Painting Club

Man, a great night at Painting Club! I worked on Descent, duh, but I've made it through my ten version 2 heroes with the completion of High Mage Quellen. I also finished my minion Barghests and powered through four Razorwings, a very evil-looking sculpt I absolutely love.

Matt worked on basecoats for all of his Space:1889 minis, so he spent a lot of time looking up different uniforms and playing with color schemes. These are some great sculpts and I can't wait to see them painted up!

Finally, you can see that everything is on a mirror. Matt dug a big mirror out of an old television, and it makes a great workspace. I'm sure it keeps things a tad brighter, but the non-porous surface of the glass keeps the paint from drying quite as fast, and our blotches scrape right off at the end of the night. Viva la mirror!

Monday Night WIPs

Pretty much the same dudes as last night but I'm happier with their performance. That dwarf fighter turned out awesome, I could do dwarves all day! I like my ettin too, I decided to forgo highlighting on the skin because the shading looked so good.

Tomorrow the washes on the elf mage and the barghests will be dry, so I'm bringing them to Paint Club. Also I'm thinking Razorwings and a Falconer from Descent v1.

Sunday Night WIPs

Not the best night of painting, everything needed multiple coats, paints took forever to dry... look at that elf mage in green (photographed from the back), I last touched him two hours ago and he's still too wet to do anything with him. Anyway, I'm happy with my dwarf fighter and my Ettin minion, and I might be able to finish them up tomorrow before Paint Club. The mage and the barghests are less far along, I'll be taking them on the road.

Three Wolves and a Furry

These are the wolves of Ravenloft: three normal wolves and the werewolf boss. I tried to make European Grey wolves, although I didn't really look up the coloration of real wolves. These wolves kind of have pig noses, this isn't the best wolf sculpt. But it's cool, dogs are hard. I've read many comics where the dogs look like giant rats.

Remember Horrorclix? It's gone but not really mourned... not to hate, but WizKids could have done better; in fact, they've learned the lessons of Horrorclix and have done better. Anyway, when Horrorclix was coming out, you could look at HeroClix and HorrorClix product produced in the same quarter, and the HorrorClix stuff looked much better. I think it's because of the sculpts and the different natures of sculpts that tended to show in the two sets. Horrorclix designs like wolves or werewolves had lots of texture and picked up washes and whatever drybrushing a factory can do really well. Meanwhile, the smoother spandex designs of Heroclix suffered under the same number of paint applications.

 This translates roughly to painting at home, in that my ability is roughly equivalent to a Taiwanese Wizkids wage slave, and these wolves looked decent without much in the way of paint apps. I did spend some time to give them gold eyes and white bellies, neither of which is really on display in this picture.

Friday Night WIPs: I'm Back, Baby!

I wanted to paint all week and never could until tonight, my paints just sat out, mocking me. But tonight I put finishes on two Descent figures, took five more from soup to nuts, and even finished my Ravenloft Blazing Skeletons! More tomorrow, I've got the painting feelings!

Nom Nom Nom...

I like this ghoul mold, even though it's from Dungeons of Dread and I've got a few of them already. A ghoul is pretty much just a cannibal, so they gave him parts of a person to eat. In the bevy of various undead and even more various monsters, it places the theme front and center.

My vision with these guys was, "What if your whole body was one giant scab?" I started with a purple, washed black, and highlighted a mix of purple and flesh-tone to steer safely clear of Grimace territory.

Lil' Lizards

In recent years Kobolds have moved from goblin-like to kind of dog-like to the current state of being reptilian. I support this trend... I mean, look at these kobolds, with their birght green. They're basically micro-Lizardfolk. When I was a kid Kobolds hadn't gone reptile yet, but I couldn't figure out what a Kobold was, and they weren't reptiles yet, but they were definitely in contention. I remember we had the game Fantasy Forrest, and that had kobolds, but looking them up shows a very Goblin-like creature. And I remember a dog-kobold too, maybe from "Dungeon!"? I can't verify that one..

Anyway the Ravenloft sculpt is very reptilian, with a prominent tail, so I went with that. The green contrasts nicely with rich red in the robes of the Sorcerer and with the cheap copper I decided to make the soldier's armor out of. Strahd ain't giving you stainless steel, kobolds, he's got cravats to buy and fluff! And your weapon will have to be a sharpened stick... the dark lord was somewhat unprepared for henchmen that are not already equipped with fang or claw.

 I don't think that kobolds are a great fit for Ravenloft's ascetic, actually. Their niche, one-hit-die flunkies, is pretty much kobolds, goblins, and bullywugs, and none of them are really "creatures of the night." What would really work would be Skaven, or some kind of similar ratmen. Does D&D have ratmen outside of wererats?

Ravenloft's Toughest Non-Villians

...unless you play with the Dungeon Command expansions! Then you've got to fight Skeletal Chargers, Tomb Guardians, Dracoliches... as I told Matt when we played the other last week, I can't help but want to kill characters, it's in my blood.

Anyway, gargoyles. These were low-hanging fruit as I began to paint the Ravenloft box. D&D says that gargoyles look like statues until they start moving and kill you, so any fleshy detail would not be canonical. Ergo, I painted these as stone.

