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Good evening all you Reaperphonics! So this miniature I just finished and photographed this afternoon, he's a Ral Partha Fire Giant, sculpted by Tom Meier back in 1977. I've always liked this Fire Giant, because even though he's not as popular or as well known as the Frost Giant from around that same time, he's still incredibly fun. I think my favorite aspect of this miniature is the fact he is a giant from back in the day, but he is barely larger than a modern Reaper man-sized miniature nowadays. When I remember to I'll have to do a size comparison photo for you all, always fun. So anyways, here he is: I wanted him to have coal black skin and flame-colored hair, so I think that kind of turned out okay. The one thing I was kind of doubtful about was his eyes. My doubt was whether or not to give him maybe red pupils, but ultimately decided against it and just gave him flaming eyes as well. I really love this figure. He's actually currently available at Ral Partha Legacy, but the one I painted was actually an old lead one I've had sitting around for a long time and had just never gotten around to painting. I should probably also put in a little plug here, the Ral Partha Legacy Chaos Wars Kickstarter is just about over, ends July 14th, so if you've got a love for classic miniatures and the sculpting of Tom Meier, it is definitely worth checking out!

Hello everybody, related to the Kickstarter, but also just some really nice videos that Ral Partha Legacy did. These are a number of interviews with Tom Meier, the sculptor behind the new miniatures and basically behind Ral Partha itself since the seventies, as well as the "discoverer" (can't really say inventory) of how green stuff can be used to sculpt miniatures: https://www.youtube.com/c/RalParthaLegacyLTD/videos Have a look, some videos are longer than others, but all worth seeing if you're interested in miniatures, sculpting, the history of miniatures, et cetera!

A really nice mini! Highlighting the skin was fun! 😁 Thanks for looking!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ralparthalegacy/ral-parthas-chaos-wars-wave-4-thunderbolt-mountain Sorry guys, not too technically advanced, but here is a link to the Ral Partha Legacy's fourth Kickstarter, this time adding elves, dwarves, humans, orcs/goblins and some creatures to the mix. Check it out, you can buy in a wide variety of ways, be if from the individual figure to large armies in bundles and packages. The majority of this was sculpted by Tom Meier, and all the new pieces were sculpted by him as well. Lots of visual images and aid to help you decide what you'd might like to snag. I'm biased as a long time fan of both Partha and Meier, I'm definitely going to grab a good number of individual pieces on this one! EDIT: Added some photos of the new sculpts from Mr. Meier:

Hello my little Rearperlificos! so tonight just got finished up and photographed, a male and female fighter in plate armor, sculpted by the enigmatic Jim Johnson (one of those sculptors I know nothing about but has had a hugely prolific career) that he sculpted I think back in the nineties when he did a range of figures for Partha, which were a male and a female version of the same character class. I've already painted up a bunch of these different figures, and these are my most recent ones. I wanted to do red as their breastplates, helmets and grieves with more bronze tones than gold, after seeing Anne Forester working on bronzes in Twitch with the Kickstarter V Centaur. I'n not ver happy how the vertical bronze strip came out on the male fighter, but buh, too lazy to really keep fixing to perfection. Also, this is the second time I took pictures of these figures because there was lots of crud, dust and hair on the figures the first time. I went back and rephotographed them a second time and I still see a few little dust spots even though I knocked a bunch of them off. Anyhoos, here they are for your viewing pleasure: the female: The male: and being they were originally sold in a blister pack together, here they are in the same photo: I would usually put them on bases but the gal has a wide base that is a little too big to fit on the one inch base, and I didn't have a slightly larger base sitting around so I just sealed them really good and am going to leave them like that. In any case they just sit in a display case, a display case in my unfinished basement that nobody except myself ever sees, oh the humanity......

So I found these guys at the last NEMPA paint day a I attended a few years back, and decided to paint them up... I have many other orcs from this line, but not these guys... I even have the Polly S Armor Dark Green paint I used on the others back in High School! (I,m class of 1981) and a close up So all you Partha lovers chime in with comments and critiques! The Drow

Hello and good evening all you Reaper Maniacs! So here's a few miniatures I've been meaning to paint but just haven't gotten around to them, you know, too many minis, not enough time. But I did finally get around to these, which are pretty fun, Squidmen with Goo Guns, sculpted by Tom Meier when he had the company Thunderbolt Mountains. These are miniatures that his son had designed. and here they are as the actual group/blister pack they come in: Anyhoos, quite enjoyable and reasonably simple to paint, hope you guys and gals all enjoy!

