Reaper Warrior Women

I'm going to continue documenting  my painting work in the last few years on this blog.  So, without further ado, I present to you two Reaper minis.  I painted these two female warriors  for a friend in our gaming group back in late 2010 and early 2011. They were the choice of he and his wife.  Reaper minis are much larger than the old Ral Partha figures, so they are easier to paint for me. I think they are considered to be 28mm heroic scale, which seems more like 30mm to me.

The first mini, Lorielle Silverrain, is a ranger whose primary weapon is the bow. She seems almost like wood elf royalty to me.  I went for a non-metallic gold trim on her leather armor to see how it would look.  Before the varnish (vallejo flat), the NMM gold looked really good.  I think the varnish wiped out many of the highlights that gave the gold a luster; the picture you see here is post varnish.  So, for later minis, I switched my varnish of choice to a can of Testor's Dulcote which seems to preserve highlights.

Here is the backside of Lorielle.  I recall working very hard on the NMM on the quiver only to have the varnish kill it.  Oh well, at least this figure can be held and the paint won't peel off.

Finally, here is a female warrior from Reaper whose name eludes me.  Anyone know who this is?  She is really armed to the teeth.  This one did not get the NMM treatment since it takes me so long to do.  She got the regular Citadel metallics which are not quite as nice, but are still great for tabletop. The technique of using some of the brown washes on the gold really helped on this mini.  It gave teh weapons a more worn look.   I like the swirly snake thing on her sword and the choice of red hair.  Hair color is one of the first things I think about for some reason...

Green Dragon Update

Greetings loyal viewers out there.....anyone?  Bueller?

Today I finished painting the wings on the green dragon, and I must say, Im happy with how they have turned out. i went for a lighter color than the body that would seem a little transparent.

I wanted the areas that were lower to be a darker shade than the highest areas....classic highlighting and shading stuff. I also wanted the shaded parts to be more dark greenish rather than shaded with black.

I continued to work on the claws and the horns on the wings.  I did some more highlighting on the face and mouth as well.

The lines of delineation between the scales are strong, and I am not sure if I will keep them this way. By the way, the crummy right wing I sculpted myself does not look too bad at this stage!

How to Make Fantasy Trees for Gaming

There are a lot of guides out there on the 'Net on how to create tabletop trees for different kinds of games.  Most of them don't really appeal to me, since the trees don't look very real or are very flimsy.  Some of the kits that use plastic trunks that you dip in glue and then add flock look decent however. I decided to come up with something that would look very real and be durable, and it turns out it was a bit of work but worth it.  What follows is the basic process I use to make my trees.


1) The first thing I do is get some coat hanger wire.  I cut pieces into segments of various lengths, and then I use pliers to twist these segments together.  Coat hanger wire is very strong, so the tree will last forever.  Just don't ever step on it, as I assume it will not give to much and hurt a foot pretty well.You could also use floral wire here which is easier to bend.

2) The next step in my process is to create some smaller branches for a more realistic effect using a twisted strands of copper wire or the like.  Twist up the wires around the tree to make smaller branches.  The ends of the wires were split for more realism.  Now we start to see a tree skeleton that looks plausible?

3) After the skeleton is done, it gets messy.  I coat the entire frame in toilet paper or paper towels dipped in PVA glue. This is not easy, but I basically wrap the skeleton like a mummy.  The paper is very wet at this stage and extremely sticky.  Also, to the outside observer, this stage looks very dubious.

Once the paper has dried overnight, I glue the entire sculpture or mummy tree to a piece of MDF board ...a circle cut using a box cutter...with wood glue or the like.  Some kind of glue that will last and not break or crack.  I did not use PVA here since I don't trust it to hold the heavy wire over time.

 4) When the mummy tree is dried to the MDF board, the fun and the magic happens.  This is the painting of the bark stage where something that looks silly actually turns into something that looks very cool.  I first coat the tree in a dark base coat of black using a large brush.  When that dries, I drybrush various shades of brown starting with the darkest and going to the lightest.  You can lighten your brown with yellow or even an orange.  Using white made the color look mauve and not pleasing to my eye at least.  You can see how the twisted toilet paper has the sort of texture of real tree bark.  Very cool indeed.

