A thing a week 2020, week 32

This week we're back to minis but with a special theme!  As I've noted the last few weeks, I've got some larger projects bubbling under the surface and we'll hopefully be able to catch up with that stuff soon.

I purchased these ADnD Adventures 11-002 Clerics with Staff and Warhammer somewhere in the early 90s when I started playing RPGs (2nd Ed ADnD, if you're curious).  They were some of the first minis I ever purchased and they're older than many of my current players.  When these miniatures were released, gas was 90 cents a gallon.  The 80386 was the fastest Intel desktop CPU you could buy running at a scorching 12MHz and big hair was all the rage.  Yeah, it was a different time.

I went with a Clyde Caldwell color scheme to match the era in which they were sculpted.  This is pretty much what fantasy art looked like in the days before most art was done digitally and shared on the intertoobs and it's one of the few things I have nostalgia for.  I did make one significant change, though.  I'm pretty sure these were intended to be pantsless which I think is just plain dumb.  Sane people don't go traipsing through the wilderness sans pants and unless the climate is so super hot that wearing metal armor would burn, I can't imagine these folks wouldn't cover up.  A thing that I wanted to change but didn't was her awful boob armor.  I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure boobs don't work that way.  At least she's not on stilettos.  

Despite my issues with her armor, I still think these are great sculpts faithfully capturing an all-but-forgotten age in the hobby.  There are a lot of details, many of which are quite hard to reach--a thing that modern mini sculptors try to avoid.  Despite intending them to be a speed-paint between other work I still spent six-ish hours on these two over a couple days with special attention to their faces.  I rather enjoyed painting these which helps explain the next two.

These two rogues were bought around the same time; maybe in the same transaction.  I don't like 11-005 thieves with shortsword and sling as much as I liked the clerics but these were primed and ready to go so I figured this was as good a time as any.  These are also highly detailed and probably also intended to be bare legged but I see no reason to give up on my "Pants For Rat Catchers" campaign yet.  Their armor is similarly cringeworthy but I didn't let that get in the way of doing what I could within about seven hours over a few days.

It's worth noting that these are in something approaching 25mm scale which means they're considerably smaller than contemporary figures which are usually done in 28mm or 32mm heroic scale.  This makes all of the tiny details that much harder to deal with.  Luckily, being made of metal, all of the details are still crisp which helps quite a lot.  It's a pretty stark distinction from Reaper Bones figs which tend to be soft and muddy, though the Reaper Bones Black figs are going in a better direction.

2020 finished mini counter:  68/50

A thing a week 2020, week 31

This week we have a break from painting less because I didn't paint anything and more because like I mentioned last week, I have larger things going on in the background.  Also, as I've saidtyped at least a few times here that I like making tools so here we go.

I generally paint my minis and other bits stuck to the top of spice jars.  These might seem big but I like them a lot.  I also go through a lot of spices.  Unfortunately, when I have to paint something near the base of the mini, the large tops get in the way.  Sharp-eyed readers may have spotted a dowel among these recently.  While dowels allow more angles of attack, I find them much harder to manipulate with my comically big hands.  I also hate that I cut them so terribly unevenly with my razor saw because I don't have a more proper tool.  Sanding them flat might work but these are oak which is difficult to sand and even then a big metal fig on the top is still pretty likely to tip over.  This tool keeps the figs upright and means I can be lazy and not sand them.  Win-win!

These are pretty much what you might expect.  A couple layers of chipboard with holes cut in them are glued to the top and bottom of a couple pieces of cardboard.  I also took some chunks of square-ish XPS foam to the inside corners to give a little more strength.  So far this guy has been working pretty well.

Way back in the heady days of January of this year, full of hope and optimism before 2020 went to shit, I built a new paint rack to replace the older jankier one I'd built a year and a half previously before I started binge buying paints.  It's served me fairly well since then though I ended up doing a serious revision after my Pro Acryl expansions arrived in slightly larger bottles.  I ripped the glued-in racks out on the left side and remade them in pseudo-configurable format with a long horizontal piece and a shorter piece at the height of the paint bottles vertically.

