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I opened my gesso to use to prime a figure and it had separated; kind of like you'd see if you opened a jar of paint without shaking it first. It also had a ring of greenish crud around the top and smelled absolutely rancid. What gives?

As requested, new thread, and a WIP! For anyone interested in seeing my first 10 months of painting, my noob thread is here: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/51059-helping-noobs-good-karma-painting-kickstarter-bones/?p=756353 This thread is going to be about my wacky next project, which is to paint 15 NPCs for my gaming group's Kingmaker campaign. Plus 5 PCs, but maybe those won't be in this thread. We'll see. My experiment this time around is to try to take my painting to the next level by painting the same thing on all 15 minis before moving onto the next thing. For example, all the faces, then all the skin, then all cloth, then all the leather, etc. To the extend practical. So kind of batch painting, but on really different minis and not using the same colors, although I'm going to use some core colors across the minis. I think. I'm hoping this will help me improve my technique on each type of material. Beyond that strategy, some things I'll be doing differently than before: - priming with gesso. heard from a couple people at ReaperCon that this may be more durable on metal minis than the brush on Reaper primer I've been using. And all these minis are intended for gaming, so durable is really important. - mixing Reaper brush-on sealer into more of my colors, for durability and cuz peeps on this board say it's nice to mix into glazes, which I use a lot. - base-coating all or most of each mini before I start highlighting/shadowing. Usually I "finish" each area of the mini as I go, so this is going to feel weird. But I want to get an overall feel for the color scheme of each mini, and some of the techniques I learned at ReaperCon require knowing this. For example, one tip I got to improve my minis was to blend some of the primary color of the mini into the skin tones of the mini, because that is more realistic than pure skin tone. - Mixing more of my own shadows and highlights, rather than using trios. I've done some of this before, I but it's a specific goal here. This will also let me do more interesting color variations in the shadows and highlights. So here are the 15 minis assembled, prepped, and roughly based. I'll refine the bases later, but I have a weird habit of liking to paint my mini on its base, so the basic idea is there. No you aren't imagining the random gray blobs on two of them. That's poster tack holding bits together while epoxy putty dries. And here are most of them with the gesso: So holy crap - 15!! Prep took forever, even with a friend's help, and just getting them primed was no mean task. In my experience the gesso works better on the thicker side. When diluted, it tended to form bubbles that stuck around when dry, while the thickness seems to not be a problem when the gesso shrinks and dries. I've read a lot of arguments about whether it actually shrinks or not, but whatever you call it, it looks like shrinking and does a nice job of revealing detail. I should have gotten the gesso done yesterday so I could brownslobber today but alas the good weather and my newly planted container garden distracted me. I think it's a good idea to let the gesso cure 24 hrs, so this is all I have for now. Thanks for looking! Heidi

I've been watching videos on painting Bones to keep me occupied while I wait for any news on my shipment from Reaper, and I've seen people recommend using various putties (mainly "Green Stuff") to cover/fill seams on assembled Bones figures. I used to be a (bad) traditional artist, so I've got a big tub of gesso that's not doing anything. I know it will take paint happily, since I used it to prime canvases, but I'm wondering how well it will adhere to the plastic on the Bones figures. Anyone have any experience?