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Basilisk from the Bones 5 Core Set. I wanted to give him the classic green and gold coloring of the basilisks of lore, and I am happy with how he turned out. Learning how to blend and layer is a continuous process of improvement for me, so tips and advice are welcome!

One of the two selections this week was the basilisk. I immediately knew I wanted to this guy as blue when I saw him, but didn't realize I'd go orange, too. BATTLE REPORT! Wins: * Started this one with a brush coating of the new dark purple from Bones 5. I mean, you get these new colors, you gotta use 'em, right? * Lightening up the purple to blues with rich indigo, then again to aquamarine. I wanted the blue to really pop. * After getting all the blues in place it immediately occurred to me I wanted to go in a different direction. I looked at the color wheel and saw orange on the opposite end of the spectrum. Let's do it. Used it as a filter to not lose the dry brushing color and it ended up making a cool skin effect. Sweet! * Using the orange now as my basis for something brighter and could lighten up, I placed it between all the scales and used it to bring forward the shadows. * The shadows weren't bright enough, so I took the liberties of using an orange/yellow mix to show scales on the underbelly and match them to the little dots I found on this guy's skin. With there only being a few dots they looked out of place, so I added some more dots to bring it out. May have gone a little heavy handed... * Taking a note from my Werewolf I did in a previous post, I used the Drakenshade for areas where the muscle or armor were and used it very sparingly. Looks great and worked great! Helped define the musculature. Misses: * Eyes pop, but feel I could have made them better. * I love the way the bone and horns look, but I'm not sure they work for this basilisk. I originally had them as blue, but opted to keep them light. Not sure how anyone else feels about this? * The scales on the feet needed something and rather than going orange, I went with the blue seen above. Again, seems pretty bright and I'm not totally sold on it, but it works. This guy was fun, looks good overall, but also has a LOT going on for colors. Obviously, this is a departure from classic basilisk colors, but then again - IT'S FANTASY! I thought making the yellow areas look as though they are soft spots for a team to target. Not sure it worked fully, but it was fun. Win. If you have any feedback or comments, please lay them on me. I can't get better without some direction from the team.

I ended up going in a little bit of tropical direction with this guy, using some really bright, lush greens. For his eyes, I wanted to elude to his petrifying gaze by giving them milky, cataract like coloration.

On the board this week is the basilisk. I have started the base coat on the lower half and the first wash.

This is the Reaper Bones 77371 Basilisk sculpted by Julie Guthrie. It's quite small - about the size of a large dog, with a wonderfully grouchy visage. I painted it up fairly quickly to illustrate a video about how yellow and black can be mixed to make greens. This was an example of the less vivid greens (For a really vivid yellow-and-black green, see my She-Hulk Show-Off thread). All the colors on the critter were mixed just from yellow (mostly Yellow Ochre, but also a little Hansa Yellow), black, and white. The video is here, if anyone cares to watch it.

Some of you may remember the diorama I had started entitled Billy's Bad Day. For various reasons, I am, for the most part abandoning that concept. I was really struggling to tell the story I had in my head. I still however want to paint my basilisk, and maybe include it in a diorama, but if I do, I will likely include another character that is a bit more relate-able to the viewer than a couple of goats. More on that later. For now, I'm going to concentrate on painting the basilisk as I have time between sculpts. If I get that done and my other ReaperCon entry for 2019 in time, I will look into expanding this into a diorama. If not, this can still be my Open category entry. Here is the basilisk: The basilisk will be based on a Gila Monster: But instead of pink, the light areas will be inverse flame color (red up to yellow) with a black belly and skin. A few months ago, I used my air brush to add a coat of brown liner/blue liner to the skin areas, then air brushed the rest with Cinnamon Red. Lately, I have been reading Rhonda Bender's (@Wren) blog, Bird with a Brush. For the past month she has had a series of articles on Contrast that have really got me itching to pick up a brush again, but I've had way too much sculpting work to get done to do so. I strongly recommend that you follow her blog, it is excellent. The articles on contrast are as follows: Compare and Contrast Contrast Versus Realism How to Paint Contrast – Mind Games How to Paint Contrast – Hands On Last night, I was ill with a cold, but had slept much of the afternoon. I wanted to relax, but my brain was just not functioning the way I needed it to to start the next step of the druid turtle, so I picked up this painting and decided to do the next step. I decided to follow Rhonda's advice and add another couple layers of zenithal lighting value to the red, airbrushing on a coat of Sunrise Orange and another of Candlelight Yellow. Then, I went back with a brush and base-coated all of the skin areas with a blend of Brown Liner and Blue Liner (I never use pure black for natural blacks). So this is my base starting point. From here I plan on using glazes to develop the shadows and highlights, pushing the contrast further than I have ever gone before. Challenges I see coming for me in this project: Finding time; I have a lot of sculpts in the hopper between now and January, so progress may be slow between now and then. Developing enough contrast. I have a tendency to think it is enough and stop too soon. I really want to push it on this one. Keep me honest folks! Black/near black. I've never been very good at black, so having major areas of black scares the stuffing out of me, especially since I will be covering major areas of finished color with black squiggles to make the gila monster markings; that's going to hurt. The next step will be developing the major red shadows. I want to thank Rhonda one more time for teaching, inspiring, and challenging me to do this. I honestly believe that this is one of my best sculpts; I want it to be my best paint job as well.

