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Here is my tortle monk printed on an inexpensive resin printer.

Putting my new Photon through its paces printing some Heroforge sculpts. The halfling operative is actually a mash-up of two Heroforge sculpts in Tinkercad. (Why can't Heroforge let you have just a single cyberarm?) Didn't think to photograph her till I had the primer on: The first print of the gnome solarion didn't have enough supports on the arm with the fireball, so after cleaning the resulting lump out of the vat and trying again with more supports, here she is, supports and all:

She's a touch rough around the edges because I forgot to take final pictures before I sent her off to her forever home. But luckily, I took these before I finished to see what I wanted to fix and they're pretty close to the final. This was a tiefling custom printed from Heroforge. My first real 3d printed piece, it was printed by a 3rd party who did a pretty nice job of it. But I found it interesting as it was this odd mix of some really fine details and some clunky ones. For example, the face, horns and hair were nicely detailed. But the cloak waves were quite angular and the wrist wrap on her left arm felt really bulky. Color choices were provided by the person who wanted it painted, but I enjoyed what they wanted for the most part. And they asked for some extra details like a neck collar and a tattoo along her chest which can be seen peeking out from under the leather strap. A little freehand work that was simple but quite tiny but I was impressed that I was able to do it.

I have finally been feeling inspired this weekend, although, as usual, my Muse has her own way of doing things. Back in September I posted a thread with some pictures of the first two HeroForge miniatures I had ordered and painted. A couple of days ago, I got a Cigar Box Battles mat for urban terrain, which will be where whatever this project turns out to be takes place. So, today I sat down and worked on some of the figures that have been on my desk for it: The new figures finished today are in the front row. From left to right, Violet is a HeroForge figure; Karl is a Reaper 50211, and Cynthia and Kyle are from the Reaper 50042 Modern Children set. The skateboarder is on the table... I'm still not sure whether this is going to be a skirmish game of some sort, or a roleplaying game, but there are at least some characters to get started.

I was asked to paint my friend's steel Hero Forge mini. The character is a Half-Fairy Werewolf Drunken Master, so no judgment on the design of the mini. I have painted 5 or 6 of the, "cheap" and expensive plastic minis from Hero Forge but this is the first metal one. I have to say they are tough but as rough as 60 grit sandpaper, and you lose almost all fine detail. In the picture the metal one is on the right, the priest in the center is the cheap plastic, and the bard on the left is the HQ plastic. Still yet to see a brass one.

I live! I spent January making lots of little art that piqued my interest to get back into making art frequently again! I painted a friend's Heroforge mini. It's quite grainy compared to metal minis but goodness, has it gotten so much better. I also have a rough camera adding additional graininess. It's hard to see here, but the vast majority of his robes are in Leather White. Pure White was only used for the extreme highlights, like on the potion bottle. The red also has green in the shadows. I'm learning! I painted our entire set of the Secret Weapon Tablescapes Dungeons and Mines tiles! This was an in progress photo. I realized the moment after I packed everything perfectly back into the boxes that I didn't get a completed photo. Some finished pieces before repacking them up. Bless this sculptor, y'all. I drybrushed my way through all this while rewatching the Office and everything looks heckin' great because of these amazing textures! I painted the new Bones Black Owlbear. I had to give it antlers, of course! This was a fun accidental exercise in almost monochrome. It's all purple but I intentionally chose some blue purples and red purples. The darkest color used was Nightshade Purple and the brightest was Snowdrift White. There's more variation in the white but I struggle with this camera phone. I'm really liking how solid it feels but I haven't tried testing it the way they tested the original Bones at conventions. :) It also made for a really pretty palette! Lastly (though it was the first in the timeline), I sewed some velvet bags for our new favorite game, The Quacks of Quedlinburg. I think it helped me get back into my art groove because I got excited about a thing, wanted to make something related to it, and already had the skills for it. I wanted it and I got it! They're not stellar photos, but a cheap lightbox certainly brought this camera up to mediocre.

These two minis are the same character, one in an action pose as an eldritch knight, and the other as arch mage of the mages college. These are for an upcoming pathfinder campaign. These are custom heroforge minis I printed and sculpted flames on the sword for added effect.

My BF had a PC made with Heroforge I've been putting off, cause he wanted Tartan painted. I've seen all the recent Tartan posts here and followed along with the tutorials and I'm so pleased with how it came out! He also requested a red leather jacket and green mohawk. Overall I am so happy with this mini. Used almost all reaper paints, and a couple of citadel washes. Thanks so so so much for all the tartan inspiration!