The idea was that the paint bottles end up holding most of the weight and that the dividers are really there for organizational purposes.  This worked less well in practice partially because there's no guarantee that there are lots of bottles in the correct sizes in a given row but mostly because I re-used the chipboard dividers which are nowhere near rigid enough.  It also got extra annoying when all of the larger bottles were in play and I had to put them back.  This situation was passable, if just, for the last few months.

I kept the idea that the dividers should be configurable, sort of future-proofing them from variably-sized paint bottles for the future paints that I'll inevitably buy.  I swapped the chipboard for Readi-Board which is a) cheap, b) relatively easy to work with, and c) something I have a lot of on hand since I use it enough.  It isn't ideal for this usage, sadly, since it is not super rigid and has more thickness than I'd like--3/16" if you're wondering.  The middle support shares the load with the two ends which has so far prevented a lot of sagging.  A section of craft stick glued to the bottom of each support keeps everything reasonably flat.  

Construction is basically a double thickness cardboard backing with taller 1 1/2" walls which makes taller bottles a little more secure.  The previous two versions had a glued footprint but his time around I left those off and it leans back on something sturdy.  A coupla piles of blue tack keep it upright which I'm sure will fail hilariously some day and I'll regret everything.  This has the added benefit of freeing up desk space which I always seem to be short of. 

This frame should be configurable enough to not need to be rebuilt for a while.  The only thing that'll prevent long-term use, the most likely thing as it were, is if I buy way too much paint to fit. Someday if I can get my hands on the gear and materials, I'd like to replace the dividers with something more appropriate. 

A thing a week 2020, week 30

More painting this week but less in the figure variety and more in the terrain realm.  This week has been a mess and I've got some bigger projects that need some sustained effort so this week's offering is mostly technique painting and most of it not very good.

I'm a sucker for scatter terrain and props, and in a world where we're able to play RPGs in person I love few things more than putting a thing on the board during an encounter.  I'm starting to forget what that was like, if I'm honest.  These items are from the Dungeons and Lasers kickstarter from last year and apparently I spent a lot of money on it.  This is a little baffling since I'm not a fan of tiles with tall walls but I have some ideas that may or may not turn out--anyway, that's not what we're here for.


I've got a handful of tiny droppers of Vallejo Surface Primer which I'm generally a fan of.  I've been using this both as brush on and through the airbrush for as long as I've been priming but looking at the volume of stuff on the way, I felt like this was probably not going to be sufficient.  Naturally, I overbought and ended up with a pair of 16 oz bottles of Stynylrez.  If you're not sure how much that actually is, a typical beer is 12 oz and on a heavy day I might burn through a tablespoon of primer.  I expect to never run out.  I like it well enough but cleanup is a mess-it apparently likes to dry in the paint cup which sucks.

I'm using these guys as an opportunity to burn through some of the old paints that I don't favor anymore.  My gripes about Army Painter paints are pretty well documented at this point.  It's less that they're lousy and more that a) they're not as nice as Pro Acryl, and b) my painting style (if you want to call it that) has changed and generally I'm no longer well served by a pile of paints of various shades of the same color anymore.  Of particular concern, Army Painter metallics are absolutely awful.  Metallics in general are pretty lousy and having a bunch of sci-fi terrain seems as good a place as any for me to use them productively.  Interestingly, despite the few hundred of figures I've painted, I've never run out of a single bottle of mini paint--yet.

These particular metal stairs are about as simple a paint job as you'll ever see.  They're primed, base coated with Army Painter something or other metallic and followed by a coat of Badger Ghost Tint Oil Discharge.  I wanted them to look kind of funky and janky and in retrospect they probably want some kind of rust or weather effect.  I might do that some day but for now they're done enough.  I do wish they'd stand a little easier so on that hypothetical some day, I'd be well served by weighting the base somehow.

In staying with the stairs theme, these are stone stairs.  These terrain pieces are in general pretty well sculpted but I really would have liked more stones on the top and front rather than the back.  Astute viewers will note that the back looks wrong.  That's because I painted them upside down and as a result the directional lighting is wrong.  Whoops.  I haven't glued them and maybe on another some day I'll fix that but I'm not super worried about it.


