Search the Community

All Hail Hydra! This one I have put off painting since way back when. In it's unpainted form I thought it had soft details and was a bit crude. As soon as I started painting it now, the drybrushing revealed another side to it, so to speak. It turned out much better than I expected, mainly as the faces are easier to read than when unpainted, and the details are not as shallow as I had thought. Again, I use a big brush when painting big bones, this one was mainly painted with a 15mm wide flat and a 5mm flat. It was painted mainly with drybrushing with no washes used at all. I started over a black undercoat, I painted the entire thing with new Citadel Incubi Darkness, and drybrushed this heavily with new Citadel Kantor Blue. Next was a heavy drybrush with old Gamecraft Olive Green on the top half and Vallejo Game Color Dead Flesh on the bottom half. The stripes are in an old dark red I think is Leviathan Fire Dragon Red. I am not quite sure, as it was poured over into another pot at some point, and I did not write what it was on the new pot. I drybrushed the stripes with new Citadel Wazzdakka Red. The back ridges, horns and claws were done with new Citadel XV-88, Bleached Bone and Reaper Splintered Bone. The mouths were painted Kantor Blue followed by Citadel Screamer Pink and Wazdakka Red, and a mix with yellow at the edges. Eyes in bleached bone, Yriel Yellow and Wazdakka Red. Teeth in Reaper Splintered Bone. I printed out a base for it, and built it a little up on the front end to make the beast stand a little taller. The cracks and edges were hidden with clumps of tufts. Many of the miniatures in the first Bones kickstarter were based on metal minis already in production. Might this be a factor for softer details on those than on the newer ones? This was a paid add on on the KS. 77191 Hydra Reaper Bones, from the first kickstarter 2013 Sculpted by Sandra Garrity Made from Bonesium PVC Bespoke printed 130mmx80mm base Currently available from reapermini.com

I saw this post from Sculptor Sandra Garrity reposted by one of the places I follow on facebook, talking about a company who is allegedly producing miniatures she owns the IP on(from the Ex-Grenadier) without her permission Sandra Garrity I have given a lot of thought to what to say about Mirliton/Stefano Grazzini's continued illegal production and sale of my figures. Despite being notified repe...atedly since 2006, and being sent legal documents showing that I, and now also Gin Fritter at Armorcast, legally own certain Ex-Grenadier figures, Mirliton/ (Stefano Grazzini) brazenly continues to sell our figures without our permission. His saying that he will take this matter up with me privately is a joke! Mr.Grazzini has failed to contact me or respond to my emails.His refusal to stop producing my figures, and respond to my emails, shows he has no intention of doing the honest, reputable thing. He knows it would be prohibitively expensive for Armorcast and me to take legal action. Since he is in Italy, he just does whatever he pleases. Mr Grazzini, if you are the reputable person that, you claim to be, stop selling the Ex-Grenadier figures that Armorcast and I legally own. It is now up to you to do the right thing and respect our intellectual property rights. I know that in the past I've seen the company recommended as a source of some of the old Grenadier range (and may well have recommended it myself) when people who are looking for them ask, but given what's said above I'd hesitate to do so now as I don't approve of unauthorised copying of other peoples work for profit Now I know this is only one side of the story, and that the IP of some stuff from defunct companies becomes complex (eg Ral Partha Europe is still legitimately able to manufacture minis that Ral Partha itself lost the rights to when it folded/got bought), but where there are issues because of this you've got to at least talk about things (after all if you're convinced what you're doing is legit, why not say so and provide the evidence)

Good day everyone, now that the contest is over, here are some pictures of entry in Reaper's Painting Contest #8. Congrats to the winners and all those who participated. I can't wait to see the next model selection. The model is 77364, Angel of Shadows and it's mounted on a 77247, Pillar of Evil both sculpted by Sandra Garrity. The last picture was my entry in the contest, I managed to finish second. I entitled my entry the Angel of Hope. I removed the sword she was holding in here right hand and I carved her finger as if she's pointing the way for the lost souls so they will to turn back to the light.

Good day everyone, here is a Bear Rider Command (Bear only) that was produced by Grenadier in 1995. My friend had this miniature for a long time and the original Standard bearer Dwarf rider was nowhere to be found. This model was sculpted by Sandra Garrity and Reaper have an alternate version of it under the name 02294, Thorondil of Kragmarr.

Here is a 77437, Winter Wolf I painted in black to make it look like it's a Worg for the purpose of my D&D campaign. This model was sculpted by Sandra Garrity and I mounted on a 25 x 50mm base.

Here are two groups of vermin I had the pleasure to throw at the players last weekend. 03394, Rat Swarm sculpted by Sandra Garrity. These are pewter version of the model and I mounted them on 25mm base.

