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Hi everyone, sorry I haven't posted in a while. I mostly post on the Reaper Facebook Page and Twitter now. I still check out everything on the "Show off" every day, though! Here is my most recent tartan project. This is Aeslin sculpted by Sandra Garrity. My customer is a fan of the show (and books) Outlander and this figure was chose specifically for it's potential for painting a tartan. The tartan that was picked is the Wilson Ancient Hunting Tartan. It has these very thin quadruple orange lines that give it a very interesting blue/green/orange colour shift look. I was only able to fit in three of the thin lines, but it was enough to give the cool effect.

Victoriana from Bombshell Miniatures, sculpted by Patrick Keith. This is the figure I entered into the Miniature Monthly Masters painting competition. I really like this sculpt, and in fact I bought two more of her to paint just last week! Some of her WIP photos are here: WIP

Well, I'm not actually painting anything at work today...because I'm not going to work today. Suffice to say, we tried a new Chinese restaurant the other day, and it has not gone well. BUT! I posted a teaser in my last Lunch Sessions thread, and now I can go ahead and start this one. Prep work is done, so when I do get back into the office I can actually start laying paint. Here's what's going on this time around: Privateer Press has just started their Minicrate program, a subscription-based monthly "crate" of, well, miniatures. They are all special edition minis available only through the crate subscription. When I saw the first mini they planned to release, I almost got a subscription before realizing I probably wouldn't care overmuch about most of the minis involved past the first...we'll see if I regret that decision later, but the good news is: @chaosscorpion did subscribe, and was willing to work out a trade for the Swamp Siren in exchange for a warlock for his fledgling Trollbloods army. (if you care to see the mini in question, @Ghool just posted a really lovely painted version) Chaosscorpion was good enough to send the Swamp Siren over already, so I have her waiting for the day I paint her up...I have plans to do a resin-water base for her eventually. And I have procured and prepped Borka Kegslayer: I do have one specific instruction for this fella: Tartan! Chaosscorpion also provided a specific family tartan for me to replicate: Now, I've done a good bit of freehand, and a fair number of stripes, but never any actual plaid. So I decided I'd get some practice in first, which is where this preview pic comes in: This is the backside of one of the new Wizkids Pathfinder unpainted line, from the "Merchants" set. By way of a quick review, these are cheap and nicely detailed. They are pre-prepped and pre-primed, and I was impressed with both the lack of mold lines (still a few, but nothing egregious. For NPCs or townsfolk I'm not too worried) and the complete coverage of the primer. I was surprised to find the primer was every bit as hydrophobic as bare Bonesium, but eventually I got a basecoat down. I'm planning to paint her dress in plaid, using the Aitken tartan: I chose this tartan because it has roughly the same pattern as Chaosscorpion's, although in different colors. It's likely I'm overthinking the process, but I want to be as accurate as I can when I get to the plaid on Borka. So that's where I am at this point. I likely won't do any further painting until Wednesday (there's an office Halloween thing tomorrow), but I've got a bit of a start!

This is Miss Ogre 2017. Steve Harvey realized he made a mistake and that she actually came in second but when he tried to rectify the mistake, she ate him. I had such a good time painting her. I kept having Shrek flashbacks. First, "Get outta me swamp!" The Scottish accent made me want to attempt painting plaid. Then realizing that she is wearing two skirts because.....Ogres have layers! I considered giving her a tramp stamp, a beauty mark (her tusks are in the way), and platinum blonde hair. Maybe I will have to get another and do that on the next one. The little guy has pretty soft features and I couldn't see any mouth or anything on him so I gave him a suggestion of a mouth. I may go back and tweak it a little more. Not 100% sure what the things are hanging from the front of her belt. I almost painted them to be lizard heads! Also, not sure about her dagger looking rusty realistically but it's not bad. Plus, she is appearing in this weekend's game! I can't wait! Anyway, here she is. I present Miss Ogre 2017!