This guy was so fun! Mmmmm...and my uploader is broken. Sorry...I’ll try again later...

I recently got a commission to sculpt a basilisk. I'm really excited about this one as I've been wanting to do one for several years. Due to cost constraints, I can't quite do the version I had originally wanted to do, but my client and I worked it out and I am very excited about what we came up with. He also gave me permission to share it with you. This one will be featured in a indie campaign later this spring I believe. Here is the rough concept (please don't laugh at my rough drawing skills; I really need to take a page out of @Morihalda's book and work on drawing more): From that, I created the armature. Note that the rear two legs on the left side will be on a rock which spans under the beast as it is climbing over it, touching the inside of the right-side rear leg. This allows me to account for all 8 legs and still have a one-part casting. Right Side (head pointing to the right): Top (head to the right): Left Side (head to the left): Angled View (head tot he left):

Found this in a box at a friends house. He gave it to me for free, I eventually painted it up and gave it back for free. Painting is fun!

From Lunch Sessions I, my basilisk. Such a fantastic sculpt from Julie Guthrie. Painted up to decent tabletop quality. I still need to clean up the base, but that'll happen in a batch with some others. These photos are skewed very yellow, not sure why.

TL;DR: I have a lunch break. I'm going to paint during that break. Finari and the Basilisk are first up. So, coming back from a hiatus, and I have several realizations: 1. My painting station in the new house is not yet set up and won't be fully ready-for-use for a while, 2. I have lots of house-projects to do with my spare time at home, and 3. Winter is coming, so the Pittsburgh weather will not be pleasant much longer. This all points to one conclusion: I can stay indoors on my lunch break, eat quickly, and paint almost every day. So, I'm going to try to paint at least 3 days a week, if not 4, for 30-45 minutes at a go. I'll take pictures at the end of each session and post them here. When I finish up a batch of minis, I'll figure out what will be next and start a new thread (hence this being "Lunch Sessions I"). At the start of each thread, I'll lay out the goals for each mini I'm painting and reiterate my desire for honest feedback based on those goals. So, part one! Finari has been mostly basecoated since approximately 2014. This particular copy of her had some really nasty mold grossness on the face, so I carved away a lot of the plastic tumor. For this reason, she's a bit awkward in the face and my goal is mostly to get her done. I'm painting her as an Emerald Claw/Blood of Vol officer for my Eberron games, so there will be some very simple freehand to signify that affiliation; she's also got rather a lot of black, so I'll take the opportunity to work on that, since it's an important color that I don't feel confident with. The basilisk I want to paint purely for fun, but I want it to be a "tabletop display" piece. Smooth blends, etc. Nothing particularly advanced, technique-wise, but I want to show competency in the simple technique. Both pieces are starters to really get back in the swing of painting, paving the way for some more advanced/detailed stuff further down the queue. Day 0: this is where the minis were at the start of my session today. They're mostly basecoated already, with a little bit of highlighting on the basilisk's dorsal ridge and Finari's hair. You can also see some of the Rathcore V3 miniatures holders we recently received from their Kickstarter. So far, I really like them. I have a couple of the larger painting handles as well, but decided not to use them for these minis. My only problem with these is there's no good way to use the holders for penny-based figs. That said, I think I'll be able to make my own corks for penny bases when the time comes. Day 1: Today I was able to paint for about 45 minutes. Part of that time was spent painting pennies black to finish out the bases of the kobolds and rats I put up in Show-Off the other day. For these two, I brought up the highlights on the dorsal ridge and Finari's shoulders closer to linen white, sketched in the Vol blood-drop on her shield and based the red scales/ear-flaps on the basilisk. I also found several spots where Finari's original basecoat had worn away and touched those up. For the basilisk, I'm trying to decide what the smaller side-and-belly scales should look like, as well as his spines and claws. I think I like the darker green for the smaller scales, but I'm not sure if I should go pale or dark for the claws. Any thoughts?