5) After the painting of the bark is done, it is time to add foliage.  This is the step that can be done many ways. For my trees, I use Woodland Scenics Poly Fiber in green color.  I add PVA glue to the branch extremities and glue clumps of the fiber to the tree.  I repeat this process until I get a nice, bushy look. You can also base the MDF with some sand or small rock or whatever at this point. Things look good here, but the leaves do not look convincing to me being all one color. The fibrous look of them does not bother me for some reason.  So onto the next step..final highlighting and base work.

6) The final process is very fun and easy to do.  I dip a large drybrush in shades of yellow and orange, and I lightly overbrush areas of the fiber to give the foliage a multicolor look.  Yellow is used for extreme highlights, and darker green is used in the cracks and crevices.  At this stage, the base is painted and flocked with some of the static grass which makes it really pop. I also like to add some rocks around the roots to hide holes...usually made from broken up pieces of cork and then basecoated black.  I highlight these rocks with various shades of grey.  This is the final product, a very nice looking and long lasting tree that should not bend, break, or shed any leaves.

A Ral Partha Ogre

While I continue to work on the Green Dragon, aka white dragon from Ral Partha AD&D, I wanted to share this completed Ogre from the same company.  He was done in January 2013 I believe. At first , I wanted to paint the metals in the Non Metallic Metal (NMM) style, but that seemed too time consuming for my slow skills, so I went ahead and used my Citadel metal paints.  Below is the first pass at the mini.

 I think the hardest part of painting miniatures for me is to select colors for clothing and decorations that look good on the mini and go well together.  This Ogre's skirt thing is a kind of grey-blue, which at first I liked but then decided  was too bright and happy.  Almost like he belonged to an army of men.  I wanted something more wild nad independent.  I pondered going to something more brown or earth tone in color, and came up with the next picture which used kind of a reddish brown from Vallejo.

Not only did I changed the color of the skirt, I decided on green skin instead of tan. He now has the skin tone of the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz...kind of a grey green.  I performed some washes using Citadel Gryphonne Sepia on the metals, and some washes on the boots and skirt and weapons using Citadel Devlan Mud.

The final mini just had the base flocked as well as some additional highlights here and there. The light for the camera was incandesent, which gives the picture too much yellow tint.  I added some little tufts of grass from Army Painter to the base which I think are great.

That's it for Mr. Ogre.  I hope to use him in some games someday.

The Beginning

Welcome.

So this is the first post for this blog, the kickoff post so to speak. This blog is going to be a kind of record of my hobbies and fun time activities... Thus the funhouse tie in. I will hopefully talk about my gaming with Old School Dungeons and Dragons, my painting of fantasy miniatures, and perhaps some posts on beer or drawing or making crafts and costumes.  Possibly a little about organic gardening too.  I hope to post lots of pictures of in progress minis and things I have crafted since I really love seeing pictures of other's work.

So, without further ado, here is a Ral Partha White Dragon that I am currently working on...painting it to be a Green Dragon.

The dragon did not come with a right wing, so I did the best I could with Green Stuff and some wire to make a wing. It is slightly larger than the left, and a bit rough...but from afar it looks good!!!  

This first shot shows the basecoats and the choices of colors I made for this guy/gal.  By the way, I found this mini in a "bits bin" in the local game store for two dollars or so.  I picked him up along with quite a few other classic Ral Partha and Grenadier minis that were of no interest to the gamers at that store for some reason.  My gain.

Since the picture above was taken, I have highlighted the heck out of the mini, especially the back and the face.  I have not gotten around to the wings yet;  those will be the finale.  For the scales, I used many coats of watered-down Vallejo Deep Green mixed with Golden Olive or Flat Yellow.  The highlighting takes a lot of patiences ,but the results are more than worth it. I recommend to any ew painters to use as many highlights as they can stand.

Here is another shot showing more of the face and head.  As usual, the lighting tends to blow away many of the highlights...

 

 

More posts to come as I finish different phases of this guy.