This guy was really interesting.  It's clearly a spike trap but the grooves in the wood grain are super deep and the splotches I interpreted as blood are really tall.  This was fairly challenging to paint.  In fact, many of these have the same issue--they've got multiple negative space places that want paint.  The spikes in particular were a pain to work around.  I would have liked this particular piece to be a little grungier but I'm not going to dwell on it.

The altar on the left is fun with candles and a recessed pentagram.  I was going to do something funky with OSL but then realized there wasn't really anything sticking up so it probably wouldn't sell.  The dwarven thingamadoo on the right is a fantastic marker/monolith/whatever that I like quite a lot.  I don't know that I'd use it super often as what it is but as a marker that stands in a space and marks a location, I think it'll have a lot of utility.  Yes, i realize that not all stone is grey but I have a lot of grey paint to get through.

This last guy is a fancy stone sarcophagus.  I didn't paint it in that orientation but I didn't think it'd shoot as well in the regular one.  It's interesting how often sarcophagi show up in fantasy RPGs.  I'd be curious how often they show up in published adventures compared to, say, dragons.  I imagine if they'd called it "thieves and tombraiders" that might have been too on the nose.

If you're at the bottom here looking for a finished mini counter, well, you're out of luck.  None of this scatter is complicated enough to qualify as a real mini.

A thing a week 2020, week 29

If you were expecting minis this week, then have I got a deal for you.  This week I'm pushing speed and working more with some of the tools I've accumulated of late.  First among these is the magnifying light I bought.  I like the light part more than the magnifying part but in its current configuration I whack the arm with my brush too often.  I'm sure we'll see more about that sometime real soon.  I'm also switching back and forth from shit brushes to much nicer brushes depending on what I'm doing which has been...interesting.  Enough preamble.

First up we have Kelainen Darkmantle, Evil Wizard who I painted like Gandalf with OSL because I could.  The link goes to the Dark Haven Legends version but the one I painted was from Bones 4 Kickstarter.  I intended this to be a 3ish hour speed paint but, well, I made a mess of mistakes and ended up spending 5 hours.  The OSL isn't great though I do like the analagous color scheme.  I also painted the left bracer as metallic and then completely didn't sell this on the right bracer. Very early on I screwed up the coloring on his clothing and while I like the light tan for his normal clothing, the shading on it is shit and it generally looks bad.  I'd intended that
the interior of the smoke/effect/whatever that is to be light and I probably should have pulled it way closer to white to sell it.  The last thing I screwed up is the...whatever it is in his right hand which I imagined as metallic but also didn't sell.  The first thing I messed up was not dealing with the mold lines super well.  Overall, it's a good sculpt, a good mold, and an iffy paint job, but he's done and that counts for something.

Next up we have a return to batch painting.  These six came with my Bones 4 order, specifically Wraith Slayers,  Wraith Lord and Bodyguard, and Wraith Duelists.  Anyone following those links might wonder why I painted them if they were made of an awesome and more expensive translucent material.  Well, mine weren't.  They were made of the harder Bones Black material (I think), so they still wanted to be painted.

Since I got these last year I've had pretty lofty goals for them.  The sculpts are great and I really dig the details that came through.  While I'm not usually onboard with built-in bases, I like these quite a lot.  The rough hewn stone piles I think work really well.  They were going to be the bosses in my last campaign but that didn't pan out for narrative/pacing reasons.  Now they're the bosses in my current campaign but it's never 100% claer that the game will go that way.  That's the power of RPGs, I suppose.  In the intervening year or so that I've had them, I've had a pretty clear vision of where I wanted them to go and they've been prepped and primed here for around three months before I got to them. 

These were a speed paint and unfortunately, I think it shows.  They weren't particularly difficult models but I probably should have spent more time blending the purples which don't hold up super well under close scrutiny.  I also had high hopes for the metallics which went on real nicely (Vallejo Metal Colors are like that) but which didn't glaze/wash very well.  The bases could be painted better too.  Overall, I don't think the results are unacceptable and weighing in at about 10 hours for the batch of them over like three days, I feel like I got more than I paid for.

