold lines over his hand wrappings really sucked. Base coats were mainly provided by the airbrush and finished with a few hours of brush work for highlights and details. The troll was a true speed paint with basecoats provided by ProAcryl Transparents and a light drybrush. Another hour or so for details and highights and he was done. Overall the two of these jokers were done in under eight hours and like the previous two, I have very little use for them (trolls are a playable race in my game worlds and have a very different aesthetic).

This beefy gal is listed as giant and she took freakin' forever. Being mostly flesh, I spent a super long time glazing up and down to make it look OK. Basecoats were done with the airbrush and followed by a fleshwash to unsuccessfully add darklining (I did that at the end with a detail brush). The cloth and other details were (obviously) rushed and I did not realize that her leather skirt was quite so shiny. That particular Vallejo Game Color Terracotta give me a lot of trouble and probably I'll burn it on terrain or give it away so I don't have to deal with it any longer. I sunk around twenty five hours over a week or so into this fig, or "bigature" which I stole from Uncle Atom and I think we landed in a good place. There are no giants in my place so yet again, my potential uses for this fig are pretty limited. She'll count as large fig #1 for the year.

Last up we have what is hopefully clearly a dragon. He's also a bigature and again I have to note that the sculptor was a little off the rails. I watch all these youtube videos where folks are painting these $150 James Workshop dragons with intricate, painter-friendly textures then I see this guy with random cuts in his wings, barely defined webbing textures, and stupidly deep and inconvenient scales. As I don't use many dragons and don't particularly like this sculpt, this guy is a speed paint. I started with a Forest Green Daler Rowney Ink which I was going to lay over the entire model as a green dragon and immediately changed my mind. I kept it as the base for the wing webbing and ended up with an Indigo Daler Rowney Ink for the rest of the body. After that, a lot of drybrushing and detail work done to the tune of about six hours all told. Not my best work for sure, and the fig will hold a better quality paint job but I just can't be bothered.

And we're done! There's one more guy kicking around somewhere that I cannot find. I'm sure he'll show up at some point at which point I'll stick him in the pipeline but until then, I'm calling it done. It took a year to work through them all and ultimately I think they've been pretty good sans the stress of them being delayed for so long without any real understanding that they'd ever ship. Either way, they're done now and that's cool.

2024 finished mini counter: 49/208, 2/4 busts or large figs