A thing a week 2025, week 13

More right-down-the-plate work this week, plus a short rant. 

First up we have Elven Blacksmith and Sarah, the Seeress. If Sarah looks familiar, it's because she showed up way back in week 51 of 2022 which seems a lot further in the rear-view than it actually is. Mold lines on both were pretty awful and I did not enough work to deal with them sanely. None of the details on either is as good as it could have been (speed paint) though I take some pride in noting that this version of Sarah done in less than half the time turned out much better. I guess several hundred figs of practice does add up. The blue on her dress got a little chalky in the higher tones but I think I got the volumes correctly. The orb on her staff looks particularly good in this shot but in stark reversal, it doesn't look as good in person. The blacksmith is kind of a mess. The right side of her face was a mess of mold issues and I did what I could to give it any definition. Also, there wasn't any indication of a shirt in the sculpt but I was dumb to not paint one on--wouldn't even be the first time. She looks dumb without it especially with her armored leg plates. Which blacksmiths commonly wear. Or something. Anyway.

Here we have Finari, Female Paladin and Isabeau Laroche, Paladin both in bones white. I noted yesterday that practically-armored gals are under-represented in the hobby and I stick to that assertion. This week we have an excellent example. Finari is in ridonkulous boobplate fantasy armor and I bought the fig nonetheless. While not as bad as a lot of the examples you can find, it's not great, Bob. I give a pass for figs to not have helmets on so you can see/paint the face in expressive ways FWIW. Isabeau is far more realistically dressed though I had to paint out the boob window because I had to, that's why, and you can still tell she's a gal without it. Finari's hair is going to be a mess in actual combat as opposed to on a Hollywood set. Isabeau's cleverly tied it all up where it won't be a problem in either case. Neither of them is in heels (I have some standards FFS) and they're clearly both martial characters but Finari is clearly in the armored gal pinup vein while Isabeau isn't. Hollywood and video games on the whole have so warped our understanding of how things should look that we expect the former when the latter is actually way better and not less cool on the table. Last rant: those are clearly two handed swords. As in most sculpts, there's stuff to like about both and they're easy to tell apart on the table even though I painted them in mostly the same scheme. I missed another opportunity to put some heraldry on Isabeau's shield just like last week because: speed paint.

Last up we have Innkeeper Sophie from bones 4. I assume she's a mascot for Reaper or something since she shows up in every bones kickstarter and apparently as ReaperCon semi-exclusives. I haven't found any lore online but there are many Sophies in my collection now, though this is the first one I painted. She's got some weird mold issues around her face which I painted around and I am very thankful I painted her wings as a subassembly because it made everything much saner. The texture of her wings and the highlights I did got washed out in the last minute wash I stuck on there. Lots of this paint job is phoned in and probably a half hour more of refinement would have been good. Maybe in the future when I don't have a several hundred long backlog. 

2025 finished mini counter: 51, 2025 specific figs remaining: 88

A thing a week 2025, week 12

Back to the grind this week with four offerings right down the middle of the plate. These and next week's are basically what passes as speed paints as I get these days.

First up we have Hagar, Dwarf Fighter and Durok, Dwarf Ranger from Reaper both in bones white. I've spent a lot of pixels on decrying the difficulties with bones white material and these guys have all of that in spades. The molds are soft and really don't flatter the molds at all. Looking closely at these shots, I'm thinking that Hagar's torso covering shouldn't be a breastplate. I also note that Durok's cloak looks like it's shiny but it's actually just patchy. Not sure if that's better but they'll look fine in my small squad of Dwarves. They were done in something like four hours for the two of them.

Next up we have Erick, Paladin Initiate and Alandin, Elf Paladin, the former as normal bones white, the latter from Bones 4. Erick is pretty much what he looks like and, yes, I missed an opportunity to do some freehand on his shield--speed paint here. Alandin would have been painted much earlier but I glued the wrong arm in the wrong place and then convinced myself I was missing a piece only to realize my mistake not super long ago. I painted Alandin as a gal because I thought it fit the sculpt better but I don't think that was the sculptor's intent. I like cheesecake-y fantasy pinups as much as the next guy on the Internet but I feel that normal practical armor non-boobplate martial gals are sorely under-represented in the hobby. We'll get a nice contrast next week so tune in then!

2025 finished mini counter: 46, 2025 specific figs remaining: 93

A thing a week 2024, week 22

Continuing on last week's post, we have another pair of Rocky figs from Bones 4. They mostly follow the same scheme as the previous blue Rocky: one or more lousy ink basecoats applied badly with the airbrush followed by one or two more basecoats with contrast paints, speed paints, or homemade washes, followed by picking out every scale individually and finishing details like horns, eyes, and whatnot. And yes, I said last week that I wouldn't commit to picking out every individual scale on every fig but spoiler: I did.

First up we have Treasure Rocky in green and yes, greedy green was the only appropriate color choice. I didn't wan the chest and treasure pile to be the focus so I made sure they were muted down. The gold basecoat was a speed paint metallic IIRC followed by a seraphim sepia wash to darken it down and to knock out some of the shine. If it looks a little dark, that's why and exactly what I intended. There's still some shine in the darkest parts of his body which looks pretty wrong in the photos but sells a little better in person. I should have yellow-shifted his wings and ear webbing which is pretty consistent in all of these guys. The gems and whatnot are phoned in but I'm not unhappy with the result.

Next up we have Flying Rocky in red and I like to think that he was rudely awakened by an alarm or something and has taken flight in shock. This kind of thing happens when you spend hours picking out tiny details on a fig. Of the five, this guy is probably the weakest. There's a bunch of mold lines I didn't manage well and the shininess on him is a little distracting in person. I also failed to sufficiently pop out the scales under his eyes and all of that is on top of the difficulties I and many folks have in highlighting red. The problem is that when you push up into the lighter values it turns pink which reads incorrectly and I am not good at yellowing down into orange and salmon tones despite how much I paint in that color. Part of it is that I really don't want to lose the vibrancy of my favorite pyrrole red and it really shows on this guy since the composition is dominated by it. Yellowing down his webbing would have helped the contrast but I'm still happy to call both of these guys high quality works on the year.

2024 finished mini counter: 126/208, 9/12 high quality