A thing a week 2026, week 26

This week we continue our tour of the biggies which will clear out most of them. I also get to re-live the trauma of "I was lazy and glued everything together without thinking about how I'm going to paint them." So we got that to look forward to. 

First up we get both! The blue guy on the left is a Greater Basilisk and he turned out really sharp. This is a high drama, low effort offering and I specifically picked an undercoat that was a little bit glossy. In this case, it works! He's mostly drybrushed with increasingly high valued paints, in this case Golden So Flat Ultramarine. The guy on the right is a Celestial Stag and even though he took way longer, the result is so much less good. Horns in particular eat a lot of time and the total effect is kind of patchy because of the many layers of drybrush I did to pop out the very shallow texture and still do anything with the volumes. More work could have sold it more but I wasn't in that headspace when I painted it.

Next up we have a coupla really big dragons. The blue guy on the left is an Amber Dragon which I couldn't be bothered to look up before I painted him. He's the same color scheme as our basilisk on purpose so I could go a tiny bit faster. This is a great sculpt with a lot of very nice texture so I spent a lot of time dry brushing and washing over it which landed in a nice place. I would have liked his cyan bits to be a tad lighter but he came out well anyway. Probably the base needed more work but when I got there, I was just plain done. The guy on the right is Narthalyssk and despite having as much texture and effort, came out so much less dramatic. Red is hard to highlight and I was afraid of pushing into oranges which I thought would lose contrast with the yellow ventral scales and wing membranes. Joke's on me, though, since I did a lousy job highlighting those too. Under the my very bright painting lights, he looked OK. On the table, his reds look indistinct and his yellows look washed out and dirty. I did like the demon dots, tho. 

2026 finished mini counter: 153

 

A thing a week 2026, week 25

ed> due to some scheduling shenanigans, this guy didn't get posted when it was supposed to. Luckily, with the power of the Internet, I've backdated so that none shall be the wiser.

 This week we start our biggies tour where I work through a bunch of the bigger-than-normal figs in Bones 5. 

First up we have two biggies and neither of them are particularly worthy efforts. The Dragon-Lion on the left needed at least some gap filling and the fur colors really needed to go up at least a couple layers. I got good hue contrast between the scales, the fur, and his mane but none of those parts by themselves is well handled. At the time of this writing, I was going through a really painful medical issue and freaking out about making it to Bricks Cascade so suffice to say, my attention was elsewhere. The Catoblepas on the right is more or less the same deal except that the sculpt featured more or less one texture which makes my indiscretions less obvious. Also of note, I glued it all together and really struggled getting the green on the base he's standing on. Don't worry, I didn't learn, and will make the same mistake many times in the coming weeks. 

One of the most egregious example of gluing stuff together and then struggling to paint stuff is this guy who I call "treasure dragon." Because he's on a pile of treasure. Get it? This guy is purple to contrast with the yellowy gold pile he's laying on and his left arm is a real mess. Somewhere during the painting, it fell off and I think I ended up with a blob of glue that made it not fit correctly so I ended up having to do a lot of filling. It's hard to notice if you don't know but it's definitely not as good as it probably should have been. A coat of Badger Ghost Tint Orange went over the gold which makes it pop a little better and ultimately the composition works even if the dragon's paint job isn't particularly good. They can't all be bangers, kids.

2026 finished mini counter: 149

 

A thing a week 2026, week 24

One of the things I find fun about these kinds of big fig kickstarters is I end up with a bunch of stuff that I might not have ever considered but that I might try really hard to work in somewhere. Notably, last week's offering wasn't this kind of thing. Also like last week, links seem to be few and far between despite how many levers and dials the Reaper site has. If I give the figure a "name" it means "I have no idea what this guy is so here's a silly name for it."

First up we have Night Cloak, "angry dagger worm", and Dire Cabbage. The first and last are the best kind of paint jobs: high drama, low effort. In both cases, the sculpt is doing most of the work and both were painted as successive sets of drybrush and transparent paints. The angry dagger worm guy took way more effort since he wasn't all one color. I had a rough time getting the fleshtones on his underbelly to look OK and, well, they still don't. I was done with him, tho, so that's where he landed.

Next up we have Young Fire Dragon who I might have painted in red if I'd known that before looking up the link and "frogmouth wing guy". These are two more high drama, low effort works. Probably the dragon could use a little more variation top to bottom and/or picking out the wing membranes which I normally do. Still, I don't think either are terrible but neither is particularly good.

2026 finished mini counter: 146

 

A thing a week 2026, week 23

And now for something completely different. Bones 5 came with a bunch of spell effects that make sense if you're playing D&D. I'm not, so some of these guys will have far less utility than otherwise. As such, I didn't do much to paint them and it shows. These guys are (I think) Bigby's Interposing Hand, Bigby's Grasping Hand, and Bigby's Fist and like a lot of Bones 5 figs, I can't find links. 

The pinky-magenta ones are washed and hit with a coat of Badger Ghost Tint Magenta and as usual with the Reaper Bones transparent figures and basically any paint: I had a really hard time getting the paint to stick. As far as I can tell, the material itself is hydrophobic and no amount of washing seems to help. These guys are (I think) Wall of Stone, Wall of Thorns, Tenser's Floating Disk, Spiritual Weapon, and Planar Servant. 

Not shown here are the three hand-sized spell effects that I forgot to shoot that I'll use somehow, somewhere. Ultimately these guys look OK in these shots and the majority of them won't get a lot of screen time which is pretty much par for the course.

2026 finished mini counter: 141