Last night, after tiring of video games, I decided to speed paint a basilisk over a glass (or two) of Port. Now @Beagle may instruct you that fine English gentlemen do not speed paint with Port, but my family hasn't had to worry about what those guys think in a couple of centuries. I can even drink my Port out of a coffee mug if I desire. But I digress. The only real failure here is that my sealer has frosted the shadows a bit. It was more vibrant before that little mishap, but the non-painter is unlikely to notice the difference. Also, edge-highlighting the one in the middle works reasonably well.

Cute puppy found near the corner of Crown Street and Wharf Road. Very friendly and energetic, seems to like people. Brown and grey markings and a long tail. No collar.

From the second Bones kickstarter: the cute lil' Basilisk. You dont want it to look at you. Another quick paint job. 77371 Basilisk Reaper Bones KS 2 Sculted by Julie Guthrie Bonesium PVC 40mm base

I've always loved this description of the basilisk as a highly poisonous creature. It's hard to make that work in D&D though. :-) In D&D, I would imagine that the basilisk would haunt an ecology that would have difficulty supporting life. If most animals the monster sees are petrified, then eventually the local flora would suffer. So the I've tried to paint the miniature as stalking a desolate wasteland with minimal vegetation. This beastie was definitely a fun paint. Comments/Criticism welcome, of course!

Don't Look Ethel!!! Too late... she was turned to stone! Ok, maybe not, but that's what this little guy is known for. This, like the lemures I posted earlier, are part of a collection I am doing for a local convention. This basilisk was inspired by the Pathfinder RPG basilisk, thus the green and yellow color pattern. Hope you like him! CAH

As I threatened last week, here is another batch of old enamel paintjobs from around 15-25 years ago. Troll Firbolg Mind Flayers Gnolls Owlbear Basilisk Xorn Finally, some fairies linked here in case anyone has a problem with a teeny-tiny glimpse of fairy flesh.

Hi, Not sure if my work on this little critter is worth of a show-off... But since it is getting nicer outside and my spare time is spent less on painting, this ought to do... Just a quick paint for fun. I still like how cute the sculpt is.

Meet our protagonist Marvin. He is all alone and wishes to find his true love. He makes a wish: Someone who Doesn't mind a little dirt? How about someone with scales? How about someone who likes the water? None of these are quite right. Think! Think! Maybe true love awaits in the forest: Someone green? She flew away.... But the wings were pretty... Marvin wishes for someone who has large wings! Nope nope nope nope nope! How about someone like me? A perfect match!

Batch of Bones 2 jungle-themed animals on CMON Jungle bases! 77216: Panther 77371: Basilisk 77266: Slyph 77270: Spikeshells

I just finished putting the final touches on the camel and need a break from sculpting for a bit, so I went though my mound of minis and chose the Dracolisk to paint in the next few weeks. It dawned on me that I have this model both in metal and bones, so I prepped both of them and will paint them together. I am going to use two different techniques on them to achieve what should be a similar paint job. On one, I will be starting with my shadows and highlighting up. This is the technique I've used for years and am very comfortable with it. For the other, I'll start with a mid tone, glaze in the shadows and then bring up the highlights. I tried this for the first time on the Wyvern I painted last spring and really started to like it; however, it is still new to me. I want to use these models as a test of the two techniques to see if I can see a difference in the final products, and if one technique has an obvious advantage. As usual, I'll try to run this hour by hour, but that will likely get muddled in the middle, especially as I try to keep up with shooting two minis. Here they are assembled, washed, and primed (metal only): Have a good night, Andy

This is a quickie paint-up of the Basilisk from the Bones Kickstarter II. (Whining complaint follows, ignore if you so choose...) I don't know what the product number is because it's yet another mini from that collection that isn't yet available in the online store, and I can no longer be bothered trying to find it in the preview gallery because its 'search' functionality is, frankly, garbage. They are really stretching out the general release of the KS-II minis; in my opinion, too far. Much too far. Starting a whole new KS before the old one's minis are even available is a bit on the nose, I think.

He's too cute to be one the of the deadiest lizards.

Swamp Denizens from Grenadier Shambling Mound, Giant Snake, Basilisk, Shaugin, Troll, and Gnolls Painted these this last December before Christmas. The two Lizard Men I posted on 4/1 are part of this set.

My first bones 2 mini! I love this sculpt. it is very cute. I painted her to similar to Pathfinder's Bestiary art. The eyes are my first attempt at OSL, but the pictures didn't turn out too well perhaps because the glaze medium I used made it shiny. I'll see about trying to take new pictures after I get the matte sealer on as I'd like a critique. Edit: New pics! The glaze it still shiny, but the color turned out more accurate.