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I finally reached the point where I think I'm done with Mossbeard, the enormous ent from Bones 4. I wanted to go to town on his base, and almost immediately after recieving my package, went out to Michael's and bought some dollhouse/fairy garden deer, frogs, and mushrooms. I also ordered the Bones familiar pack #1 (77176) and some Tiny Terrain trees from Miniature Market. And then, I just didn't do anything with him for over a year. Finally decided to get him done. While assembling him, I decided to make use of his empty chest cavity to install a tea light so his eyes could glow, so I drilled right through his eyes and neck, and filled in the eyes with clear gel medium so the light would come through when illuminated. Used lots of grass tufts, lichen, and cuttings from am IKEA fake plant, and put some fairies I've had for over a decade into the base, too. I also modified the head so he was looking more directly forward, since he was largely looking down in the original. Hope you like him! Close Ups & Details of Base Head Details and Glowing Eyes WIP photos

This weekend I painted up half the bones Familiars 1 set—the wolf, bat, and cat—as part of my plan to make it through some of my backlog. It’s been a really rewarding and fun set to paint, none of the minis take long, and despite the most of the figures being tiny the easy access to reference material made them pretty straight forward.

This is a fairly small Bones wolf from the Reaper set 77176: Familiars. I'm not sure who sculpted the wolf, but it is tiny. Here is an unpainted size comparison. The Bones wolf is second from the left, between a pewter Reaper wolf from the set 02830: Wolf Pack (3) and 03682: Willow Greenivy. A couple of wargs, one from Thunderbolt Mountain and one from RAFM, complete the size comparisons. Anyhow, here is the little critter. It is so small it hasn't got separate legs; I painted black between them. WIP thread here, with full details on all color mixes and techniques.

In keeping with the month that hosts Halloween, I painted up some familiars! Very simply done, starting with grey liner, nightmare black (a little extra purple for the cat) and heraldic red for the eyes (cat and raven) & mouth (bat). Drop of linen white for the cat's eyes, and a drop of dragon gold for her forehead. Still need to clean up the bases a bit. Otherwise done!

77176 Wolf 77216: Wolf, Wolverinex2, bear, eagle 77392: Peryton 77230: Ankheg 77262: Vulture Demon 77198: Barrow Rats 77259: Fly Demon Clearing back log to prepare for Bones 3 by painting up similarly-colored minis

Just a quick hour-long paint, almost exclusively drybrushed, and the ground is just drybrushed with three green colors I grabbed at random. But it's painted, which is 100% progress since I finished Mashaaf. Pardon the horrible pics; I couldn't find my nice background pages. Sir Forscale, to show how little this guy is. :) Colors used (in order): Brown Liner (base coat) Powderburn Brown (fur) Shadowed Stone (fur) Concrete Grey (fur) Misty Grey (fur) Solid Black (eyes, ears, mouth, nose) Solid White (shine dots) Jungle Moss (ground) Jungle Camo (ground) Pale Lichen (ground) EDIT: This is the figure I painted for Day 1 of my "paint one mini per day all of November" challenge. Link to index thread: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/71625-oneboot-attempts-minivember-painting-a-mini-every-day-in-november/ Huzzah! --OneBoot :D

Note: All of these are from Reaper Bones #77176 (familiar pack) I haven't done the bases for these yet, those will be done later. I also accidentally deleted the photo of the ferret... Sorry. First up, the Fox. Not bad... Not GOOD, but not bad either. Second, the Cat. I decided to do it as a Siamese cat, 'cause it doesn't look too "fluffy", and I hate black cats (even though both of mine happen to be black...). Though it turned out okay, I did notice afterwords the large seam along it's back (too late now), and that I failed to do a proper "fade" on it's front-right leg... The rest faded nicely though. Thirdly, the Bird. Too small to be a hawk (which I already did with the "animals pack" anyway), and too small to be a raven (which would be boring to paint anyway), I went with a Blue Jay... I'd like to remind you how small this figure actually is (about the size of my fingernail) - so I think I got a pretty darned good amount of detail on it, all things considered. :D Note 2: I didn't do the bat yet, nor the fairy dragon... I'll show off the bat, faerie dragon, and ferret later in another "batch".