Dug up an old mini by Sandra Garrity, which, according to my database, I bought over 10 years ago. I don’t know which is sadder, that I actually made a database of my unpainted minis or that I still have 188 unpainted ones (and these are just the Reaper ones!). Wanted to give her a roguishly, confident face and I’m pleased with how it turned out. As for her clothes, after reading Rhonda Bender’s articles, I think I need more contrast. Base made from air-dry clay. Thanks for looking.

Unfortunate Cadwalon, plague infected, denizen of the sewers. Like a rat able to disappear under the rubble, without a trace. Unfortunate Cadwalon, poison merchant, burglar and opportunistic trickster. Those who know him are aware of his impulsivity and fear enchanted blade. Those who disregard him will pay bitterly for their negligence. Here's 02044, Cadwalon in all its magnificence , Dark Heaven Legends sculpted by Sandra Garrity.

Reaper Miniatures 77016, Rats Dark Heaven Bones sculpted by Sandra Garrity .

02155 Liara Silverrain by Sandra Garrity

Allanah Greyloft OSL project. The WIP is here. Allanah WIP If you have any suggestions or criticisms I'd love to hear them.

Frulla was selected as part of my "On Deck" thread. So, I've cleaned her up and primed her. Next up is basing the slate. Pic ... Stay Tuned

Needed to relax and paint for fun for a change, and wanted to try some new paints. This was a Fun little one, in spite of a slight miscast. Tuilin: It’s hard to tell from the pictures, but I even managed to get pupils in her eyes that I’m happy with, yay! The blue is a Vallejo shade I wanted to try out. It’s turquoise in English, but the Spanish name is Halcón Milenario (Millennium Falcon). I don’t know why they call it that as Han’s ship was most certainly not this color, but it’s pretty. Shadows and highlights were attempted by adding MSP Nightmare Black and Dragon White, respectively. Her hair was another attempt at the Blond Hair triad, which is taking a bit of effort to get a handle on. It didn’t help that all my brushes are failing on me right when it’s not possible to get new ones. Comments and critiques welcome!

New project, not from my shelf of shame. My plan is to use greys to make it look like she is in pre-dawn light with a little bit of illumination from a glowing golden gem on the end of her staff. So far I have managed to prep the mini and apply the paint on primer. This is my first time using this primer so I'm interested to see how smooth it will be.

So here's my latest creation. I tried a different technique this time around by "overbrushing" for the the highlights on the skin and it was . . . ok. I can see it as a great way to speed the process along for a speedier paint job, and might be great for painting armies and units, but it does have its limits when it comes to blending. I'm also not sold on the blending in the armor as it did not blend real smoothly despite my best attempts but its a start at least. As always, any ideas, suggestions, critiques, feedback, etc. are most appreciated!

WIP Thread is here: WIP Down to 25 left on my shelf of shame. Comments, criticism, suggestions are welcome.

02031: Michelle Dancing Blade by Sandra Garrity. I have repainted the eyes on this mini at least a dozen times while practicing for other projects. I have retrieved her from my shelf of shame and I am using her to practice directional lighting. At least she will get painted and not suffer the indignity of routine eye transplants. My intention is to make it look like she got caught in the act of stealing something and there is a bright light shining on her from directly to the left of her face about 15 feet away. My plan is to make her leggings and shirt purple and her boots and vest dark blood red. Comments and criticism welcome.

Sometimes you need to see a miniature in person to appreciate it. This is one that would come up on the site and I’d scroll right past without a second thought, but I saw him hanging on the rack at the FLGS and was immediately smitten. Figure was prepped and primed as my previous show off thread went up, and was painted pretty quickly over the course of a couple evenings. Apologies for the picture quality (yet again), here is Alfred Redlute: The sculpt holds up pretty well, despite its age (S. Garrity 97 is engraved on the rear of the base). Minor flash and a small but noticeable pit on the lute’s fretboard, but no real mold line issues. Paint wise, nothing really fancy going on. Tunic is Templar Blue and it’s associated triad with Palomino Gold around the bottom and cuffs. Found some GW shades along with the mini, so the yellows and browns got a dose of Nuln Oil. His lute is red for the obvious reason. Sadly, some of the paint on the lute’s strings came off when sealer was applied. I believe the problem was the old brush I used being too stiff and rough. I fixed the damage best I could, but it’s nowhere near as nice as before. Al’s pantaloons are Dark Elf Highlight mixed with some Linen White. Turns out that triad is good for more than just drow skin! The base is meant to represent grass, as that was evidently the original intention of broccoli bases, so I painted it green. With MSP Grass Green. Because my imagination refuses to be bridled. All in all, not terrible for the time and effort, for me at least. Though I do regret the last glaze which made the blue highlights very hard to see. But I was too scared to try again, and they aren’t completely gone, so something to work on next time. As always, comments and critiques are welcome!