I printed this design from heroforge needing a custom, notable NPC, swashbuckling aarokocra captain of the high seas for a campaign. Not a perfect print or paint, but good enough for the table.

I whipped this guy up on Heroforge, modded, printed, and painted him today. I had been looking for a good dragonborn/dragonman/reptus/etc but have been left wanting. This guy is a silver dragonborn cleric, death domain, follower of Tiamat (I know, non-chromatic) for a 5E campaign. I'm happy with how he turned out considering I was shooting for table quality.

I have a few minis displayed at my local game shop and was contacted a couple weeks ago about doing a custom job for a D&D player's Heroforge mini. This is the first time I've dealt with their Premium plastic, and it is much better than the detail plastic they used before - though there were a lot more little plastic spurs that I didn't entirely erase all trace of. I'm pretty happy with it, and the client is happy, so mission accomplished!

One of my friends came over today to paint, and I painted this custom HeroForge mini he ordered. She's apparently a Yuan-Ti pureblood PC in one of his games. There was some concept art with green eyes and purple clothing, so I used that to start with. All told, she took around 4 hours. I'm quite happy with how she turned out... sitting and chatting and not agonizing over every decision made her fun and fast to paint. Now, about the mini itself. Here is a fully zoom-in version of the image above. You can easily see the 3d printed layers, particularly on the base (which appeared not to have been perfectly horizontal in the printer), and on the raised arm. The picture doesn't necessarily draw attention to the same areas as the eye, but it's pretty obvious the layers are there if you spend any time looking at the mini. That said, for a tabletop piece it should be fine and the material itself took primer (and thus paint) just fine. The material had some flex to it, and there were only a few supports. Several small details were noticable, for example the details on the bag and the eyebrow piercings (which I didn't paint), but she was supposed to have more defined abs, which didn't show up. I don't think light sanding would have helped much - you would have to take off enough that you'd be seriously damaging the mini at that point. At $30 a pop, they're very expensive, but I could see it be worthwhile for a beloved character.

I posted another one of Heroforge's custom ordered 3D printed minis the other day, and I just finished another one. This one didn't have the texture issues that the other three I've painted did - the only place I really notice rough texture is on the back side of the shield, which is fine. This particular character is the Paladin in the party I DM for (5th Edition, homebrew campaign). The symbol on his shield represents his deity (goddess of light, sunburst symbol) and the dwarven homeland he's far from (mountains). He recently joined an in-game faction called the Queensguard, so their symbol & colors are painted on his right pauldron.

I painted this commission tonight. The model is from Heroforge and the customer had it custom printed to match her D&D character. The texture of Heroforge models is always a bit bumpy due to the printing process, and I smoothed out what I could with a scraper, brush, and water rinse. it's kind of rough to catch all of it when the material is fragile hard plastic that isn't the easiest to whittle down in some areas, so there are some spots on her face that I'm not entirely happy with. Still, not bad for being able to custom build your character.

I backed the Heroforge Kickstarter a while back, and just got my reward. I backed for $30 to support the idea. I was dubious about the ability for the company to pull off a quality figure but figured $30 was a good way to support the technology and test the final results. Here's the original design I ordered: Though not visible in the picture, I intentionally introduced a clipping issue, which was either caught by the software or by Heroforge's QA team, as when I received the model the clipping issue was resolved. The eye cover clipped through the right side of the hood (left side of picture, hidden by flame), but I'm happy to report the defect was absent in the test piece. Upon receipt, while getting ready to prep the mini, I accidentally dropped it about 3-4 feet onto a carpeted surface. As advertised, the material the "high detail" plastic is made from is a bit brittle, and the piece fractured at the arm: I attempted to drill into the material at the arm to set a pin to fix the hand, but the material is too brittle for that. I ended up just using superglue, and fortunately the join seems to be relatively strong. The second thing I noticed was the surface. Despite the "high detail" material, there were significant surface artifacts on almost all the surfaces. I primed and drybrushed the mini to see how bad the situation was: Pretty bad. I had some work to do... Note the base edges are not very sharp, I'm assuming the corners broke when I dropped it, I didn't have enough time to notice whether this was the case before the drop, so that's what I'm assuming. More to come...

WIP here: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/58969-my-custom-mini-from-heroforge/ Basically, this mini I designed to pay a little tribute to Theresa from the videogame series Fable, but a little more action oriented. There were plenty of issues with the Heroforge mini, but all the details are in the WIP. Overall, happy with the service, and I'll check back in a few months to see if they've been able to improve on their material. Still some texture issues with the cloak, but it was a good test piece to show how much work one needs to do to get a HF mini into decent shape.