One of the old school figures I still really love. I started buying them back in the mid 70s, at Len's Hobby Center in Astoria. This was a more recent acquisition, from some nice lady down in Texas. The snowy base was a last minute epiphany C&C are very welcome. I'm not too happy with the awkwardness of the cloth - it needed a lot more blending. I consider it a snapshot of "that time I was focusing on getting more daring with contrast, but without the blending skills to pull it off"! -t

and it's day one after the grand Kickstarter Bones 6 and time to pull my eyeballs away from the ever changing Kickstarter screen and back to my version of reality. So here's one more figure I've got, painted a couple years back, but once again, as it hadn't been released, never showed him off. Well, he's out and about in the public, so here he is a very small Dwarves Necromancer, sculpted by Dave Summers three or four years back: I really like how his face is half a skull and half a living dwarf. It I would have been thinking years back, I would have maybe painted a side of his beard a lot lighter, but oh well, not going to worry about it now. Anyhoos, enjoy!

Hello everybody on the penultimate day of the Reaper Bones 6 Kickstarter! So here's another figure I've been sitting on for a while, painted it I think already a couple years back but never posted or showed it off because he wasn't yet available. Well he was recently released over at Ral Partha Legacy, so it's time to show him off! Back in the eighties, if I recall correctly, Tom Meier sculpted a whole bunch of troglodytes, I think with the Ral Partha/Citadel collaboration back then, and when Ral Partha Legacy had one of their Kickstarters, they re-released those older figures. A little bit later Tom Meier sculpted this little fellow up, a sorcerer/priest/leader for whatever group of trogs you might end up gathering. He has a pretty long base so he got stuck on one of their mount bases. and kind of funny, now that I start thinking about it, I've been using the only other Partha Troglodyte that I've painted as my avatar: I might want to change that, I don't feel like an ugly lizard.......

I’m away from home (again) with my travel paint kit. I was experimenting a couple of months back with a Zorn palette of 4 paints. A rogue seemed like the sort of person who might want to be somewhat subdued in color, so I decided that this Ral Partha rogue from The Adventurers range (set 98-013 Female Adventurers) would be a good figure to paint with the Zorn colors to stay in practice. It wouldn’t hurt to actually read/watch some theory on NMM, but there’s not too much metal on her besides the dagger, so it should pass on the tabletop. She is part of an effort to ensure a reasonable selection of PCs for my planned OD&D ampaign revival.

finally finished up the batch of Ral Gnolls, what I thought would or might be a fun batch job to paint was any but, all the armour was different etc felt like I was painting up PC they werte basically the same size anyways, lol.

Hello all you Reaperlased! So I painted these a few years back, but as they hadn't been released yet, I never posted them. These are four new figures from Ral Partha Legacy, Drunken Dwarves, that were just recently released. Fun figures sculpted by Dave Summers, pretty much in that same scale as the old Tom Meier Partha dwarves from the eighties were sculpted in. I'm always excited when Ral Partha Legacy releases new figures, whether they be re-releases of old Partha miniatures of days yore, or new releases of figures that were recently sculpted. Here they are all together: Great group of guys, always ready for an excuse to grab a mug of beer, perfect for tavern encounters!

Hello there all your Bones 6 supporting Reaperodytes! So I've been pretty busy since my last finished mini, and I went to Mexico for 11 days to visit my wife's family and to do a bit of vacationing, so I've been been finishing minis as quickly as I've wanted to, but things are slowly going back to normal so I've got a couple minis that I just finished. Being these were a set of four too means I wanted to work on them all together. So here are Ral Partha's Shadowrun Blood Mages, I think sculpted in the second half of the nineties(?) by Dave Summers. They are kind of loosely based on Mexican/Aztec colors, even though the axe wielder I thought originally looked more oriental. As I was actually able to see his little mustache though, it reminded me kind of Cantinflas, but that was after I'd already gave him a more Asian instead of Native American hue and I just kept going on from there. So I took these all this afternoon with my iPhone, because after seeing the photos I took from my normal camera they were kind of dark photos (in all fairness though it was a cloudy day with very blah light) and the iPhone versions were quite a lot more vibrant. I may though wait for another sunny day and retake photos with my other camera. These were actually some very fun figures to paint. With all the feathers I was able to use a lot more colors than I probably would have put on a single figure and I still don't feel the colors are too much. You might have a different opinion, and if so, please let me know. I'd love to hear what you think! Anyhoos, hope you enjoy!

