And we're there! As the last Sunday in the year, we get our last post in this series for the year. And as per usual I'm draining the rest of my painted queue so buckle in and stay tuned in the next few days for my usual end of year shenanigans.
First up we have Lion's Tower Captain Amara from Kingdom of Talarius and Kassandra of the Blade in bendy white Bones plastic. Captain Amara is an OK sculpt that I got in a kickstarter-like batch. His cloak is a little patchier than I would like and he's got a dumb fantasy sword and pauldron but he was pretty easy to paint and I like his Captain Morgan pose. Kassandra is a good sculpt let down by bad molding. I spent a lot more time trying to get her to look right than was probably warranted and I note again for the record that I'm done buying white Bones plastic. She was done in around four hours most of which was on her face and color swapping basically all of her gear. I didn't have a plan and it made everything harder. He was done in about two fairly straightforward hours.
These little dudes are most of Familiar Pack I from Reaper in hated Bones white plastic. I painted the wolf as a fox way back in Week 27 of 2020 and boy was that photography rough. They've been kicking around my painting desk for years in various states of not-prepped-ness so it's not stunning that the sitting cat is MIA, never to be seen again. These aren't try-hard paint jobs though the Faerie Dragon got more love simply because he's more complex. None of them hold up under close scrutiny but that wasn't really the point, either.
These three are
Adventurer Fighters and Sorcerors from Tri Fin Studio. These are great sculpts, come in parts, and are slightly modular which is great. I should have painted them in sub-assemblies but didn't and they were in enough parts that it was rough to get them together. These are pretty basic schemes held up by some well-placed details starting with a zenithal and speed paint/contrast paint basecoat. I note that the fighters are fairly plain which I like while the sorcerers are not which is also appropriate. Overall I think all of them work pretty well and weren't
that hard to paint and I really dig the double highlight on the Elf gal's hair. I'll also note that they have some newer sculpts that I really like but haven't purchased yet so don't be surprised if more of these show up in the unforseeable future.
I did take the gal fighter to a high quality (#15 on the year if my count is correct). One of the great things about less-busy sculpts is that you
can put a bunch more time on quality than just getting the details in. I did a bunch of NMM style work in TMMs on her metallics which is a little washed out and patchy in these shots but which work a lot better in person. There are also some nicely subtle transitions on her gambison and pants which doesn't show super well here. In addition to other things that don't show well are the three-ish hours I spent on her face which looks weird here because her head is tilted down a bit. Still some camera setup work needed for next year I guess and I really have to start dulling down these contrast paint basecoates--the shiny irks me.
Next up we have
Pi-Rat with Cutlass from Darksword Minis and Prince Nicholas from Reaper both in metal. And for
reasons I can't explain, I cannot find a link on the Reaper site. Prince Nicholas I bought many years ago and
could not find record of when. He's been sitting primed and partially painted on my painting desk for what seems like many years but probably was only since summer of last year. His cloak looks extra patchy in these shots but works better in person. Pi-Rat was purchased a couple years ago for a campaign which completed quite a while ago. He played the ship's quartermaster, a weasel-y guy named Norbert. He's been partially prepped and painted for about the same amount of time. Note that metal figs don't work well with my normal Badger Synylrez primer
does not work on metal figs (ask me how I know this). I had to go with slow-curing Vallejo Surface Primer instead.
Penultimately we have
Nolzur's Wyvern which I bought quite a long time ago. I have a handful of these large sized Nolzur's figs that I otherwise don't like painting. He's painted mainly with the airbrush with a bunch of details, washing, and drybrushing because the details were pretty well sculpted. I'm not 100% sold on the last fleshwash which I probably put on too heavily. He'll be large fig #3.
Last up we have
Nolzur's Young Blue Dragon which was a birthday gift from a buddy many years ago. He was also painted with the airbrush followed by washes/constrast paints, drybrushing, and details. This is my favorite kind of painting: high drama, low effort. Probably the details on his scales could have been popped out more. The darks are nice, tho, and I like the fade on his wings provided by the airbrush. Because the last wash on the wyvern went so badly, I opted
not to wash this guy's wings. Both of them are semi-shiny from the ink basecoat but IMO that works OK for scaly creatures. He'll round out the year as large fig #4.
2024 finished mini counter: 420/208, busts or large figs: 4/4
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