A thing a week 2025, week 35

This week we have four more figs on target. These folks are Runewars Leonx Riders and I am a big fan of big kitty cavalry. I bought two sets of these (one saved for later) when they came on sale because the game was being sunset. If they look or sound familiar, we saw their game-mates, the Outland Scouts, way back in Bonus Week 53 of 2023. 

These aren't fantastic sculpts and the mold lines were a real mess so I didn't feel like spending a lot of time on them. I did a pseudo slapchop on these and looking at the glamor shots, I really should have gone higher on the highlights. The kitty parts of these I like well enough. The armor and elf sides I like less so. They were done in a few hours for the lot of them which is fast enough to field an army if I played such games. Either way, they're painted and that counts for something.

2025 finished mini counter: 131, 2025 goal figs remaining: 18

A thing a week 2025, week 34

Following last week's offering we have these four as the red team. They're the other half of the Gotha Knights box and TBH, I was super done with these guys. The fur is pretty OK if patchy but the red parts, especially the big dude's cloak are really phoned in. I did some shading on the metallics but not much. 

As I noted last week, these guys probably won't see any game time so I didn't super feel like putting a ton of time into them. I especially disliked their spikey bits and the fact that they wouldn't stay on my large painting handles. My normal painting handles are magnetic with some putty on the top which hold pretty well for single magnet setups. These guys are too big to have a single magnet so they don't work on those. Also, their bases are way, way too big to fit, so they go on the "I can make no assumptions about the configuration of magnets" larger handles made out of ancient and empty paint pots with only putty on top. I don't like using these because they're not super secure and this didn't help. 

At any rate, these guys are done and I'm happy with that. Also, you might be wondering why I've got four figs here and my countdown has been decremented by five. Well. As part of the normal prep, the figs in whatever pieces they come in get taken out of the box. I do a dry fit then remove mold lines and whatnot, and then glue them together. Well, one of them was missing an arm. I hope he wasn't too expensive, but I can't exactly assemble him sans arm so I'm taking him off the list entirely. 

2025 finished mini counter: 127, 2025 goal figs remaining: 22 

A thing a week 2025, week 33

Moving right along, we have more House Goritsi figs from Wrath of Kings, this time half of the Gotha Knights box (next half coming soon). Like last week's specialists, these guys are also really big and because of the hard plastic used in these and their very spikey fantasy weapons, they were also really pokey which made them harder to paint.

I thought the first two were the same guy but they're actually different poses. The last two seem pretty distinct, I guess the cloak guy being an officer or something with his very weird fantasy weapon. I don't hate these sculpts and I get that games want to have a distinct visual style but at the same time I long for a more realistic portrayal of these obviously fantasy characters.

These are painted as dark grey wolves which I thought fit the subjects well. In retrospect, I should have done black wolves as a point of practice for painting black furred characters. I'd really wanted to do these as a batch paint but a) they're really pokey, b) they're really big and didn't fit on my normal paint handles, and c) they're super detailed. I did an OK paint job but got to the end and really just wanted to be done.  I don't expect they'll see game time but I've been pretty bad at predicting these things but I'm glad they're done either way.

2025 finished mini counter: 123, 2025 goal figs remaining: 27

ed) not sure what's going on with the formatting here but I'm far too lazy to hack the HTML directly.

A thing a week 2025, week 32

...and this week we're back on track. These two were purchased in the heady days of the spring of 2019 as  the Wrath of Kings: House Goritsi - Specialist Box #1 from CMON and a game that I notably don't play. We've seen the Whitemane Duelists from way back in 2020 week 37 as my first really high quality attempt and my first real NMM attempt. These are from an expansion pack that I got on steep discount as the game was being sunset and at a time when I was desperately trying to find canine anthropomorphs for my in-person game. The good: they're painted. The bad: they're really, really big, like 65mm so they tower over most of the character figs in my collection. I also don't know what's up with their gear which seems to be a mishmash of cyberpunk and artist fantasy hallucinations.

While not a speed paint, I also didn't go out of my way to really pick out the details though their size lent themselves to a fairly clean result. Due to their size, they ended up taking something like five or six hours each which is way more than I like to spend on a non-player character, non-high quality effort. They are on the 2025 goal list and despite my misgivings, I like the way they turned out.

2025 finished mini counter: 119, 2025 goal figs remaining: 31 

A thing a week 2025, week 31

This week we take a short break from our 2025 goals because, well, I had a need to paint something else this week.

First up we have a Duck-Billed Platypotamus from CobraMode. Did I technically need this guy? No, but he's been kicking around my prep table for far, far too long and since I'm at a point of cleaning the danged thing, I took the opportunity to paint him. My fantasy world is populated with silly double creatures like the ones out of Avatar so I got excited when I stumbled upon this guy. He's pretty simply painted in about  mostly with the airbrush. A wash on his bill and tail and a bunch of the normal brush-on details finished him off in about thirty minutes. 

These two are Weasel Witch Hunter Flamberge1 from Goon Master. It's super hard to get anthro figures for weasels which sucks because in my fantasy world, weasels are very common and well-loved by my players. The actual need for this week was we're having a special guest star playing the guy with the hat. The guy without the hat was printed at the same time earlier this year so I took the opportunity to paint him too. This is a great sculpt painted fairly quickly and I did not realize how glossy they'd come out until I was shooting. The base coat was provided by a mix of Pro Acryl Transparents and Speed Paint 2.0 and I've been trying to keep the low values in addition to the saturation for these kinds of characters. I think I got that but somewhere lost the really high values, especially on the reds. Still happy with the results here but certainly more work could have been done. They were completed in about four hours all told.

2025 finished mini counter: 117