I had a day off yesterday and wanted to get some work done toward staging an Original D&D game sometime “soon”. I’m working on a handful of potential PCs, but wanted to get a couple of smaller monsters done. These have all been sitting around in primer for a long time and I’m tired of looking at them. So…drybrush the heck out of them and call it a day. The figures are all Ral Partha, two trolls (01-063), three skeletons (01-046), two wraiths (01-030), and a small carnosaur (13-004, an erythrosuchus to be exact).

Continuing with my group of under-represented character classes, I painted up this bard from the Ral Partha set “Female Adventurers”. I’m not sure who the sculptor was; the range was a mix of Mize, Guthrie, and Meier. I’m trying to use some colors I don’t use as often on these; hence the lavender shirt. This is a fairly petite little figure. I know @72moonglum would have highlighted the nail polish 😂, but I can’t see that on the table. How petite, you ask? Scale creep, anyone?

Yesterday was a hectic day at work, so when it came to be lunch time I wanted to close my computer and take a complete break from things. It was raining, so walking seemed like it would be unpleasant. I decided to pull out the paint set I keep at the office and have a go at this old Ral Partha cleric. I didn’t set an actual timer for a speedpaint challenge, but this was right up on an hour. I don’t usually use yellow, so I was experimenting. As finished (before varnish), the shading on the yellows are not quite as smooth as I would like them to be. Two coats of varnish (one by brush to protect the figure to get it home, and one spray after the basing is completed) will, as I know from experience, smooth things out a bit more. I’ll post pictures of the based figure after the spray varnish sometime later today. A few weeks ago I inventoried my true 25mm individually based fantasy figures suitable for a vintage D&D game, and concluded that I was very short on armored mace-wielding clerics in the classic D&D mode, and that I had no recently painted bards at all. I pulled out a male and female in each category and cleaned them up on Tuesday (plus a stray female thief) and brush-primed them on Wednesday. Five figures seems like a manageable goal to reach before some other Muse comes along to drop off a random bit of inspiration. 😆 I would like all five of these figures to be a departure from my usual color palette, but we’ll see… This figure is part of a group of 8 Wizards and Clerics sold by Ral Partha as a boxed set in a range they called The Adventurers, which eventually reached a total of 15 sets. Sculpting was a mix of Dennis Mize, Julie Guthrie and Tom Meier. While not specifically identified on the Lost Minis Wiki, this figure has a marking on the base (somewhat visible in the top picture by the head of the mace) of “ES73”, which suggests that it was originally intended as a 4th figure in the Personalities and Things that go Bump in the Night “Clerics” set (ES-73 or 01-073), and therefore is presumably a Tom Meier.

I finished up the two figures on the left this weekend, and the other one last month (although I didn’t post a picture at the time). They are the three members of a package originally sold by Ral Partha as 02-946, Champions, from the “All Things Dark and Dangerous” range sculpted by Julie Guthrie. I don’t especially need more fighters to support my hypothetical D&D game, but I had them on hand and primed them near the start of the pandemic. I won them in an Ironwind sponsored round of the speed painting competitions at Gencon a couple of years back.

I looked the thread from 2020 where I did the first of this group of four vintage Tom Meier sculpts. I had forgotten over the intervening two years that I painted him as a nerve-settler on the day before we were all sent home from work for the duration. My office is still basically on limited office manning, with one day a week for most of us, and yesterday was day 700 of the current emergency. 🙄 However, things were quiet and a bit chilly outside for walking, so I settled in for a speed paint of the fourth thief from the set, the other two having been finished up on Sunday. As can be seen by Sir Forescale (whose base I should have shimmed somewhat), these old Ral Partha figures are very petite by modern standards. I started with this figure primed in white and washed with black previously, but with no other paint on it. This was the result of about 45 minutes of work (not including the basing), and consists of the tanned flesh triad, the olive drab triad (which I will miss now that it is gone), and a couple of brown and gray sample paints I’ve acquired along the way. As a thief, he is deliberately subdued and non-descript in his attire. I dug into my sotrage boxes and fished out the first thief from March 2020, so here are all four together: Just for fun, I also dug out one more figure. The reason I bought this packet from Ironwind Metals in the first place was that I wanted to have another go at painting the fellow with the tall pointy hat. I had originally obtained him as a member of a bonus blister pack, the Chaos Wars pressgang, which came with my copy of the rules in 1986 or so. I wanted to take some inspiration from my original ~1990 paint job, but go a little easier on the monochrome blue: By then I was at least using Partha acrylics and had learned drybrushing, so I’ve seen a lot worse vintage paint jobs. These days, at least practice has made me faster. 😁

