Django Wexler

I finally finished up my new painting project! The brave adventuring party faces off against the most dangerous foe of all. (Unless you count my cat, worst nightmare of any miniature.) These are all from the Reaper Bones II kickstarter — I was poking through the giant pile of minis and trying to figure out something more interesting to do than just painting them one by one.

Let’s meet our adventuring party!

I took a ton of in-process pics while I was building this, along with my own musings, if that’s the sort of thing you find interesting.

Lessons Learned

• The “bonesium” stuff that Reaper Bones minis are made of is tricky. It’s neat in some ways, as flexible as a plastic toy, so it’s easy to temporarily move an arm out of the way to get an angle at something. But a bunch of the minis I got are twisted or bent permanently, and I’m not sure how to fix them. The approach that works on resin minis — heat in boiling water, re-bend, quench in ice water — seems to work, but the minis return to their bent shape after a couple of days. Internet studies suggest more boiling time? Need to experiment.
• Modeling foam is also tricky. Superglue and spray paint both dissolve it like acid. The foam coat stuff protects it somewhat, but not completely, although it does mask the too-regular foam texture. Next time I will probably still use foam coat but paint by hand. This is annoying, though, because painting sand manually is a PITA.
• Need to think harder about what happens at the edge of the modeled area. I had masking tape down to protect the wooden base, but when I pulled it off it left ragged bits of sand that I had to fix up and paint. Maybe some kind of lip made of green stuff?
• Composition. The color scheme worked well — gray-blue terrain, brilliantly red dragon, mostly blue-green adventurers. Also increasingly getting the hang of skin tones, including dark skin tones. The placement is trickier — this one looks fine if you can pick it up and manipulate it, but with the adversaries facing one another it’s hard to get good-looking pictures from one direction. May need to think of these arrangements as more theater-like with a single intended viewpoint.
• Basing. I cut the Reaper minis off their bases, but realized later that unlike, say, GW minis, since they have built-in bases their feet aren’t always level. This meant some last-minute fixes to the terrain, which I should have built in from the start. More testing and mockups.

A while back, I was introduced to the game The Doom That Came To Atlantic City. The game itself is fun — it plays like a kind of reverse Monopoly, where you rampage around destroying houses to open gates to the nether realms — but more importantly for my purposes, it came with a set of awesome figures as playing pieces. They’re based on art by Lee Moyer and sculpted by Paul Komoda. I knew I wanted to paint them immediately, and fortunately soon after one of my friends bought a copy of the game.

Taking decent pictures of minis with my little point-and-shoot is bear, and these are just about at the edge of my ability to paint, but I was at least reasonably happy with how the set turned out. Let’s do the roll call!

Great Cthulhu comes first, naturally. His paint job was pretty straightforward — just basecoat, wash, drybrush, and a little touchup on the highlights, and a similar process for his base. I still don’t quite have the hang of painting gemstones though.

Yog-Sothoth, The Lurker at the Threshold, was a bit of a puzzle. It’d be easy for him to end up as just a purple blob, which isn’t that interesting. I thought about doing him as soap-bubble spheres, but my painting skills aren’t up to that, so I decided to stick closer to Lee’s art which shows him as purple, and work on my manual highlighting technique. Still getting there.

Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young, is a deliciously complicated figure. Just teasing out which bit is part of which creature took forever. Color-wise I thought of him as kind of a weird mish-mash of stuff, but I’m not sure it came out as well as I imagined. I might have backed off the flesh-tone in the middle a bit? Who knows!

Hastur, the King in Yellow, is very, well, yellow. I don’t paint in yellow much, just because it’s a fiddly color to work with, but I was pretty happy with how the new GW yellow wash worked. Mixing in some golds and oranges seems to have worked as well. Trying again for a gem-like thing on his sphere, not sure it really worked. One downside to the yellow is the bright light makes it look weird and breaks up the blending.

Tsathoggua, the Sleeper of N’Kai, was also pretty straightforward, since so much of his body is textured. The art actually shows him as light purple, but I thought he’d be too close to Yog that way, so I did him as brown-furred. A bunch of blending back and forth until it looked okay, basically.

Ithaqua the Wind-Walker was also straight-forward, because he looks very similar to some of the Cryx (undead) models I did for a Warmachine army. I used my standard zombie-skin mix (purple and green washes for a mottled look) and a blue-and-green drybrush on the swirling winds to make them look eldritch.

Azathoth, the Daemon Sultan, came out a little weird. I really like how the color combination ended up, the blue and red, but the underlying parts came out too dark, so the highlights look like they’re “floating”, especially with the relatively light chitin. If I were doing it against I’d use a light blue undercoat and less wash.

Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, was a ton of fun to paint but an absolute pain to photograph. Something about his downward-looking face makes him really hard to get in focus. This is probably my favorite figure, I love the asymmetry and the contrast between the smooth and weird-looking parts of his figure. The blue and green color scheme worked better than I expected with the gold.

The gang’s all here!

Today I wrapped up a far-too-long painting project, the Skorne Mammoth. Here are some pictures!

A full rotation:

Getting back into mini painting. Here’s my pirates (Warmachine Sea Dog Crew) finished long after the campaign they were supposed to take part in is over. Apologies for crappy photography. (If anyone knows a camera that will allow a novice to take good mini photos, I’m in the market for a new camera…)

Anyway! Pictures. Click for huge.