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I'm pretty sure I already know the answer, but it never hurts to get confirmation. . When stripping paint from a mini (in this case a Bones that I completely screwed up the paint job on), is it necessary to get every molecule of paint off? Or is it okay if there's some bits left in some of the crenalations and under bits? Thanks!

So I've finally joined. Ebonwrath was the first dragon I managed to grab from my pile of Bones. Now assembled and brown line primed. Here are the results, based on my modified list. 15: Alien Goo, main 3: HD Fireball Orange, secondary 17: Solid Blue, accent So this is YOUR doing Pezler! Guess I'll try for the 3* challenge. It'll feel like my early days of painting when I owned a very limited palette.

"Old Made New" This is for those of you who need inspiration (as usual) to pull some of those ancient pieces from your collection and give them a new life. Post the following: A Before Shot of the mini. Whatever it had for a paint job before it went for a dip. (Optional) Post a mid-point shot. Right after coming out or perhaps another day in solitary. Or a mid cleaning process shot. Paint specs everywhere. An After Shot of the mini. The clean and ready for paint shot. I'll start this off. This is my original Tom Meier Blue Dragon (DG3). I bought this mini at a hobby shop here in Seneca Falls, NY after riding my bicycle from Waterloo to Seneca Falls (3.8 miles) when I was 12 to buy my first miniature. It was in a blister pack and came with DragonScale Wax that you could rub into it to make it blue. Which I originally did. Sorry no photo of that. Here is a photo of the original packaging I found online: The stamp on the bottom of the mini says Meier on it so I know it's not the re-release under Ral Partha and now Iron Wind Metals. On to the BEFORE shot: Now that's been sitting on a shelf somewhere wherever I've lived since it's last "repaint" somewhere back in the early 90s. The base was a piece of wood my grandfather gave me to use, that I sanded down and glued him to. I think I used plastic cement glue. Oh, and that's Testors paints. Which was pretty much all that was available around here back in the day. I did acquire a few Polly S paints but not that cyan blue or bright yellow. Now here's an IN BETWEEN shot ... freshly pulled from the Simple Green after two days: Pretty gruesome. I don't know how well Testors enamel paints come off in Simple Green but it did have the DragonScale Wax previously and might account for his ... uh ... "condition." Finally, the cleaned up AFTER shot: So there you have it. The journey of a dragon from my youth through to today. Stay tuned for his WIP and Enjoy. GET MOTIVATED!

Giant Mountain Troll The Old Troll and the Boar I cleaned, repaired and repainted a long time baddy from our gaming sessions, Reaper's Giant Mountain Troll. He had fallen to the floor a few times over the years and had a gloss coat instead of a matte coat for a sealer. So he was quite due for the treatment. Given his look and feel, I decided to paint him as an older troll. His skin is duller. His hair receding considerably. He hasn't fought anyone in a long time. Even the boar for his dinner wasn't much of a hunt. So he's kept his clothing in relatively good repair and found and made some better furs to wear. He still prefers his old stone axe. He was happy to find some stone laced with mithral to make a new axe head for it though. You can check out the WIP post to see everything I did to get him here. WIP The ol'boy will return to the carry case to stand before those pesky fellas from yonder cities and protect his mountain or wherever he gets plopped down. Enjoy. Check him out in the Inspiration Gallery. (Approved) Added to Thrym's Index of Reaper Miniatures & Thrym's General Show Off List

My long time generic bad guy, the Giant Mountain Troll by Sandra Garrity, came out of the carry box to get cleaned, repainted, and repaired. His nose suffered a long drop to the floor flattened his bulbous nose considerably. Here's his stock photo from the catalog: Here he is with his paint cleaned off with Simple Green double dip and his nose filed back to sort of bulbous. Since he was well and truly beat down, I decided to make him my next piece with Lunkh being finished and the Hellborn Troll being mostly done. Stay tuned.

Well, I did a very poor job months ago on my Zombicide: Black Plague hero, Ann the nun. With Sorastro's recent tutorial on how to paint her, I thought to strip her and try again. Unfortunately, despite 72 hours or so soaking in Simple Green, hardly any paint has come off her. Ideas? If I could buy the solo figure again, I would, but no idea if that's even possible.

I discovered yesterday that Simple Green works amazingly well to remove the oil/grease/mold release agent/whatever it is that is on resin miniatures/bases/parts. I dipped an old toothbrush in some undiluted SG, and scrubbed for maybe 30 secs, and the piece came out nice and clean, ready for primer/paint. I am doing an experiment to see if diluted (with water) SG will work as well. Results in a few days.

I wrote a brief blog post about using Simple Green to strip miniatures. If you would like to see the results head over to: http://www.dethstruck.com/2015/09/29/stripping-with-simple-green/

So I have some minis that need cleaning. First couple I used the simple green straight from the bottle. The paint came off, but the simple green foamed really bad while scrubbing the minis. Even with a purple nitrile glove on my hand, my hands still smelled several days later. Should I dilute the simple green? 50/50? What do you do?