(Yay, typo's in the title, lol) This was painted at the recent NEMPA Paint Day on Sept. 19th by my painting padawan/rent-a-kid Spawn Number One. (My friend April's 15-yr-old son Thom...) It's the Bones version of the wolf familiar originally found in Familiar Pack I. It was primed with brown liner and painted rainy grey (body) and polished bone (muzzle, chest and tip of tail), washed with a mix of pure black and violet shadow, and then dry-brushed with the base colors again before getting some dry-brushed highlights. Base was primed with blue liner, basecoated a mix of a medium blue that came with one of the LTPKs and ghost white, then dry-brushed ghost white and then some pure white highlights were added along the top edge. I did the eyes for him. Because I was busy with so many other things during the Paint Day, we forgot to paint the nose. I'm still trying to instill the concept of brush control in him, but he has a bad habit of trying to tickle the mini with the brush rather than using long deliberate strokes.

I must say, the small size of these models (especially the smaller of them) made this a nice challenge. I did my best to find reference photos of real animals to use as a basis for painting them, which was a big help. I have two sets of each of these, and with the exception of the wolf, wolverine, and bat, I painted the duplicates differently, to provide more variety. Here are pictures of the Animal Familiars: Bat, Crow, Red Fox, Weasel, and a 'black' cat. Bat, hawk, grey fox, ferret, and a brown-striped tabby cat. And here are pictures of the Animal Companions: Snow leopard, vulture, wolverine, wolf, brown bear. Black panther, falcon, wolverine, wolf, black bear.

I packed up all my mini painting gear and took it with me to my sister's for the holidays. My Christmas gift to my niece and her three friends was for each of them to pick a mini out of my box of Bones and pick out something they'd like me to paint. Boy that sounds like something a BBEG would say, "Come here, children! Reach into my Box of Bones and draw forth a miniature monster!" They also picked the colors. So they decided they wanted a doggie, a unicorn, a wizard, and an Eye Beast. One of these things is not like the other. There's probably a future as an evil overlord for that particular child there. With the exception of the unicorn, all the minis were of the size to put on a base, and I managed to discover several things in the process. First, that the wooden disks I'd bought at the craft store when I grabbed my essential mini making kit last year with the intent of using them as bases don't work well with my super glue. The wood goes OH SO THIRSTY and slurps up the glue right into its innards. I put glue on the top, it came out the bottom. Fortunately said wood is so thirsty that it kept all the glue inside itself, rather than affixing a 1 inch round disk to my sister's kitchen table. I'd already gone through one of her walls, I didn't need to add yet more carnage and destruction to the bill. Slapped some Reaper primer on the top of the thing and on the bottom of my Sculpey adornments and that seemed to make the glue work. Tried out Scupley for bases for the first time, nothing complex. Mooshed it onto a wooden disk, texturized it with a bit of packing foam, cooked it in the oven, painted it Grass Green. So the doggie was done first, as there wasn't much of anything to do, with the color of grey being chosen by my niece. I think I used Honed Steel and attempted to drybrush on some lighter grey, but the black wash I used seems to have obscured that. So a simple, plain, common mutt type of doggie. The Unicorn was selected for the poor mite that unfortunately was at home sick. So as little girls are prone to chosing, the once proud beast was to be slathered in shades of purple and pink. Though my only purple is Sparkling Amethyst, which happens to be one of my favorite paint colors. I didn't want to futz with mixing, respecially since my only reds are on the darkish side. Something that will likely be remedied by the arrival of the HD paint sets from Bones II. Not much to see here, Amethyst on the body, the promotional cancer awareness pink for the mane, tail, and... floofy hoof things... I'm not sure if they're feathers or fetters. Used a lighter gray wash to bring out the detail to try and keep the pink from washing out. Did not work quite so well. Maybe a drop of pink in the wash next time might help. So Mr. Wizard here was to be painted blue with a black staff. I thought that looked a bit dull, so I painted the fringe on his robe in yellow. Originally he was Sparkling Blue, but that looked very dull visually, so I had to throw a few coats of HD Dragon Blue from my Bones Learn to Paint Kit over it to liven it up a bit, and used the HD Pale Saffron for the fringe. The staff is pure black, and the face and hands are Tanned Highlight. I didn't even try to paint the eyes, as I was running down to the wire finishing these things. There were bits where his dark blue wash wasn't quite dry when I put on the varnish, so it got a little bit smeared in places. So Mr. Eye Tyrant I think I did the best job on, though he was a pain in the butt. I painted him black first, then put on the Amethyst, and decided that looked too dark. So two coats of white, then the Amethyst again, which looked better. The future villainess decreed that the fearsome beastie was to have green eye stalks/tentacles, which was going well until I accidentally got a bit too much Pig Iron+Viper Green wash in my brush, and had significant spillage all the way down his backside, requiring yet another coat of Amethyst. Pure White toofs, Blood Red eye and tongue, some Pig Iron on his base, as it was rocky and not broccoli like the doggie. He wasn't varnished when pictures were taken, but I put a matte coat on him and then used gloss on his tongue to make it look all gross and drooly and such. And here's some group shots:

Mangu Timur feathered serpent & Faerie Dragon Tereziyna, bonepander wizard aka Ms Violet Damiel, Iconic Alchemit Mr. Bones Halbarand, cleric - generic sun god symbol (free handed) Seltyiel, iconic magus and that's everything that would fit in the case: Below is all that remains for me to paint in Bones 1: the rest were sold/traded away. Its not my goal to paint them all before Bones 2 comes in, but ..... Comments and criticisms welcome. I want to get better.

So, I've been working on this fellow for about 3 months. He's the Darksword Ranger (with bow!) sculpted by Jeff Grace. He's a gorgeous figure, with a very expressive face. I loved painting him. The bird is Reaper's Hawk Familiar from Bones. I went to the Knoxville painting day last weekend, and Wren helped me figure out how to fix him up, so now I'm setting him free into the showoff forum! However, I'm taking him to Reapercon, so if anyone has any suggestions, please please let me know! I feel much better about the hair now! Enjoy! The Wip is located here in my running thread I sculpted everything except the 2 figures, mostly with sculpey, but a few details in greenstuff. Here are 2 close-ups of the ranger:

Finally finished(ish) my players' PCs for our ongoing game of D&D. They all still need bases, and there was one latecomer whose mini I'm going to start in earnest now, but the figures themselves are done so I thought I'd show you guys. (All are in Bones.) First is Daughter Ren, human cleric of Broxin, homebrew goddess of motherhood and honorable combat. Her face is a little wonky, in large part due to a botched facial-reconstructive surgery on my part, since she came without a nose. Still, I'm pretty pleased with how she came out. A good experiment in highlighting red, into orange on her coat and into white on the gemstones. It's a pity they discontinued this mini; I'd really like another go at her in another color scheme but can't see myself getting the metal one anytime soon. Next is Kaida, eladrin rogue. Pretty simple, but I do really like her face and the color-shifting(?) on her cloak. The sealer turned out too shiny on her; some of those highlights aren't actually paint. Perra Bloodbane, dragonborn fighter, was relatively simple, by comparison. I'm not thrilled with her little cloth thing, and I need to learn how to shade yellow better (though I'd sort of figured it out by the time I did Ren). Pretty pleased with the flaming sword (which I added from a spare paladin after she got one in-game), and my light OSL on the armor, where I used a mix of silver and copper paint to indicate the reflection of the fire. Next is Lillith, elven druid, who was quite an adventure to paint (you can find a partial WIP here). I don't like the sculpt very much to begin with, the cast is weird and bumpy, and then my initial attempt to paint it turned out alarmingly garish. Pingo's suggestion of a unifying colored shadow sorted me out though, and I ended up pretty pleased with the final result. She's pictured here with her "animal companion," a dog whose name I don't remember. Last up is Lalopan Maxia, half-elf Star Pact warlock. I'm really proud of him. I got a little drained towards the end, so some of the fiddly bits are a little rougher than I'd like, but for the most part I think he's one of my best minis to date, especially in the face area. I also really like his sword blade; it was a pretty effective study in shaded metallics. Comments and criticisms welcome! (Yes, I know I need to do something about the bases and also that I need to dust my minis before I take pictures of them.)