2020 finished mini counter:  64/50

A thing a week 2020, week 28

This week we have more minis since I've been on a roll and making good progress.  Given that I'm more or less working for bonus points for the remainder of the year, I'm sinking more time into deliberate practice.  In particular, I'm currently working on brush control, blending, and understanding colors better through a lot of mixing.  I've reached a point that I can crank out a finished piece reliably in a few hours so for a while I'm either going to push a little more in quality or on the other side, push similar quality in less time.

First up we have Reaper Bones Dragonman Warrior (no, not Trogdor) and painted for use as one of the player characters in my every-other-weekend-ish Saturday game should we ever get back to playing in person.  This fig is way more complex than I thought it was and thus it took a lot longer to paint than expected weighing in at around 7 hours over a few days.  His armor is technically painted as non-metallic bronze.  It sells OK on the table but doesn't hold up to scrutiny since it was done mostly as an afterthought.  As such, I don't think I can count it as a "serious attempt" even if I'm OK with the results.

This is a Juliette, Female Sorceress from Reaper Bones.  I don't recall buying this mini so I'm pretty sure she came as a freebie in one of my big orders.  This a small fig and not overly complex.  If I were any good at this and wanted to spend more time, I would have done some freehand on her dress or something but this started as a speed paint and I don't really know what I'm doing.  As I got going, I decided to push the quality a bit and put extra work into the details that are present and into her face which I think turned out well.  All told she was not quite five hours including a partial and very rough basecoat done months ago.  I think the results are good so she'll count as the 5th of my high quality figures.

Number three this week is Deladrin, Female Assassin, also from Reaper Bones.  This is one of the first figs I bought, prepped, and primed and boy does it show.  The mold isn't great and more than a year and a half ago when I prepped this fig, I did a lousy job of dealing with it.  The dagger in my fig is quite different than the one in the mold.  This is a side effect of a very sharp knife and not understanding how soft Bones material is.  Furthermore, most of my attempts to deal with the many mold lines really just resulted in the model being very frayed.  I fixed some of this when I finished painting but there was way more than I could effectively deal with.

If you don't count prepping and priming done sometime in 2018, I started painting this figure in earnest about the same time I painted the Highland Heroine way back in January.  She was supposed to be the third high quality fig for the year but even though I spent a lot of time there and has my first lousy attempt at wet blending, issues with the molding kept me from finishing until now.  I don't remember how much time I spent at the end of last year but if the Highland Heroine was any indication, it's probably in the dozens of hours finished up this evening in about four.  There were lots of issues here mostly dealing with problems I created earlier.  This is the first time I'd stuck so much paint on a fig that I had a real problem, on her face no less, which wasn't super straightforward to resolve.  If the mold had been better or my prep had been better, I think I would have pulled this fig into the higher quality levels but as fate would have it, I just wanted to be done and have to settle for "OK".

And rounding it all out are a pair of wererats from Reaper, specifically Wererat Stalker in blue and Wererat Assassin in red.  As I mentioned in last week's post, my game has a lot of anthropomorphic races in it and it's often hard to find figs that are in the right ballpark.  These two represent two more of the player characters in my Saturday game and I intended to speed paint them.  In retrospect, I should have known this wasn't going to go well because they weren't going to be in the same color scheme.  The sculpts ended up more complicated than I thought they were so I spent a couple more hours than I intended to bring them all out.  I think the result is good and the two of them were done in about five hours.  Also of note, I bought a magnifying light which is great once I get it adjusted.

2020 finished mini counter:  57/50

A thing a week 2020, week 27

Starting out for this week I've got bases.  This isn't anywhere near all of them and I don't think they're even the best of them, but this is what I had pictures of.  None of my figs were based--heck most of the bases weren't even painted but now due to James Wappel's tutorials, I've fixed that.  Over the last few weeks I've magnetized, painted, flocked, and otherwise finished every fig I've painted to date.  Luckily for me, that's not very many (~200 or so) and while they're not all winners, they are all done.  Moving forward I'd like to base figs as part of the painting process so we'll see how that goes. 