Years ago I had a revelation; if I remember correctly it was when I was painting the shoulder cross-skull device on a Terminator. If you paint in matte black, then drybrush in light grey, you get a really good slate. It's easy and I've always liked how it looked.

So the gargoyles were base-coated in black, drybrushed in grey, got some gold eyes and white teeth, and I moved on. We appreciate their contribution to keeping this project on time and under budget.

Monday WIPs: Descent Fighter, Elemental

Not a lot of time for painting tonight, but I did get Reynhart the Worthy ready for his wash. I'm keeping his colors light, so his armor is a pale blue before the metallic go on, and the wash is grey instead of black.

I expect to put the elemental together quickly this week... an hour of drybrushing should do it. It's got fire, water, earth, and air parts, and my plan is to do the fire and water as colored transparencies over mettalic white to try and capture their fluidity. I'll keep the stone and air as matte as I can to contrast. That's the plan anyway!

Sunday Night Reckoning: Mage Party!

I had a pretty good day of painting; did my zombies, finished two Descent heroes, and those evil sorcerers I was so mad at last night? They're not so bad. Put er there, Descent Chaos Sorcerers. We've learned a lot from each other lo these last few hours.

In the way back are three Ravenloft Blazin' Skeletons. Painting bone is relaxing, but these guys? Bone amidst translucent blue which once marred will never shine again? That's some high stakes shit right there.

Descent WIPs plus Goblins

I'm done with painting for the night, and we're switching to Internet. Here's my WIPs, which just got washed and will be dry tomorrow. These four zombies will be simple drybrush jobs. I like the way Widow Larha, orc shaman, is turning out. Leoric the mage is also going good;  I'm giving his skin a wash I'm something besides black because I've finally learned from my mistakes.

In the background you can see the Descent sorcerers  Let me give you a preview of their full write-up: fuck those guys and fuck my pot of Dwarf Flesh. I'm getting such shitty coverage and I'm pretty frustrated and that's the main reason I'm done for the night.

The other thing did today was finish my ten goblins: four Descent, four Reaper Bones. The Bones were a joy to work with, and the Descent; well, I want to say they're done and I can move on;  but I've got two master monsters with this same sculpt left to do.  Boo!

Rats are the New Cats

I had planned on doing these rats in five minutes: metallic black basecoat, spots of Tamiya transparent blue, highlight in light blue, done. And the results would have been okay, it would have looked like the prepaint. But I've got a few of the Rat Swarm from Savage Encounters, and I can never from a visual scan whether those are rats, or bugs, or what.

When I basecoated these minis in white, it was a revelation to actually see the sculpt. These weren't a bunch of little blobs, they were rats, with heads and tails and other stuff I had never seen. A second revelation was a paintjob I saw on BoardGameGeek, that used different colors to make the individual rat shapes stand out. Part of me says that a dungeon should have black shiny sewer rats, and this looks more like the terrarium at PetsSmart. But also that looks like a bunch of rats. So idea stolen!

I got out a bunch of greys and browns and went to town, never letting two of the same color touch, and never going into Albino Lab Rat territory. I drybrushed appropriately, and then went back and did dots of red for eyes. Not every eye, just the prominent ones. They aren't perfect, there's still quite a few bodies with too much black on their bottom sides, but I like these rats.

Descent Wizard, Goblins WIP

Tonight I applied a wash to my goblins (four from Descent, six from Reaper) and started on my first magical Descent hero, Leoric of the Book. I'm doing Three Color Goblins (green, brown, and black) which is why I can stand to do ten at once. 

It was a joy to work on that mage because I got to put down a lot of GW Enchanted Blue. That paint is as smooth as butter.

Zombies that are Actually Dead

Ravenloft zombies! I wasn't over the moon when i saw this mold in the Ravenloft preview but it's pretty good. It's a vanilla human zombie, and it's a withered husk fantastical zombie, both good things.

I got into D&D miniatures to run my 4th Ed. campaign, so I started with the WOTC Dungeons of Dread set and moved forward from there. 4th Ed did some neat things with zombies: they had the Chillborn, the zombie that died of frostbite and did cold stuff to you, and the Corruption Corpse, the artillery zombie that throws pieces of itself at you. I support both of those ideas, that's excellent thinking outside the box by WOTC. I also had some orc zombies from some previous set, and those are great too! Adventurers are essentially machines that generate orc corpses, after all. But the end result is that I had very few normal human zombies.

Also, these guys are the Anti-TV-Walking-Dead. I've seen a lot of TV-quality zombie makeup recently, where zombie-ism is depicted through white skin, circles around the eyes, and blood on the mouth. This sculpt depicts what that makeup can't do, the corpse that's a few months old, with a caved-in face and elongated limbs.

My paint job was an attempt to show this semi-mummified level of decomposition. I basecoated in mid-tone gray, washed in black, and highlighted in a mix of light gray and fleshtone. The clothes were done as brown rags. Sidenote, if you look on BoardGameGeek you'll see some of these zombies in Fred Flintstone clothes. The rags have these spots sculpted into them, and it's hard to resist the temptation not to do them in yellow with black spots. But I think that the sculptor was giving us surfaces for the brush to catch, and I kept things a Serious Brown.