This is what I finished up this morning during the Dean family paint and chat session. My brother, my two sons, and I are all gamers, so we try to have a weekly chat to discuss what we’ve been playing and/or reading, often to the accompaniment of brushes rattling in cleaning water. These guys were primed back in March 2020, after I got home from Cincycon where I had spent the weekend worrying about the looming pandemic and playing Chaos Wars. I painted one of the four thieves in this set promptly, and then set everything aside. This week I have been thinking about whether I had the figures (in old style small 25mm) to support a game of D&D (original brown booklets style, most likely) and that prompted me to pull out some of the already-primed things at hand. Sculpting by Tom Meier…

Good evening Reaperaurians! So just finished this one up and got him photographed, a mini I've been wanting to paint forever but just recently found the time and space, it's a very nice classic Ral Partha Dragon, sculpted back in the eighties by the immortal Julie Guthrie, sculptress extraordinaire! Biggest and only real problem was to decide on the color, but once I did, it didn't really feel like it took too long. The other thing was I didn't know how low I wanted to paint those bumps and spiked black, so I kind of just painted them at the head and then at the tail but I had liked the shading I'd done on the rest of the bumps enough that I just decided to leave him red. and then some closeups: So hope you enjoy him, I think this brings up my lifetime total of painted dragons to maybe six or seven. Haven't done too many!

Hello all you Reaperloogans! So this one I finished a few nights ago is Valania the Sorceress. I'm not sure who sculpted her, but I really did enjoy painting her. She's one of the newer Partha figures, I think after they became Iron Wind, and she's got a tab base, not an integrated base. She's also a bit larger, not the 25 mm of old. She's actually around the size of a Reaper figure. So for her skin I tried something a little different, I started out with Blushing Rose, because I wanted to have her be a little ruddy and pinkish. Hopefully she turned out okay!

Good evening Reaperhoochagans! So I've already done a set of these, but was asked to do another one with another different color scheme, so here is round two of the Tom Meier Thunderbolt Mountain fairies: and here they are together: This time I was asked to do some different and darker skin tones, so did some tones using Dusky Skin, Terran Khaki, Redstone, Dark Skin Highlights So anyhoos, hope you all enjoy! EDIT: adding a link to the original set of fairies: https://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/94511-thunderbolt-mountainral-partha-legacy-ballerina-fairies-by-tom-meier/#comment-1995386

Good evening Reapertons! So I've been busy working on a little project, plus I'm painting some Christmas elves for my mom, but amidst everything else I got inspired to repaint a figure that for some reason I've always liked quite a lot. She's a very simple figure, and I painted her first probably way back in 1980 something, probably between 1982-1986. She was sculpted by Dennis Mize in a set of four other thieves in the Children of the Night range. I've actually painted three of the four, still haven't gotten around to painting the last one with a grappling hook. Anyway, showing off new to old: and here is the original miniature, way back from the funky monkey eighties: and here she is when I painted her maybe in the early 2000's, I'm guessing between 2004-2006: and here they are all together: So the oddest thing about these is that I've really never succeeded in varying from the basic color scheme. There's always a bit of a change, but I always envisioned her as a dusky skinned, desert-themed thief. One of these days I have a feeling that I'll paint her again, and I'll try to do a hugely opposite color scheme, blonde hair and bright clothing. Who knows when though, it seems it takes me over a decade to get to a new version of a figure!

Hello to all you Reaperthalians! Here's another figure I just got done with, Shara Darksteel, a Ral Partha/Iron Wind Metals figure. I really like her skull mask, and tried to give her some darker slightly Gothy colors, without making her just black, and her robe ended up looking more or less like a monk's robe. my settings that I use seem to tamp down the color of these figures, her hair is much more vibrant and the features on her bolts are a lot more red. I used bright skin as her base color, which was a color I hadn't used in quite a while so that was nice to do something different. I wish I knew who the sculptor was for this miniature, but not quite sure. Might have to hunt her down in the Lost Mini Wiki. So anyhoos, more to come as long as breath flows from my body and my hands don't shake! Hope everybody had a nice Turkey Day!