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Rescued this pair from the Box of Goodwill over the summer, and tried for a quick tabletop job during my Thanksgiving paint binge. Didn't quite get them finished in November, but they are done now. Spent way too much time on them because I didn't start with a color scheme in mind and ended up having to repaint a couple areas.

Greetings! Boys..... Get your guns. I'm a raisin' a posse! Yeeeehaaaw! Thanks for looking!!

We've got a new mini we're Kickstarting, and I figure I'd leave the link here. This mini is not Chrsitmas themed. But, we'll be back with more Chrsitmas later this year :)

Just finished figure number 2 in my Cowboys and Gunslingers set. I'm not very good at painting black but I'm working on it. I highlighted slightly with shadowed stone gray but it's hard to tell from the pics. I need to set up a photo box. Gonna work on that this weekend. thanks for looking. Always look forward to your comments and critiques.

So, I started these a while ago as a kind of a giggle. This is kind of a catch-up thread, as I am pretty far along with them. I had been feeling the need for more Githyanki / Githzerai figures. Anyhow, I had the abortive Ellen Stone, Cowgirl figure (link is to the metal version) from the first Bones Kickstarter, the one that never made it to retail because she hasn't got a nose. Someone (it may have been me, if anyone feels like digging through the old posts) suggested painting the bodged Bones version up as an alien. Then I noticed this guy from, I think, Bones II, 91001: Stone from the "Savage Worlds" line, who looks like a sort of zombie-ish revenant cowboy with a gaunt build and a skull-like, noseless face. And it all clicked together. My normal prep for Bones figures these days is mild flash removal and a wash of dilute Reaper Brown Liner. I don't have any pix of the figures at that early stage, but here they are with a thin layer of pale banana yellow on their skin (the male figure appears to have gloves, but I'm going with bare hands anyway to emphasize his alienness). I mixed it from my favorite Golden matte fluid acrylics in Yellow Oxide and Titanium White. The point of this pale layer is to give an undertone to the skin so that one is not dealing with a single flat color. After the initial layer I rinsed over the skin with a very fine wash of a more orange tone mixed from Hansa Yellow Opaque (a very bright lemon yellow) and Golden heavy body Pyrrole Orange. Then I started building up the shapes and contours of the skin with various subtle golden browns, mostly mixed from Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Yellow Oxide, and Titanium White, and add more bright yellows based on Hansa Yellow Opaque. This is where you can start to see the shapes of their faces and they start looking a little less awful.

The proportions of this figure strike me as a bit gawky and thin ... but then that's entirely in keeping with this guy being called "Slim." The figure practically begs for conversion; the neck and wrists are very clear, making this an ideal candidate for head or hand/weapon swaps, and even the delineation between the rim of the head and the bottom of the hat invites a pretty clean cut with hobby knife (so that some other hat could be substituted). What's more, with a bit of putty (and I'll likely be doing this the next time I pick up one of these figures), a fairly straightforward bandanna face mask could be made to clearly turn this into a bandit/robber/outlaw type. "Reach fer the SKY, pardner! This here's a ROBBERY!" That sort of thing. :) It might even improve the figure, as it might help to obscure the "pencil-neck" look of the figure right now. The integral round base has a very nice wooden plank texture that nicely conveys the notion of this figure standing on the front deck of a saloon, bank, or sheriff's office in an old "wild west" town, and it's small enough to fit into the recessed portion of one of the round 30mm lipped Chronoscope bases (although it's a bit on the thick side). My only real "innovation" for this particular figure was that I printed off a sheet of various posters and "wild-west"-era ads and signage (thank you, Google Images!) and in this case I opted to put an entire poster on the base to underscore that "wild west" connection. I used a hobby knife to tear out points at the corners, to give the idea that this had been tacked up at the corners but then pulled/ripped off, thus losing the corners in the process. In retrospect, I could have probably gotten by with just a mere portion of the poster plastered to the deck (so that more of the nice wooden plank texture could show), but I suppose that's something I can do for other western-themed figures. Detail on the gun belt, pants, and shirt is subtle but still distinct enough to bring out with washes or a little bit of brush highlighting. The guns themselves are more of a challenge, as the barrels seem bound and determined to bend back; I tried heating and straightening, which only seemed to give temporary relief, and once I started actually painting, I gave up on going back and hoping to get a different result. Further, the detail on the guns comes out a bit lumpy, perhaps too fine (and at too much of an extremity) to come out properly in "Bonesium," but at least it gets the rough idea across that he's got guns. If I hadn't already used up all my "hand holding pistol" pieces in my Deadlands accessory packs, I'd do a hand/weapon swap, pronto. (And getting a pricey pewter accessory pack just for a single cheap Bones mini seems like overkill. ;) Although I'd certainly go for it if I were trying to kitbash a PC mini.)

