A thing a week 2024, week 3

This week we have only the former: stuff on my painting desk that I'm trying to finish without being a part of a category I'm trying to close out. This is an artifact of how I record things (usually by year or kickstarter) and not at all interesting. These figs are mostly in the big bucket of "misc" which is everything else, and not a category that gets finished probably ever.

First up we have Vistra Dwarf Fighter from the Wrath of Ashardalon boardgame and Alaeros, Northland Fighter from the Temple of Elemental Evil boardgame. These are not good sculpts. Vistra is gigantic for a dwarf and being as hunched over as she is, she's got a lot of negative space. The texturing on her cloak is nice but the stuff on her armor is really overkill, especially compared to the other figs in that set. Last, there was no way to sanely deal with the mold lines given the texturing. All of the detail mean that despite cutting about a million corners, she still took like three hours to paint. Bleh. For Alaeros, I hate that his axe is bendy. I hate that he has so many stinking straps. I hate all the fur even though I spent what feels like too much time on it. Sometimes during the painting of these kinds of figures, I question my judgement when prepping them. 

Next up we have from the Legend of Drizzt boardgame the titular Drizzt, some notable character or other Jarlaxle, and love interest Catti-brie. Given that I read all these books when I was young, I should probably remember but I don't and I can't be bothered to look them up. These are OK sculpts with very poor molding like most of the other figs in the cycle of boardgames and as such I (clearly) didn't spend a lot of time with them. It's also curious that they're so all over the board in their style. It looks like Drizzt and Jarlaxle were done by the same people or at least people with similar styles. Catti-brie looks like she came from another set entirely. I can only guess at why this is. 

Last up we have Half-Elf Warlock - Jilsa Rennwin from DnD is a Woman and looking at that page, it seems I screwed up. I should have printed her at 32mm like a lot of the other 3d prints and and increasingly large proportion of my collection. Instead I printed her at 25mm like a dumb. That made painting her a lot harder than it needed to be especially in her face and gambeson which I spent a lot of time on. 

2024 finished mini counter: 18/208

A thing a week 2023, week (gasp!) 53!

This year we get a bonus post! The first Sunday of January was the 1st and today is also a Sunday so we get a 53rd entry in the series. This is good because we have a lot of figs to get through and I'm glad I didn't have to jam them all into the previous post.

This is a Mystic Portal which I got with Bones 4 and you might note that the bronze is the same jobby as the harpies got. Yep. It's mostly otherwise done with drybrushes and washes and should be a fun set piece whenever it is that I might need such a thing. The bottom piece is warped very badly and I wasn't unable to unbend it sufficiently so I guess the lions are just not going to be very convincing while holding it. I also note that whatever transparent plastic they used in the molding was highly hydrophobic despite a lot of scrubbing to prevent exactly that problem. Anything I had to brush on rather than airbrush was a pain but on the upside, it'll count as large #5. 

The fiery guy on the left is a Temple of Elemental Evil board game Fire Elemental and the fiery guy (?) on the right is a Bones 4 Crab Man despite the fact that the morphology would indicate that it's indeed female. Did I need to paint both of them like fire? No, I did not, and neither of them is super convincing at it either way, but I did. The elemental's deep, deep details defied easy drybrushing which is usually how I pull this effect off so the yellows are too prominent and the oranges/dark reds are nearly missing. The Crab Man did this a little better but the yellows are probably not prominent enough even though the dark reds sell pretty well. I'm experimenting with the Army Painter Drybrush Set and I can say that they work pretty well even if I think they were a tad spendy.

This is Rivani from Bones 4. She's an iconic something-or-other from Pathfinder, a game I don't play and somewhat unusually, I played this one by the book keeping her normal color scheme. There are some really soft details on this sculpt which bother me and I didn't push to get a bunch of freehand on here, not like I'd normally do such a thing. I feel like I sold the shine on her hair OK but the yellow tones need a lot more work and shininess from the contrast paint on her paints still sucks. Overall, an OK job.

This guy is very clearly the Grim Reaper (no link) and probably less clearly from Bones 5. This is pretty obviously a speed paint borrowing most of the color scheme from last week's Naga plus slightly more attention to detail and some additional highlight work with the airbrush. I wanted to keep his robes dark so instead of trying to highlight with layers that a) would take a lot of time, and b) I'd invariably overdo,  I hit him with various light drybrushes instead which look good enough at arm's length. Most of the rest of the paint job is pretty simple and I pretty clearly phoned in the hourglass.

This guy is also from Bones 5 and I call him a loot golem for lack of a better name. In my mind my very careful airbrushing would have done a lot more of the work. Also, the primer would have stuck better to the transparent rubbery plastic it's made of. Neither of those are actually true. I tried real hard to sell the gold but all of my shenanigans trying to zenithal with metallics made a real mess. I also would have liked to have done better with the gemstones but I found the fully-assembled model to be hard to navigate (my fault) beyond being inconveniently big. The Golden Yellow Ghost Tint didn't super help and was luckily really hard to apply so I got that goin' for me. He'll count as large #6. 

Last up for this post and this year, we have Runewars Outland Scouts. This is a game that a) I don't play, and b) is currently out of print. I got these and some others at a steep discount and wanted a semi-easy batch to round things out. These had OK sculpts. The details are mostly big and chunky but there are too many of them. The chains in front draw particular ire. One serious drawback is that their eyes aren't sculpted. They seem to be entirely recessed which is why they're so indistinct in the packaging shots. That sucked and I only sort of figured it out and in the way that you learn things spending hours painting tiny figs, I decided that I like neither their pseudo-fantasy armor nor their iffy fantasy swords. I really wanted these to be better but I only got them to OK in the span of about ten hours all told. They're painted and that counts.

2023 finished mini counter: 373/104