Wednesday Night WIPs

Tonight I had only stolen minutes to put the finishing touches on the minion Nagas and start the basecoat on these ogres. Cheers!

Paint Club WIPs

Great Paint Club! We welcomed Marc, who's working through his Ashardalon set and off to a great start. Here's my Descent stuff.

Sunday Night WIPs

Considering the amount of time I spent stealing away to paint today I expected to have more done. Still, these three skeletons finish off my Descent archers, and I'll have this giant done tomorrow.. that ain't nothin'!

The Count with the Clout! The Imperator of Incisors! The Baron of Bleh!

I saved Strahd for last, both presentation and actual painting. The thing is, when you're playing Ravenloft, you'll never use this mini! I've never put him on the board, we always play with new people and go through one of the other scenarios instead of hunting Strahd. But he needs to look good, and this is a good high fantasy, Wayne Reynoldsy vampire that doesn't go too Lugosi or Gene Colan Dracula.

I put some deep red on him (following the Spike principle) and made sure he had a Mr. T level of gold because dude's a count. For the sword, I laid down silver and followed with a clear blue. I see this as a Frostblade, which used to absolutely wreck me in Warhammer Fantasy Battle. If I was stating this guy up for D&D, I would try to convey that he could use his sword to achieve a TPK, but wants to feed instead.

I don't think the head came together very well. First there's the mouth, which just isn't working for me... it really looks different from the right or the left sides. Second I should have gone blue-grey and really sold the Vampire in the skin tone. Strahd is a little too pink and I couldn't remove that with highlights.

Friday Night WIPs

I had a lot of WIPs this week! Here's my minion Giant and Sorcerers from Descent v1. I'm now well into that set, although my paternity leave is drawing to a close and I won't be near as productive next week. You know what rules, dudes? Painting and playing with your baby.

I like how all these guys turned out. Next are Manticores and Hellhounds!

Descent Complete!

This week I completed the last of my monsters from the Descent v2 box set, so I can now bring a totally painted set to Game Night! I've also done the contents of the Lair of the Wyrm expansion and two monster groups from the v1 set, with more on the way.

This was fun and taught me to work fast! I'd recommend the Descent game as a beginning painting project: it's the right mix of challenge and reward.

Wednesday Night WIPs

Tonight I did some touch-ups to finish off the boss monsters I did at Painting Club last night, then worked through my six minion skeleton archers from the Descent v1 box. But enough about that box... with this red Shadow Dragon done, I've completed all the miniatures in Descent v2! And Lair of the Wyrm, and Beastmen and Razorwings from v1... I've done a lot of Descent minis! Tomorrow I'll spend some time on bases, spray with matte sealer, and put this kid to bed.

Reaper updated us on their Bones Kickstarter last night, and it sounds like they're running about a month and a half behind. So I'll have June and early July to paint Descent v1, Wrath of Ashardalon, and maybe Legend of Drizzt. After all that, I'm going to be in great shape for all my new Bones stuff!

Painting Club WIPs

A dragon and as bunch of other red monsters. Good painting club!

Monday Night WIPs

More Descent boss, aka red, monsters today. I finished the two fire imps and the hybrid, then banged out the elemental, the zombie, and the Flesh Molder.

Tomorrow is paint club! I need to figure out what I'm bringing!

Sunday Night WIPs

More Descent Master monsters, this time my three boss Beastmen (done as a Masters of the Universe reference), two fire imps, and the draconic hybrid. The last three need some work, hopefully tomorrow. I've got some good stuff working with transparencies on these guys!

Saturday Night WIPs

Good night of painting as we stay home with the kid! I finished this ridiculous Descent v1 Lizard Guy hero and did my Shadow Dragon up like the Pathfinder Black Dragon. That worked against the sculpt occasionally but I like the end result, especially the wings. Then I powered through three boss monsters: the ettin, the goblin archer, and the cave spider. I will finish you, Descent Box!

Tremble before Gravestorm!

It's an undead blue dragon named Gravestorm... a little on the nose, but we don't play D&D for the subtlety!

So I knew how to do the bone, but undead dragons have a lot of dried skin too, otherwise their wings don't look good. So I looked around on how to do this Huge Dracolich, and what parts of him were dead flesh and not knobby dragon bone. I decided to match the paint master from the WOTC Unhallowed set, which decided that a blue dragon should leave... blue!

So all the bones went from a black basecoat to brown, light brown, light yellow, and white drybrushing. The flesh started as very dark blue and got some medium blue highlights for the edges of the sculpt. I love how this turned out.

Thursday Night WIPs

Finished my merriod, which I like! And my Descent v1 falconer, which isn't great. But he's done. Tomorrow, the shadow dragon!

Wednesday Night WIPs

I took a week-long hiatus from painting. We just had our first child, and I thought it was appropriate.  But now our sleep is under control, and my little squirt does a lot of nursing which does not involve me. Tonight I decided to try painting again.

Here's a Merriod, falconer, lizardman shaman, and dragon ready for highlights. (hopefully tomorrow!) Most of these guys got a simple basecoat, but my vision for the dragon is a Third/Fourth Edition black dragon, so he can start at 100 percent black, then drybrush in the blues and purples.

Why did I say we have sleep under control? I am tired as hell...

Dracolich in Training

A zombie dragon is a pretty good concept; any category that includes Nethyrmaul the Undying is great.  My only quibble with this mini is that it was the only Large-Size White Dragon avaiable for a long while. Several people used green stuff to bring it back to life and plug the hole in their dragon colorwheel (luckily the WOTC Dragon box set gave us a good Large White two years ago).