This is a Reaper Bones Hellhound and a fig I expected to use in a campaign at some point several years ago.  I don't think I did, but as the fig was primed and on the workbench, I figured it was time to paint it.  All told it was around three hours of speed paint.  I was tempted to do OSL but since the creature is casting light and I wanted it to be the focus, I did pretty minimal lighting on the ground.  I think this worked OK but I can't help thinking that I want the darks to be darker and the lights to be lighter.  I probably need to get some fluorescent paints to experiment with which a) hopefully unlocks fun effects, and b) feeds my paint buying addiction.  Watch this space!

This is a Reaper Bones Hajad and speed painted in about three hours over a couple days.  I started with Pro Acryl Transparents which are rapidly becoming my favorite paints while painting some of the bases above.  This was lightened a bit with an off white to finish a shaded base coat.  A couple hours of detail later, this is where I landed.  I've now come full circle on brushes.  I started with ultra cheap synthetic brushes, started buying much more expensive fancy brushes which I still like, and now I've returned to even cheaper synthetic brushes (Wappel's One True Brush(TM), and these awful liners if you're interested).  I have no idea what it all means except that I don't have to worry about destroying brushes anymore.  "Caress the brush, don't crush it," James says.  I literally snapped the ferrule off of one of my favorite brushes I was concentrating so hard.  I pinned it, it's almost good, now.  


Over the last few days this weekend I've been working on this foxy group.  Pretty sure the "fox" came from Reaper Bones Familiars as a dog.  Why paint it like a fox?  The other two figs are in the same color scheme so I figured, why not?  The sculpt isn't particularly good and the mold isn't really helping it at all but it's painted now and that counts for something.  Also, at this point, it's probably clear that I've hooked up my fancy camera.  That should make the shots a) more consistent, and b) less crap.  Next step:  fix my lighting.


Next up we have a Reaper Bones Kogo, Male Kitsune and Dijoro, Female Kitsune.  These are fantastic sculpts and as canine anthropomorphs are both rare in mini form and prevalent in my game, I bought a few of each.  These were primed a really long time ago in preparation for my last campaign which ran about a year and weren't graced with painted versions of these two. 


As I got through the shaded basecoat and into glazing/details I decided to go an extra level.  The two of them (and the "fox") were a total of nine-ish hours over several days and I'm happy with the results.  I got to the point that adding more paint was messing things up so I stopped.  I can see some stuff that's wrong that I'd fix but I don't think I have the skill to fix them.  Right at the moment, I don't think I can do any better than these two.  I'd like to revisit them in the same color scheme in a couple years since I've got dupes and it'll be a good comparison.  My only real gripe is that the Bones molds are so iffy.

Interestingly, the year is halfway done and I'm more than halfway done with my 2020 challenge.  I'ma add a stretch goal for bonus points:  let's hit 100 mins this year anyway.

2020 finished mini counter:  52/50, 4/5 at high quality, 0/1 serious attempts at NMM

A thing a week 2020, week 26

This week we're back to minis, these particular ones done over the span of a few weeks in between liftship builds.  I've talked about James Wappel a lot in the last handful of posts so I figured I'd post a WIP to show what I'm talking about.  On the right is an in-progress of my lousy interpretation of a shaded basecoat.  This is about the one hour mark for the two and only because I started with inks that took forever to dry.  Doing this allows me to block in colors quickly and to start studying the fig to see where light and shadows should be.  It also helps pop out the details which, on Reaper Bones figs, are often hard to spot. 

This is a Gauth, particularly one named Bellax from the Wrath of Ashardalon board game.  Like a lot of these the sculpt is good but the mold is lousy.  I really wanted to mess with this color scheme and this was a good opportunity to practice blending.  My blends aren't good but then again, this is a speed paint.  All told, base coats and finishing this guy took around three hours.  The magenta and purple are Pro Acryl with Vallejo Game Ink Violet. For whatever reason, the basecoat didn't want to stick so the teeth are wonkier than I'd have liked.

Next up we have Gwyddis, Dwarf Valkyrie.   I didn't actually order this fig--it came as an extra with one of my big Reaper orders.  The more I looked at her, the more I liked the fig.  This continued as I got to painting and I ended up painting for longer than I expected.  The mold isn't great and I did a pretty lousy job of dealing with the mold lines.  I have no idea what the thing on her back is supposed to be and I realize that I painted them as if they were metal but then didn't use metallic paints.  I could certainly have pushed the quality up more but I've got other stuff to do and stopped after a fairly enjoyable five hours.

