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This is Anduriel Drow Warrior as he walks through the Underdark. He is not a new paint but I did do some touch up on him. As always CC are welcome

Had to convert to Damian's staff as I broke hers this gave her a nasty case if man hand. Please critique all input welcome and thank you.

It felt like painting something out of my childhood with this (I'll confess to being really into the whole Drow thing for a while for the very, very obvious reason): This was my second Bones piece (I painted one of the IMEF guys for my brother, as he thinks it's cool I'm painting and is supporting my whimsy and wanted some space marines as he's a huge Mass Effect fan; still have another to do). It really seems to paint differently than the metal, but maybe I'm just imagining it. I'm following the general guidelines I see for them, but anyway. Could NOT find one of these painted to give me ideas, and I kind of had a hard time telling where her top ended, neckline-wise. So did some ballparking there. Turned out purpler than I'd've liked, maybe--I want to work on mixing a grayer shade for the base coast before I do any more dark elves (I have the male arachnid, the queen, some others. Yay)--but I was kind of happy wth my highlights. Still working to brighter brighter brighter them. But I had a lot of fun. And it totally creeps my wife out. So there's that. As always, advice for improving, her or especially in general, is totally appreciated.

After a long break from painting minis, I got back to the workbench early this month. I've completed 3, just to shake the rust off my already weak skills. Encouraged by making some progress and starting to enjoy painting again, I started work on Carinth, a Reaper Dark Elf sitting incomplete for a couple of years. She was originally intended for a contest entry, but now I'd just like to figure out the lighting challenges, experiment with this two-model method, learn some new things and generally improve. The 'two model method' is an idea that has been around for a while, but given the cost of most minis these days, is understandably not a popular technique. With a comparatively cheap, older model, I can give it a shot. The idea is to use one for practice, to work out the problems and make mistakes. The other is for a better attempt, working at perfekt. :-) The design/story: Drow priestess in a deep cavern, protected by magic glowing staff, dips her magic sword in lava to imbue it with greater power. Challenges: I've not done a lava base before now, and it seems there are now 4 light sources at work on this mini. Ambient/overhead is somewhat weak, but present; lava flowing in several spots in the base will give some under-lighting; the top of her staff will be glowing blue/white; the sword has a blob of lava dripping from it. First up is the "better" version we'll call Carinth-A. Next is Carinth-B, the draft version where I got rather ahead of myself in playing around with lighting effects: Comments, critiquesm questions and suggestions are all welcome, here. I want to improve, so chime in, please!

I did some quick paint jobs on the Bones set of pirates. Here's the first, which I painted as a drow for game purposes.

Back in 2011, I was running a D&D 3.5 campaign through D1-D3. For that campaign I needed Drow to be my bad guys. So I bought a box of Wood Elf Warriors from Games Workshop Lord of the Rings line. Now two years later, I finally finished the last five swordsmen that I never finished before the campaign ended. This is an army so the figures are done quickly with but a single layer of paint over the black primer. You can see the whole army along with Shaerlith, Spider Demoness from Reaper on my blog. Shaerlith stood in as Lolth, Demon Queen of Spiders.

Here is my latest. I had this one based and primed sitting on my table since spring of last year and just now got around to painting her. I tried a few color schemes before settling on this one. The photos were taken prior to adding a few brighter highlights to her skin, but other than that, this is pretty much how she looks finished. This was one of the toughest sculpts I have painted for some reason, but I am happy with the end results. This figure proves that I still have some areas of blending technique that I need to master. All in all though, not a bad miniature for one that is going for sale on eBay. Some of you all might think it strange that I really do not collect or display my own miniatures, but either sell them all on eBay, paint them for commission, give them as gifts or painted for the forum exchanges. The only miniatures I have on my display shelf are ones received in exchanges form other Reaper members. Since I do not game anymore and I already have collected way too much stuff over the years, I figure that I have the photos for memories or a portfolio, so I am good. C&C welcome.

http://www.reapermini.com/forum/index.php?/topic/46419-tsr-drow-by-ral-partha/ So from this WIP above, here are the final results of the four drow elves from Ral Partha that I've been painting since November 11. I finished them actually about two nights ago, but just finally got around to working on the last pictures. I'm pretty well satisfied how they turned out, even though I can also see a few issues as well. I think a little too much matte finish got put on the one with the shield because I can see a lot of glare with the photograph, but oh well. I actually enjoyed doing this and liked doing a complete set of figures as opposed to random individual figures. I'm pretty sure that I somehow saved some time by doing four similar figures. If it took about six weeks to do four figures, and normally if I'm working at a regular pace of a figure every two weeks, I saved two weeks of my life that I would have otherwise spent in painting radically different figures. So I just gained two more free weeks of painting time (in theory). I also think that by working on the WIP and documenting progress, I tried to actually make progress and post it, not letting the figures just languish as sometimes hapens. So anyhow, here they finally are. Enjoy!

So I've been collecting for a while the old Ral Partha TSR miniatures that I really like, but haven't gotten around to painting many of them, so one of my new mini-mini-projects is to start painting some up between other things I'm painting. With a tad bit of encouragement by a certain goblinoid, I decided to do these four as a WIP. Why? Who knows, just a way to chronicle them, and who knows how faithfully I'll keep up with it. I was feeling kind of guilty because they're not Reaper figures, but I do use all Reaper paints, so that should lighten my burden of guilt somewhat. So here are the first four pictures that I've done so far. I'll try to post a picture when I get to some pivotal point. First picture is just the figures themselves, primed and on a balsa wood base.

ETA: dwarvenranger informs me this guy would be better served as an ogre/duergar and I completely agree. Just wish I could change the title/tags now So, I bought this guy to participate in the WIP group thread, but slowly realized that not painting him was driving me insane, so I'll be getting another one today to work (and properly record progress on) on tomorrow with my girlfriend. Anyway, here he is! (I finally got the photographing aspect of posting a bit more sorted. It's still a bit blurry, but much better than my earlier pics) The base is made of my classic wooden disks, spray painted matte black. I then attached the ogre, and placed my "stones" behind him in, what I hope, is an interesting way. I laid down a coat of watered down Elmer's glue, and put down cinnamon mixed with Jamaican Jerk Spice Rub (it's what those little gravelly stones are). The plant in front has little red dots on the tips to signify flowers, but the plant itself is made of freeze-dried dill! The skull is a dungeon decoration from my old Hero Quest set. The large stones themselves are made of chunks of dry-wall with the paper removed. I then sealed them with dullcote, painted them black, dry-brushed light grey on them, and they spritzed a mist of silver spray paint on them. In the light, they look just like granite! I love using household materials for basing!