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The Samurai Wars Mostly hard plastic sets, with a few resin options.

In preparation for 2016 I'm trying to get some of my half-finished 2015 minis off the shelf and into the done pile. I had no color scheme in mind for this mini so I grabbed some paint at random. Most of the time that I do this I decide that it was a horrible idea and put the paints back, but on occasion I just roll with it. Just to practice something different I desaturated all of the paints with white and gave her the '80s pastel look. About halfway through I did decide that I didn't really like this mini, but hey, she was a bonus and not the reason I made my purchase in the first place. For her base I kept with the same look as my previous KD:M minis, but just slapped the paint on quickly for tabletop quality. Also, this is the first mini I've finished using the Reaper skintones that I picked up earlier this month. It's probably the worst face that I've called finished in a long time, but she's off the table.

Another week, another survivor that I don't know the name of. (Fluff, who reads it?) For the second female I attempted to conquer the Scale75 Arabic Shadow. Of the paints in the flesh set, it is the one that I find kind of odd. While it's worked ok as a minor component of darker mixes it just doesn't look right next to any of the other colors, especially the lighter ones. In order to get my shadows and highlights to play well together, I tried to make sure that each mix was at least a quarter Arabic Shadow. After many mixes and much layering I've decided that you can get a decent skin out of it, but it was a whole lot of work to recreate something that I believe already exists as part of Reaper's Olive triad. What I have isn't well blended, but I've lost interest in her. This survivor is topless though she does have a conveniently placed arm that covers her just as well as any other fantasy female garb. As such I don't really consider her NSFW, but I've gone ahead and attempted to create a dropbox photo group using just one link. It's working for me, but if anyone has an issue with the link I'll add in separate direct links for each photo. The images are autocropped for preview, but clicking one will start a slideshow. Female Survivor Once I finish the lion I'll do a group shot of all the starting pieces for the game. If I'm feeling particularly motivated I might even touch some of them up with the feedback I've received so far. That said, I'm starting to feel a bit of KD:M burnout so I might work on something unrelated this week.

Once again its Sunday night, which means it's time to snap some pics of another Kingdom Death Survivor. When I started these I wasn't really planning on painting one per week, but if I keep it up that would be 52 minis/year. I would be happy with that. This time it's a female survivor, whose name I do not know but I'm sure Cash does. For this survivor I decided to try out a few paints from the Scale75 Blood and Fire set that I hadn't used yet. Her dress was basecoated in Fuchsia and shaded with Sunset Purple. To get some more practice with extreme highlighting I took some parts up to white. Her back is kinda flat so I decided to freehand in a spine, but I didn't reference how many vertebrae should fit so I'm almost assuredly wrong on that.

I should start looking these survivor's names up so I have something to call them. Anyway over the weekend I painted the other male starting survivor from the game box. I did some experimenting with the shadow portion of the Scale75 flesh set to try and make a more realistic African skin tone that I had done with my fire giant. I don't know anyone with dreads so I attempted so googling to get a better idea of how the highlights work. In the end I still just made it up. Like the last one, he's not sealed yet so I can use these pics to see if anything needs a touch-up first. ... and I see that I haven't finished the lantern. Updated with a name thanks to Cash.

My first KD:M mini has reached the almost complete stage so it's time to take some dual purpose pics! These are part show-off, part see if there's anything I want to touch-up before sealing images. Honestly I can see plenty that would need work if these KD minis were destined for anything higher than the tabletop, but they are instead on a collision course with greasy pizza fingers. For those that didn't see my posts in the assembly thread, I decided to attempt a cold light on white stones. To keep with that idea I attempted a blue light in the lantern. I initially painted his cloth white, but didn't like how it looked next to the stones and went for something completely different. I am now adding red to my list of colors that I can't photograph. It appears to be very intense in the photograph, but is not quite so overpowering in hand. Since he's not going to be entered into any online painting competition I'm inclined to leave it as is and not worry about how it photographs. Here's how the base looks from above, and pretty color accurate. Sometimes my camera does behave.

Back when I posted my KD Survivor pinup I mentioned that these pinups were an exercise in learning how to handle the Scalecolor flesh set paints. The Survivor was not actually the first pinup that I painted though, it was the Twilight Knight. She sat on my shelf of shame 95% done until I decided to finish her up earlier this week. She just needed hair and a base so it made for an easy project. Back when I was trying to decide what color scheme I wanted to paint her in I decided to use twilight colors and used the images below to set my pallet. All of the pinups have a card that comes with them, but I thought her dark stock scheme was a little boring. I know some people might say it's a little too vibrant but hey, she at least stands out from a lot of the other KD minis you'll find out there. The metals are just simple shaded metallics and the base is a bag o crap selection that I had lying around. She's still not sealed because it won't stop raining, but eventually she'll get some dull cote to knock the shine down on her cape. Come to think of it, has anyone other than aku-chan posted their Twilight Knight? You know your journey as a mini painter is not complete until you have painted one. Just look at that face. It says paint me!

One of my January painting goals was to branch out and paint a mini from a company that I had yet to paint a mini from. I chose the Kingdom Death hard plastic pinups in part to see how well their assembly goes and in part to see how durable the hard plastic they're using is. Another goal I had was to try something new, which for January was the Scale75 flesh paint set. For anyone interested in the details you can get them in my WIP. Of course, we're now into February and I've pretty much set the same goals for myself. This time the something new was attempting to paint marble. I ended up going with a white marble with blue-grey and ocher veins. I like how it looks from above, but my freehand on the backside didn't turn out as well. First the 360 view: From above the gold mask and my attempt at "natural" reddish-brown hair: And a few views of how the marbleizing effect turned out. And last a bonus closeup. She was a fun mini to paint. I'll have to find the time to work through the rest of the box, but first I have a quick and easy mini primed and ready to go.