A thing a week 2026, week 40

If you guessed "Bones 6 this week", you're right! Also, probably next week, the week after that, and probably for quite a few more subsequent weeks. 

These first five guys are Fire Newts and I'm happy to note that a) I could find a link, and b) they seem to be available in the same red plastic as I got them in. Given said red plastic, I didn't do the normal prime/drybrush. These guys are unprimed (gasp! record scratch! Wilhelm scream!) followed by a coat of Pro Acryl Transparent Yellow and successive glowing rock drybrushes which worked out pretty much the way I intended. This kept the pseudo-transparent red glow from the plastic which is a very nice effect in bright lights. Even if I wanted to, I doubt I could have over-shown the glowing red effect with anything on their gear so I chose to do them in a very subtle cool grey. This went well enough until I realized that the caster guy was carrying a possum. Well now it's a magma possum! This effect sells very nicely for not a lot of effort which I like.

I tried the same thing with this Nightmare is in yellow pseudo-transparent plastic and it did not work out quite as well. I followed the same scheme but didn't do any dark colors on the wing membranes for contrast and while the rest of the guy looks ok, the wings look not very good. Notably they sell a little better at the table where the lights are less bright and the shine-through is less distracting. Probably the wings could use a slightly darker drybrush to sell better. Ultimately he's done and that's OK.

2026 finished mini counter: 230 

A thing a week 2025, week 45

Another small-ish batch this week, and it's gnolls! My love of gnolls is pretty well documented at this point so when bones 6 rolled around and there was a gnoll add-on, I had to get them. This isn't a high quality piece of work by any means but I think they turned out pretty well. I took my time with them which isn't a thing I do super often but I think it shows. They were done all told in maybe ten hours or so and I'm pretty happy with them.

2025 finished mini counter: 172

A thing a week 2025, week 44

Mini-batch again this week, wolf edition. I love wolves and I'm particular to solid color wolves and not just because they're easier to paint. I thought I'd ordered another group of these as an add-on during the kickstarter but I couldn't find them if I did. 

The texture on these guys is pretty good and they're molded in a hard plastic which is a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, it holds detail pretty well. On the other hand, it warps sometimes badly (note the yellow guy) and makes mold lines on fur even harder to deal with so I mostly didn't. These guys got a normal zenithal which mostly doesn't show through because they're so dark. A slapchop-like drybrush with a heavy body acrylic white followed. The basecoat was Army Painter Speed Paint 2.0 Grim Black which is probably my favorite of the 2.0 line. After that they got a couple rounds of drybrushes followed by washes to bring up the contrast before I handled their details. I did what I could with their teeth and note that this is where mold lines were the worst. I also note that I forgot to hit them with my typical gloss Reikland Fleshshade but that's probably OK. Their bases probably took more actual effort mostly because I insisted on painting with palette sludge as is my wont.

2025 finished mini counter: 166, 2025 goal figs remaining: 2 

A thing a week 2025, week 43

Another mini-batch this week and like last week, the best kind of painting: high drama, low effort. These would be the Ant Infestation from Bones 6. Also like last week, I can't find them on the Reaper site. In addition to the zenithal we saw last week, these guys also got a dry brush before hitting them with successive high gloss candy coats from Badger Ghost Tint. I base coated them with the same ruddy brown last week's mud men got but afterward I wanted to push them into a redder tint. Unhelpfully I decided this after the first brown gloss coat went on and my attempts to tint with the Ghost Tints worked less well than I'd hoped. 

The bigger fig is the Ant Queen, also sans link. She has separate transparent wings and was separate from her base. That made painting easy but the shift to a harder plastic than the typical Bones variants and the unbelievable warping that came with it meant that assembly was more of a pain that it should have been. Her legs were basically flat going out and had to be bent 45 to 90 degrees to fit into the base. Were I not equipped with the baking soda and super glue trick, this would have been a really big problem. Her transparent wings got a post-assembly hit with gloss Nuln Oil to pick out the texture.

These aren't great paint jobs but they're done and I was on the right track when I kept doing double-takes thinking a bunch of giant bugs were on my painting desk.

2025 finished mini counter: 162, 2025 goal figs remaining: 2