This guy is one of the first miniatures I purchased a really long time ago.  He's an Adventurer with Spear from Grenadier's 312 Fighting Men line apparently re-released in 1992 right around when I bought them.  This guy got quite a lot of use as one of the only figs I had for a while and has the distinction of being the first metal fig I've painted this generation.  The distinction is due to the rediscovery of my old metal Battletech and Mekton figs painted in college with enamels.  I had lofty dreams of finally doing some NMM and freehand with this guy and his blister-mates but after a painful night of failure followed by another three-ish hours of trying to cleanup the mess, I bailed and hit him with normal metallics and gloss wash.  I was more than a little hung over and shaky from doing a lot of heavy lifting during the day and I can't help but think I should have taken more time.

This is the second guy out of the same three pack and painting went a lot better.  It's a surprisingly good sculpt and despite having started painting him in blue I'm super happy I switched to red.  Given my issues with the previous fig and most of a night's rest, I put extra time in.  Total painting time was around four hours with a mix of the crap on my wet palette and Pro Acryl Transparents which I like more every time I use them.  I experimented with mixing my own colors from the transparents and an off white which went really well.  I'm hoping that experimenting more with this will help me see and understand colors better.  I also tried working with a filbert which went poorly and a liner for the first time which went a lot better.

This is the last guy from the three pack and he had the distinction of a few globs of brown paint, probably enamels, on his pants.  I thought the tip of his sword was broken off, but that seems to be the sculpt.  He's not half-swording but seems to have a Conan-like weapon.  I painted the green surcoat and gambeson over the blue base I'd put down the day before in much the same way I did the red.  I probably could have put more time into this guy but he finished off in a couple hours.  I'm pretty sure I primed these guys last century and I did zero prep because I didn't know you could remove mold lines.

2020 finished mini counter:  47/50

A thing a week 2020, week 25

This post represents probably the last of the liftships for a while because a) I don't think I'll Need(TM) more than the ones I've got, and b) because I'm a little tired of building them.  I did cut out some bits that I haven't used yet for a few knarrs and smaller vessels but we'll save those for later--I've got other stuff to do.

First up is a cutter and the first thing to notice is that this ship is big.  Stem to stern it's around 16.5 inches.  The next thing to notice is that it was built in levels which is way more work than I expected.  It was built in cross sections and I put a lot of thought how I'd attach the two with magnets.  If you're wondering how I got the keel to line up, well, it was attached as a single piece tying the top and bottom together then I cut it awfully carefully with my wrong-handed Olfa knife.  And before you ask, yes, I know they make left-handed models...now.

Didn't strictly need it to be balanced
back to front, but it is.

I didn't put nearly enough thought into how to build the bottom deck.  I would have preferred a piece of textured Readi-Board but I didn't have much confidence in being able to accurately predict the dimensions of the lower deck.  I don't fully understand the form, sadly.  Instead, I hand-fit the deck plating and let the ribbing fall where they lay.  While it isn't what I would have liked, I think it looks OK.  If I do these again in the (far) future, I'll probably sculpt it in 3D to be able to figure it out properly. 

The aft-castle also didn't get enough planning.  I had the top deck shape but none of the other dimensions.  As usual, I sort of placed it where it looked good and let things fall as they may.  It's a little tilted on one side as a result and the magnets that I stuck in the top part don't actually attach to anything because they're suspended.  I built it around the main deck's aft...whatever that thing is that sticks up which is now doubling as the connection point for the two.  This will break at some point but to put that point as far in the future as I could manage, I drove a couple long pins into it.

Painting was pretty much like the previous liftships.  We start with a "priming" coat of Mod Podge + black craft paint.  Then we get an undercoat of something in the brown family with the airbrush.  This was followed by a couple coats of home-made black wash and a golden brown drybrush and a ligher highlight drybrush. 

It's a big structure and quite complex with three playable levels.  As an added bonus, the top two decks can double as a sailing ship.  The planking is more regular and more tightly fitted than previous outings.  The bow isn't super tight but the errors don't show super prominently either.   I'll eventually put some extra detail work on.  Specifically, a cargo deck gridwork and the windowing on the side and back.  To this point, though, construction was around fifteen hours with another three-ish hours of painting.


