Elements on Fire!

I combined several ideas and minis from several places for this project.

Some manufacturers are producing plastic/resin minis using colored plastic that is translucent and looks pretty nifty. The one that started this project for me was the Reaper Bones fire elemental. I liked the look of the colored plastic, but it was kind of hard to make out the details in the sculpt. I didn’t want to prime it with white or black paint, as priming would wipe out the translucency, so I started by coating it with Vallejo brush-on matt sealant.

The matt dries clear and also creates a surface that is more accepting of paint than just plain Bones plastic. *Reaper, the manufacturer of Bones, claims you can paint straight onto the unprimed Bones material without priming; you can, it just looks like poo to me.

Next up was a coat of a deep red that mainly hit the high areas as I wanted the red plastic to show in the crevices.

Then my nice bright orange going lightly over the red painted areas.

Then Yellow over the orange, but not as heavy as either of the two previous colors.

And at this point I thought I was done, but it felt like it needed a little more…something. Thanks to Google I found this guy who had done the exact same thing and his project showed me a good finishing step. Heroscape Blog

The finishing step is to highlight with a 50/50 mix of yellow and white and only touching the high points on the sculpt.

I liked it! I then dug through my box of minis and found another couple of fire elementals from Reaper also made with the translucent red plastic. Then I remembered that in my Arena of the Planeswalkers set Chandra’s minions were made of a similar material. Here are the Flame Cats and Phoenixes just before they received the final yellow-white highlight.

Here is Chandra, a Red and fiery Planeswalker from Magic the Gathering, with her flaming minions.

Her hair kind of disappears. She came pre-painted but I need to do a little bit of highlighting. Here are all of the fire projects with some black sand added to their bases.

Lizardmen 3D

Last year Fat Dragon Games began producing gaming terrain and miniatures that were available as digital downloads for 3D printers. It’s really cool stuff and you should go take a look at it; FDG-3D   Since it is a digital file you can print as many of a piece as you need or change the scale of the items. I made some FDG Lizardfolk to see how my printer worked and how well those sculpts fit in with my GW Lizardman models.

The proportions are nice but detail is a little soft, however I have seen better versions of these models so I suspect I need to keep tinkering with my printer’s settings…once I get it working again.

I also tried enlarging one of the Lizardfolk in the slicer program that talks to the printer to see if I could get one that was in scale with a GW Kroxigor;

I overdid the scaling just a touch. 🙂

I also painted up a different Reaper Bones lizardman sculpt, this one was easier to work with as the detail was cleaner and I suspect it was just a better quality mold than the first one I painted.

One of the things I look for when I’m shopping for Lizardfolk/men is what the artist does with the feet. One of Reaper’s sculpts was of a Lizardman adventurer….wearing boots. That was a non-starter for me as lizardmen should be barefoot or wearing sandals. Maybe flip-flops. Otherwise they look weird to me, like they’re trying to fit into humanoid society. Next thing they’ll be wearing neck ties. 🙂

Lizardmen – Part4 – Kroxigor

Kroxigor

Seventeen years ago I painted an original version of GW’s Lizardman Kroxigor for my older brother’s forces. Yesterday I painted up a Reaper minis “Lizardman Tyrant” mini to see if they’d make a viable alternative to GW’s minis. Here’s the tyrant with base colors prior to dipping and basing and afterwards;

I like the design of the mini, there’s a lot of great detail and he’s got a great savage look to him. He’s not as heavily muscled as the old GW Kroxigor though;

Not too badly different though, I’ll most likely get another “Tyrant” mini in a different pose to finish out my Kroxigors as I’m really enjoying painting the minis I’ve purchased from Reaper Minis.

*Looking at the photos I see some of the copper got onto his skin, oops. Back to the painting bench for a touchup.