Finishing bits

The past couple days I concentrated on getting through some pieces that were almost done, and have been that way for a while. The oldest of the lot is this Ork Warboss with a ridiculously large gun. He sat around with black primer and dry-brushed green skin base for over ten years. Next up is my new Lizardman Army Standard Bearer with Skink attendants.

He’s only been bouncing around my bench for three months so not too bad time-wise. Then, while I was waiting for different colors and basing glues to dry on the above two I started dry-brushing and washing colors onto my new Reaper Bones Earth Elemental;

One thing I forgot to mention on the Bones cyber-gorilla from last week was that the primer paint felt a little gooey until paint went on top of it. I made sure that the Earth Elemental got a nice soapy warm bath before getting primed and had no problems. This guy is enormous. Lots of little details and texture built into him, really fun to paint. I didn’t even notice the skeleton on his right shoulder until I started dry-brushing and then it just popped out at me, hey look what I found! I have no idea what that muscular blue dude in the third frame is, he wandered into my collection a long time ago and I just recently decided to paint him. I think he’s from some super-villain collection.

The finished Earth Elemental;

One of the many nice things about the Reaper Bones line is that they all come with an integrated base, many with interesting textural details. In this case I thought his base was a little small so I built a 60mm diameter base out of three layers of cardstock and added some extra rocks to the base.

Everybody here has been finished using the polyurethane dip and matt coat finishing method.

Tale of Two Skinks, part 2

Finally got back to painting after the wild rumpus of spring wound down. I’m an Auditorium Technician for the school district so I hop around designing lights and running sound for theatrical events, dance shows, concerts and recitals. Springtime is huge for us with every school doing their final productions of everything, and banquets, and speechifying evenings, and then all of the community groups come rolling in to do their performance. And I’m involved in a Historical Recrudescence Guild at the Renaissance Faire; I work as a woodcarver/carpenter demonstrating medieval carving and construction techniques and frightening small children with the disturbing and demented puppet heads I carve. But hey, that’s all calmed down so I can paint again and possibly get back to my papermodel designing.

When last we checked in on our intrepid skinks one had been primed white, the other black. The black primed one had then had a white drybrush applied to it’s raised surfaces. They both then had a nice coat of yellow laid on for their skin base. The first thing I noticed was that the white primed one was definitely brighter. I finished their other colors and dipped them in tudor satin polyurethane. They’ve been lightly sprayed with a matt coat in the following pictures but they do need one one more spray to even out the shine.

I like a lot of the color effect of the black primed with white drybrush, but to my eyes the white primed one is brighter. Simpler too as I have about sixty of these minis that I’ll be painting up and the black primed with white drybrush is pretty labor intensive. I’ll reserve that technique for more important minis; leaders, heroes, and special troops that I want to stand out from the rank and file.

 

Edit: For some reason WordPress recommended a tag label of “DNA Profiling”….I have no idea why. I’m going to start sneaking that phrase into more of my posts though.

A Tale of Two Skinks, part 1

I have bunch of old and new GW skink minis along with some Harlequin Miniatures Lizardman troops that my older brother gave me and will work well as a skink regiment. Since there’s so many of them to paint (40+) I’m experimenting with methods that will help me to complete them without me losing my mind. I really like the greyscale (black primer then white dry-brushing) basing that I’ve been doing for my lizardmen but it feels like it’ll be a butt-ton of work to do all of the skink forces using that method. I think I’ll reserve that method for more important minis, and just get the rank and file DONE. Done is beautiful. But i wanted to experiment a little first and see how big of a difference their would be between the greyscale basing and just priming the minis white, so here goes;

Then I applied yellows to each for their skin, their spots and fins will be red but to get a bright red you have to have bright base, so yellow everywhere. And dark hunter green as the base for their shields.

They switched sides in this pic, oops, the white based one is on the left now. More to come later.