So...what happens if we crank it up a notch?  This is the Golden Sun, the PCs' liftship.  It's notably larger than the cutter stretching the tape at around 20 inches.  That's about 64 Lego studs, if anyone's wondering, and to scale about 1/2 larger than Columbus's Santa Maria.  While I could have done something smarter, the construction is largely the same as the cutter with all of the same kinds of difficulties plus a few extras since I was tired! 

The cross sections are variable thickness because that's the stuff I had available in the right size and I cleverly forgot to bevel it before I started gluing siding on.  This has resulted in some unwanted bulges in the hull but they thankfully don't show too prominently.  I also forgot to texture the bottom deck's planking.  Luckily, I'm probably the only one that'll notice.

I've been burning through some of the stock and scrap I've had laying around for the last, I dunno, year, since I last seriously built with XPS.  I've ended up with piles of blocks of weird dimensions that I used for building sides and bases before I realized it was 1,000 times easier to use Readi-Board.  I also had bins of bricks and off cuts which are great for shoring up planking after the fact.

The painting followed the same scheme...which I've decided I don't like.  The airbrush coat over the black "primer" was a nice, rich mahogany.  The damp-brush golden brown followed by the highlight looks...bad.  All of the ships suffer from the same issue which makes them consistent but chalky.  Before I do the final details, I think I'll pull it all back down with a light wash or a coat of, I dunno, a Badger Ghost Tint followed by a dullcoat which they probably need anyway. 

I think the end result is good despite the painting issues.  This exercise has pushed my ability with the material and I feel like I know it at least a bit better.  I'll also add that the previous "best" building I'd built, the three floor tavern last march, feels awfully simple and inelegant in comparison.  This will complete the buildingstructure portion of my 2020 thing a week challenge. 

2020 finished structure counter:  6/5

A thing a week 2020, week 24

This week we're back to liftships.  For my third foray into these structures I wanted to go bigger, so I did.  This is loosely modeled after a Viking Knarr, a relatively simple utility ship.  As with the other two, I started with a Readi-Board deck textured with a pen.  To build the negative space in the middle, I cut the deck in half and glued a chunk of textured foam on the bottom.  A pair of wooden stirring sticks strengthened the outer walls.  And then it all went wrong.

Unlike the previous two, I didn't build the keel first.  Starting from the top I built one side down then built the other side down and glued the keel on the bottom.  Once the keel was on, I closed the front and realized my mistake.  The two sides aren't symmetrical.  I did what I could after the fact to minimize the issue but it's pretty clear if you look closely.  Granted, most of the attention in play will be on the deck but I know it's wrong and that matters.  It's also probably a couple inches too tall on its base which I may fix at some point and I really feel like I need like one more of similar size and dignity.

Like the last two, the hull was airbrushed first, two coats of homemade wash was applied, and a final drybrush brought the planking back out.  Also note that I figured out a clever way to not only have masts on the ship but also not prevent placement of minis.  These are affixed by tiny magnets (and unpainted in this shot).  A tiny piece of string is glued to the mast to make it maybe a little fancier.  I'll probably put magnets in the top of these too and experiment with a crow's nest attachment.  They'll be painted eventually.


Next up is a rebuilt of the two mast, single deck ship from last time.  I've attempted to resolve the issue with building the hull at a weird angle by printing out and carving out hull cross-sections.  I wanted to start with something more complicated and i'm glad I didn't.  I did have to work a lot less hard to build the hull which is sweet but the shaping isn't as good and freehanding with the Proxxon does not come naturally to me.  Hint:  lower temperature and slower cutting helped a lot.  I expect most future builds will be constructed this way. 

The original ships had some inelegant stuff at the back of the ship which I've hidden this time around with some fancy bending.  It almost sells as wood.   This one's painted in a rich mahogany and drybrushed with a leather brow. The coloring really doesn't come through, sadly.  Yes, I still need to paint my standin masts, too. 

2020 finished structure counter:  4/5

A thing a week 2020, week 23

This week we're back to minis.  These were done over a couple weeks around other larger projects like last week's liftships.  These are continuing the theme of "stuff I've had on my workbench for too long."