Painting Club WIPs

The results of Painting Club! Elf, Dragonmen hybrids, and a bunch of goblins with basecoats.

Elves, Dragonmen WIP

My latest from the Descent minis: two elf heroes and two draconic Hybrids from Lair of the Wyrm. Lots of Snot Green on these guys! They've been basecoated and washed and are ready for highlights, but it's time to pack up my paints... it's Paint Club tomorrow!

Sunday WIPs

The dog got me up early this morning so I've gotten some painting done on the Descent set. Jain Fairwood just got a wash.  Avric Albright is pretty much finished. My three fire imps are through drybrushing and ready for an experiment in transparencies, we'll see how well they turn out!

Cleric, Beastmen WIP

Tonight I started painting my Descent minis. I have my first character, Avric Albright the Cleric, basecoated and washed.

Alongside him are six Beastmen from the first Descent box. Fucking beastmen... I love the sculpt, which is why I'm doing them first,  before the monsters in the actual Descent v2 set. But there's six of them. I like the post-wash result, so I'm looking forward to the finished product, but two hours ago I was so done with these guys.

Next, Jain Fairwood, Lady Bowman!

Stripey Spiders

 These are my painted spiders from Ravenloft. When we first saw photos of this set I was pissed to see so many molds that I already had, and had in large numbers. The Deathjump Spiders and the Ghouls appear in Dungeons of Dread, the first D&D minis set released for 4th Edition, which I got a lot of to support my campaign's first year. Oh, also the Howling Hag and the Elf Wizard... with all this repetition it was hard to get excited about the product. Luckily the game itself is a lot of fun, much better than the sum of its parts.

Anyway, I had about a million of these Deathjumps already prepainted in black and grey. Replicating that look would have taken five minutes with a brush, or about an equal amount of time to switch out the unpainted versions with manufactured product from my collection and moving on. Instead I tried a different paint scheme to make lemonade out of this, frankly, lemon of a sculpt.

When I roll out spiders in D&D I like to make swarms, with huge mother spiders at the center of the encounter. For this I used spiders from my old Toybiz Resident Evil toys on a 3x3 base. On these Ravenloft minis I tried to replicate this paintjob, with the idea that one day I'd pair them and have a whole encounter of red and yellow stripe legs.

I made two changes: 1, the mandibles are in red, not black. The RE spider has big sharp thornes for a mouth that can be threatening without enhancement, whereas the Deathjump has little mouth-legs like a tarantula. Those needed to be red. 2:, the original has black stripes on the yellow leg-segments. I had applied black paint to brush and was sitting down to do this, but I thought, "You're seconds away from screwing up this whole figure" and I walked away. I'm dedicated to the philosophy of Table Ready and no more... manage your own expectations, move your paint over square yards instead of creating the perfect square inch.

Journeys into the Matte Black

With my declared victory over Ravenloft, I'm moving on to Descent. I've got v1.0, v2.0, and Lair of the Wyrm, and want to paint up all of my figures to play through the Lair of the Wyrm mini-campaign in our boardgame club.

My first step is spray priming. I want to keep my heroes bright and they're getting a white undercoat. However, one of my lessons learned from Ravenloft is that the monsters needed a lot of black paint applied all over the place, so I'm spraying black down on the forces of the Overlord on day one.

Only the minions are getting paint; all my red monster bosses are untouched. This means I'll go back later and do them once I've got all my minions done, and they never look uniform. This way I'll apply what I learned on the schlubs to their bosses. More importantly, though, I never want to be left with an unplayable set and spray away the difference between commander and commandee.

The detail looks pretty good on these guys. My Ravenloft minis were tacky after spraypaint, but the black on the monsters dried nicely. The heroes got Krylon white and they're tacky, just like the Ravenloft stuff. Maybe the problem is the white paint! I thought I had run that down; my last attempt to basecoat white went through three different paint brands with the same results. I dunno, maybe everything will be black from now on.

Ravenloft's Doin' So Good...

I've been painting seriously (as in, I know where my paints and brushes are in the house) for about three weeks now, and last night I actually played a game with what I painted! shocking milestone, I know! Last night Steve hosted our Boardgame Club's game of Castle Ravenloft. He provided custom Hirstarts board pieces, and we played with the Ravenloft minis I've been working on.

These pictures were meant to get the board more than the minis. In fact, I bet most of the monsters are the pre-paints from the Dungeon Command sets that we stocked the deck with. But we did pull out my gargoyles, spiders, skeletons (non-blazing), rats, and ghouls at various points. No wolves or kobolds, so it was a challenging game!
 

The board looked great, great enough for me to never want to make anything like that ever. My hat's off to the caster hobbyists; that stuff looks incredible. But I'll stick to cardstock, or as I'm currently doing, nothing.

Anyway, it was great to play with a fully painted set! Which is not exactly true: I haven't touched the translucents. I think I'm going to paint the bones in my Blazing skeletons and ink the wraiths.