Made this for my friends son. I can see a few spots that need to be touched up before I give it to him. He was a pretty fun mini to do.

I've been doing business with Reaper for a long time, and I very much respect the fact that they're BIG on quality control. There are apparently a great many things that can go wrong with casting, and if a miniature is not up to snuff, it goes back in the melt. And if they make a mistake and it gets into a blister, they're VERY good about working with you to replace the defective miniature, as in NOW. Very good customer service. I think that needs to change. Y'see, a while back, I took the Casting Room tour, at Reapercon. Learned a lot about how the miniatures are made! ReaperBryan cast up a whole batch of "belly dancer with sword" minis, just to show us how it was done! However... that particular batch of minis didn't come out quite right. The lower faces of the belly dancers were featureless. He apologized for the mistake, and spoke about quality control, and how normally, this batch would go right back in the melt, and they'd try again. I proposed that this was not necessarily a bad thing; what we had here was a batch of LIMITED EDITION VEILED BELLY DANCERS, and how, once blistered and ready to ship, they'd be worth far more to collectors than the regular model, due to their very limited quantity! He laughed. He thought I was kidding. Poor guy really takes his quality control seriously. Far be it from me to tell Reaper how to do their business, of course. However, I still have a Limited Edition Veiled Belly Dancer, available for auction, starting at $199 unpainted; only a dozen or so are extant. Anyone interested? PM me. But I digress... Last year, Reaper held its first big Kickstarter, which I understand was very successful, although it was not without its headaches; there are threads around here somewhere full of details about this event. Me? I got a Vampire box, and was quite pleased with my deal. Reaper'd made me a happy customer and fanboy, again. Until I heard about Ellen Stone. Ellen Stone, Cowgirl, #50003, one of Bob Ridolfi's fine works. Now I had this particular miniature already; like it just fine. I got another as part of the Kickstarter. But when I went to Reapercon the following year, Bryan happened to mention that the Ellen Stone Bone had been defective! As a result, this miniature would not be made available in blisters through stores! The ONLY way to get this particular miniature is to have been part of the first Kickstarter! Upon arriving home, I looked at the Ellen Stone Bone. Sure enough, she had no nose. Gave her kind of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle with boobs sort of look. Oh, well. Mistakes happen. Not like it did any real harm, considering the great deal of OTHER minis the box had held. ...but then I thought about it. Limited quantities. Will never be manufactured again! Could it be that these noseless Ellen Stones could be turned to some kind of value? I looked more closely. And then I broke out the brushes. Submitted for your approval: The LIMITED EDITION ELLIE N. STONE, E.T. COWGIRL! Bidding will begin at $1999. Please note the limited quantity, and that this model will NEVER RETURN TO PRODUCTION! It's not a bug, it's a FEATURE! It's not a factory reject, it's a LIMITED EDITION! Let the money-- er, the BIDDING begin...

Hanging out at Reaper for the Kickstarter party got me inspired to get my brushes and paints back out. I used to post fairly regularly several years ago, but life got busy and my hobby took a back seat. Anyway, it was nice to paint again! My friend plays a gunslinger in our Pathfinder game, and this mini from the Bones line works great for his character. I painted him up last night... tabletop is my aim, so I didn't spend a ton of time on the fiddly details. I'm happy with the way his duster turned out.