First up we have Immeril from the Temple of Elemental Evil Boardgame.  This is a fig that got a lot of play as a player character a few years ago and it's a surprisingly good sculpt so it's been good to finally paint him.  This, like many of my other more recent works was a speed paint over zenithaled primer.  I was apprehensive about OSL but I'd just watched one of James Wappel's patreon videos on the topic.  Also, he's holding a freakin' fireball.  I think it worked out for what I put in which isn't super much.  Overall it was about four hours over a couple days.  I will almost certainly do more OSL work in the future and I'm happy with this first attempt.

These guys are a bunch of random bits that I'd purchased recently that needed paint.  The two on the left are (obviously) mimics, one of my favorite bads.  The next one is a badly-molded chest that I paid too much money for and the last one is a stump.  I generally don't like buying stuff I can build and both the stump and the chest are treading into that territory but I was already buying stuff and close to the $100 free shipping at Miniature Market.  The chest's casting is absolutely abysmal and no amount of paint was going to fix that.  I could have used Green Stuff to fix it but I didn't.  These were speed painted in about four hours all told.  The yellows are probably too bold and the lighting isn't great on these but they're painted and that counts for something.

Next up we have a Seething Knight and Royal Pikeman from Mage Knight.  These guys had been stripped badly and primed badly for a couple years so I was happy to finally get paint on them.  Like many Mage Knight figures, these guys have bent weapons.  I replaced the top part of the Pikeman's weapon with a piece from another fig.  It's super glued on--nothing fancy gong on here.  They photographed poorly despite changing up the background and lighting which is an indication that I should both fix my lighting and use a better camera.

The third shot is a group paint.  These folks are also from Mage Knight.  From left to right:  a pair of Amazon Blademistresses, a Nightblade, a Woodland Scout, and a Liege Knight.  These figs were in pretty poor shape.  The crap they painted them with really did not want to come off so some of the fine features got melted in addition to leaving crap in the details that I wasn't able to fully remove.  I replaced the sword of the Blademistress on the left again supergluing a weapon from a different figure.  The Nightblade is in teal and purple as an experiment that I don't think worked out super well.  I like the scout best of all of these sculpts but unfortunately, it suffered the worst of all of the figs during stripping.  Her sword has also been replaced.  The Liege Knight shows one of the super-bent weapons that are so common for MK figs.  He was partially painted for a good long time.  These five were maybe eight hours over two-ish days from where they were to this level.

The last one is another Nightblade and one that I spent entirely too long with.  I shouldn't like these figs given their dumb fantasy getups, bad proportions, and lousy stances, but I do.  This one's been altered quite a lot.  The stance is held by the blocks glued to the base and is under considerable pressure.  Her left arm has also been removed, shortened, and pinned though I left the lousy sword as is.  Her paint scheme is pretty much the same one the fig came with and I used it as practice in painting black leather.  This, like the others, was also a speed paint though some of it was done quite a while ago.

These should round out the Mage Knight figures that I'm likely to paint this year.  I've got a few that are almost stripped unmounted but I think I've run out of interest in working on these.  I suppose if I stumbled upon a better way to strip them I might revisit but at this point I don't think that's likely.  These re-taught me a valuable lesson:  I tend to get bogged down with stuff that I'm not excited about or that seems tedious which means I spend less time painting, a lot more time procrastinating, and thus I get a lot less done.  I'm reminded of last year's Regault Battlepods which is the last time I re-learned this lesson.  I think my strategy moving forward is working in smaller batches and only on stuff I think will be fun.

Painting-wise, I've done a lot of experimenting with these so 2018 me should be pretty pleased with that.  I'm starting to grok Wappel's shaded basecoat thing which is definitely speeding up my work and, I feel, boosting the quality ever so slightly.  I'm also doing a lot more mixing and planning of colors.  I super like getting rough blocked colors on the fig early in the process.  It's way easier seeing if a thing is working out especially when thinking about contrast across texture, color, and warmth.  I think if I end the year hitting my thing a week goals and have developed a solid foundation, I think I'll be going in a good direction.

2020 finished mini counter:  42/50