It's hard to sell both the White and the Zombie part of this guy. I tried to paint him as a normal white and give him wounds and dead eyes. It works well enough for me to move on.

Whoops, I Made a Smurfette!

Blue skin tone, yellow in the white hair to imply filth, and all of a suffen this Howling Hag was part smurf. Whoops!

But she's still cool, cooler than I would expect. I wasn't too jazzed that another Dungeons of Dread thing was being treated as a special villian in Ravenloft. A hag is a good miniboss for our favorite pen-and-paper Castlevania, but I never found the D&D hags all that compelling as monsters. But once I had painted my semi-transparent Bestial Brown onto her white-based robes, I had this looking pretty good. There's a lot of good detail in her various folds and fringes.

Ooh, she should have been green to do a Wicked Witch of the West thing. But that would make her too orcish, this blue was probably the safest choice.

Let's Be Clear That This is a Frankenstein

Ravenloft has a Dracula and a Werewolf and a Frankenstein, but where's the Gillman? How much ass would the Saughin Baron have kicked it he was in this set?

My goal for this miniature was to drive the Frankenstein theme home, and that made acceptable the use of green skin tones to recall the Karloff version. I picked a standard tone for the face that wouldn't give me any highlighting and shading trouble, then varyied my alternate tones so that no like patches shared borders. He goes between pink and grey and green, so given his size, and the fact that he comes from a D&D world, I think he's a mix of Ogre, Troll, and Hill Giant parts. That's pretty cool.

Blue pants made the most sense from a color perspective, but I kept the blue as dark as possible. It's really hard not to give a medieval guy blue pants and have it look right, because they strongly imply jeans. Look at this Elven Arcane Archer from the WOTC prepaints: they probably just wanted some variants among their various earth-tones, but he appears to be rocking some 501s.

The effect I like the most on this guy is the flayed flesh and exposed muscle on the left arm. This was a basecoat of reddish-brown (the paint is called "Brownie," racist) and highlighing in a baseline red. The result is rich and deep with nothing threatening to be too white. I'm looking for another mini to use this effect on.

Heroes of Ravenloft, Part 2

Returning to the heroes of the Ravenloft set! The second half is the Human Ranger and the Dwarf Cleric.

This female dual-wield ranger is a pretty great sculpt, and it's too bad that WOTC half-assed the paint apps in prepaint for the Heart of Cormyr set.

I wanted her in greens and browns, which made me lean towards red hair. Her chest armor is a scale sculpt, so I tried to vary between gold, copper, and the occasional flat orange to make a fishscale-like effect. I've seen this look awesome on Aquaman action figures, and if Aquaman does it, it must be cool guys. I don't think this was a total success; the area isn't large enough and there aren't enough scales. But with smaller scales I couldn't achieve the granularity of this effect. I think it still looks interesting.

This dwarf cleric is an interesting sculpt, mostly robes or jacket. I tried to do him in a rich red to make a stab at color-coding the heroes (I've got a yellow fighter, a green ranger, a purple mage, and a grey rogue). He's a young dwarf and hasn't gone greybeard yet; otherwise he'd have the wisdom to stay the hell out of Strahd's house. I like him, especially the epaulette-looking things. We called him Captain Dwarf of the S.S. Moradin when we played.

Heroes of Ravenloft, Part 1

My first look at the Heroes of Ravenloft! The first half is the Dragonborn Fighter, the Human Rogue, and the Eladrin Wizard.

I fully support the addition of Dragonborn, Tieflings, and Warforged as baseline D&D elements, but the race doesn't scream Ravenloft to me. The counterargument is that we have maybe six Dragonborn minis, so any excuse to get another is acceptable. This was the first mini I painted in this modern era (defined, personally, as preparations for the arrival of the Bones Kickstarter). This is what I painted on the first night of Painting Club, and I credit Todd with the idea of doing his axe as stone and not metal. He's a little chalky but I like him.

The Human Thief is apparently female, according to her game card. Well, she's got long hair and a "this is definitely a lady that I'm sculpting" chest, but the face and body made me assume this was a dude with Aragorn hair. Well, she was holding a sword and a knife, so I painted her like the Gray Mouser... she's the Mouserette.

I gave the Eladrin Wizard that came with the Ravenloft set to Todd to paint, and good riddance! I was so sick of that mini... he came in Dungeons of Dread, strike one. But he was also the pick to represent Marc's Half-Elf Warlock, Varin, in our D&D game, so I saw him on the table every week for three years (Varin upgraded to a Heroclix mini in the Epic tier). So letting someone else paint him was fine with me. But then I needed a fifth guy for our Ravenloft game, so I took the old prepaint and drybrushed a little here and there. It pretty much looks the same as it did before.

Painting Bone is the Gift you Give Yourself

Oh man, that's what I should have called this blog. That's why I'm doing this, cause recently I've got a real painting bone, heh heh heh.

Back in, I guess high school, my friend Bien used to paint Space Wolves, and he loved doing all the bone on those sculpts. Bone was the best effect you could do, according to him, especially in a time vs reward analysis. And he's right. I haven't done bone in years, but doing these skeletons brought it all back. You go from black to brown to other brown to white and then you're done, and it looks great, and it took you ten minutes for the three of them.

I've got some other skeletons: Descent has some skeleton archers, and of course there's Reaper Bones stuff to think of. I'm going to stockpile them and do them all at once, just totally bone out.