As those of you who read the acquisitions thread surely recall, I picked up some craft paints a short while back. Plaid has several product lines but I didn't bother with applebarrel. I've heard nothing good about it and it is their cheap paint. The next step up is folk art, which is available off the shelf locally, so I decided to experiment with them.. The idea was to try them out on terrain and see how well they performed. If they work well enough, it's a pretty substantial cost savings over hobby paint (8oz folk art = 0.5oz hobby in $$) . Now I don't actually have a lot of unpainted terrain just lying around, but I do have a boxed set still bare bones from the last KS. One look at the adventurers revealed they were everything I dislike about Bones so they stayed encased in plastic. The dragon did too, but he may at least get painted someday. That leaves us with this: Yup, a pile of terrain. I took the worst of the mold lines off and tried to flatten them, but a couple of them are going to need a second go in the hot water. I picked the smallest two and coated them with some gray liner. I've tried the gray liner on humanoid figures, but didn't like the way skin tones went over it. I think the brown liner looks better, but grey liner for grey stones should be fine. The first coat was slightly diluted (4:1) but didn't pass the fingernail test so it got a straight coat of liner for a second pass. That made it fairly dark but not black. I slightly diluted the "licorice" and gave it a once over. Next I gave it a pretty heavy drybrush of "medium gray." It was at this point I learned why the bottle says to allow for an hour drying time between coats. This stuff has a lot of retarder in it. Even with low humidity and a dry well pallet the large drop in the well just dried slightly around the edges during the whole time I was painting. For the way I'm doing this it wasn't much of an issue, but if you were only painting one small mini you'd have a decision to make. Wait, speed up the drying, or wet-blend. After this both pieces got a coat of "steel gray" over most of their area. I was thinking of it as something of a mid tone for the light areas and a highlight for the shadows. These paints are slightly translucent when thin so the areas in light were given a second pass of the steel gray to see if that would lighten them further. Now we run into the first hiccup of the experiment, "wicker white." While it obviously has some retarder in it, the paint was overall not very well behaved. With just a little bit on the brush it dried so quickly that it looked like a snowstorm, but any more and it started to smear. It took my awhile to figure out how best to handle it, but by then my steps were a little too white. You can see the difference beside the larger piece that has no white. I decided to knock it back down and tried to make a wash using licorice. In the end the wash was still a little too heavily pigmented and covered better than I wanted. You can see how the steps are all the way back to medium grey in darkness but with a slightly different hue. Next I reapplied some steel grey, though not quite enough I think, before reapplying the wicker white in a more controlled manner. I found mixing the white 1:1 with water thinned it to a consistency similar to hobby paint and I could apply it with a synthetic #1 brush. With less of the gray I think it will look darker than the other pieces but I won't know for sure until it's all side-by-side. Finally I've moved on to the larger piece and made it about halfway tonight. The half with the white highlights looks way lighter than the half without but in fact there's not a lot of white used. Something about white edging and spot highlighting really makes a difference. Details show up from 6ft away, which is good for terrain. And that concludes today's experiments with craft paint. Given that I will just be repeating what I've learned on the other pieces I don't believe there is a need for me to take quite so many pictures. Maybe I'll take some more when I get to painting the ground and such. The main takeaway here is that craft paints seem to work just fine for terrain and I can save a bit of money if I ever have a lot to paint.

My third and final bust (for now) from Heroes & Villains Miniatures. This one is "Jacobite Highlander: Culloden Moor, 1746." The big challenge here is, of course, going to be the tartans. From my research, it looks like pretty much every piece of the outfit could be a different plaid, but I'm not sure yet if I'm going to leave the shirt and/or jacket a solid color for my own sanity. This is definitely going to be the most extensive freehand I've ever attempted. He also has a few accessories that I haven't attached yet, and even came with another, much angrier and beardier head. I probably would have gone with that one except that I just did a bearded bust and I want to try clean-shaven. (That last photo was taken with my new phone camera macro lens!) I've collected a few inspiration pics that show how just how much plaid can go into these outfits.

This is the first Bones II mini I started, although I finished a few others first. She is for a player in one of the games I'm in. The figure doesn't have a name yet, so far as I know is simply called "Highland Heroine", so I am calling her Scáthach after the mythic Scots martial artist who taught Cú Chulainn and gave him her spear. I painted her hair ridiculously red. I also learned a thing or two about plaid while painting her. WIP thread here.

I'm participating in the Resolutionary Painting Challenge this year to keep me motivated. One of May's challenges was to paint a musician. I am a month late to this because the base on this guy took me a lot longer than expected. I decided because he was so small I could do something interesting with the base, and decided to go with a swampy/moors/scottish highlands type of look. Just some cut out cork (I'm sure that part's obvious), some vallejo still water, army painter swamp tufts, woodland scenics underbrush, and a little miliput to turn his base into a rock he's perched on. I never seem to mix the miliput quite right so was waiting literally weeks for that to fully dry and harden. I have a friend that I traded some miniatures with and therefore ended up with two of this fellow. They are both pretty similar, but there are some color differences between them. I also decided to be ambitious and try my hand at plaid. I thought for sure I'd have to give up and make them solid colors, so overall I'm pleased I was able to get something that looks remotely plaid-like on them, though I'm sure there's a lot of room for improvement. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy!

My second paint attempt, modeled after one of the characters in the D&D game I'm running, a new and young roleplayer playing a blonde female human fighter with plate armor, longsword, and a "gigantic shield", and "pink gloves", that he voices using that sort of exaggerated Monty Python/Margaret Thatcher voice. And she collects wolves. Her name was originally Jonah, as in Jonah Arc, but when he was informed Jonah is actually not generally considered to be a female name and that Jonah Arc doesn't exist, he changed it to Jenna and I wept for our youth. Yeah. (Podcast of this is going up later today, btw.) Note that I went for a design "reminiscent" of plaid... if plaid were gigantic and clearly painted on by a clumsy ogre. The shield design is loosely based on Scottish clan crests, and a Reaper paint bottlecap helped me make the circle. My basing stuff is still a continent away... but that's the beauty of using Bones, right? By the way, how hard are faces? Yikes. She looks a lot better from three feet away than on camera, to be fair.