77191: Hydra Bones Sandra Garrity I did this one as a speed paint for a D&D game at the last minute, and then he didn't have a base for the next two years. Well, now he's done and has a base and is just waiting for his next chance to eat adventurers. 33 Projects left on the shelf of shame! And I have the day off work tomorrow so more to follow!

02539: Silver Dragon done as a Welsh style red dragon. He should have had more shading but he has languished on my shelf of shame for long enough. Now he has a base and he is happy. 42 projects left on my shelf of shame.

02142: Beorn The Mighty by Sandra Garrity combined with 51-052 Wolf from Ral Partha. A lead wolf from 1975 lost his head so that a player in my D&D game could have a sibeccai fighter with a two handed sword. Sibeccai are a race from Monte Cook's Diamond Throne campaign setting.

I needed to paint a tartan. The miniature and the reason are here: 02178 Knight Templar with Royal MacKenzie Tartan Painting a tartan in detail would be very hard. Here is the source material picture I worked from. Most of the tutorials I looked at involved painting a black grid and then painting in each square individually. I'm too lazy, was in too much of a hurry and don't have the quality of eyesight for that. My daughter who is a highland dancer and water colour painter helped me figure it out. We figured out which of the lines of the tartan would actually be visible at arm’s reach. Then we worked out which colours are forming those lines. Tartans aren't generally composed of stripes of solid colours. The colours come from the mixing of two colours of wool interwoven. So, we worked out which two colours were involved in each stripe. For example, red and green give you brown. So, by putting a stripe of green glaze over red basecoat, I get a brown stripe. If I put a second green stripe over the red at a 90 degree angle, I get another brown stripe, but where the two cross I get a green square with crisp corners. I put a thinned dot of the green in the middle of that square to deepen the green colour, and voila, a cross hatch of brown stripes and green squares on red. Then I sketched a map of it, noting that the tartan is not a perfectly spaced grid, and selected colours which when added together will produce the colours needed. The map: This proved to be still too difficult to paint clearly, so the number of thin lines was further reduced for simplicity. I started with a red basecoat and gave it minimal highlighting and shading. Then I started with one black line running parallel to the characters belt, midway between hem and belt. This is marked on the photo below. This gave me the line from which to measure out and place all the other lines. After that it was, in order: - green horizontal stripes - green vertical stripes - enhance green squares - black lines. The lines in the source material are not actually black, they are sets of black lines and blue lines. So each black line was traced over with blue as well to tone it down a bit and give a slight blue hue. It may not seem like much, but the before and after change was remarkable. Then the very thin yellow lines, with paint thinned somewhat. Finally a yellow dot at the intersection of the yellow lines. Here's a close-up with the starting line marked. It doesn’t look very good up close, but it looks good from a distance. Looks pretty good in other colours, too. Iron Wind Metals 67-005 Female Sibeccai I have some miniatures on the way in the mail which I had intended to use for practicing tartan and other free hand designs. I will post one as a step by step at a later date. Geoff

Something in a post I read earlier reminded me of unreasonable demands made by non-painters. A new guy joined our D&D group, so to be friendly I offered to paint a miniature of his character, who was as yet not introduced to the party. He says "Yes please' and the night before the game send me this: I'm thinking, this guys a bit of a $%&^ but I'll show him up. So at the start of the game the next day I gave him this: I shouldn't have bothered, since he rage quit about a month later because we were 'role-playing' too much and not taking the game seriously enough. Anyway, an adaptation of the Royal MacKenzie Tartan for your viewing pleasure. Here is a link to how I painted this. How I cheated at painting a tartan Geoff

This miniature I've had for a while, since about 2008. I tried painting her a while ago, but I got stuck. I don't know about the rest of you, but I find painting horses to be very difficult - mostly because my colours just never seemed quite right. In November, I had to lay in supplies for over winter and that meant buying the last of my paint restocks from Coat D'Arms. While I was there, I noticed in their military line they had some Horse Tone colours. I figured, hey, why not? At least they'd probably wind up the proper colour. So Ms. Redstorm here was my first try using Coat D'Arms 224 Horst Tone Bay. The other horse tones are Dun, Chestnut, and Roan. If anybody is interested in seeing these in use, I have a number of horses and will be ordering more in a few days so I can do a WIP to show the different ones. Having pre-mixed horse colours simplifies the task quite a lot, and four colours is enough to add variety to a mounted group. I really enjoyed painting this miniature, and I never thought painting a horse would be so much fun. Also, if you're wondering why I filed off the intricate design of her shield that shows in store photos it's because her on-foot version (Vanessa of the Blade) I painted some time ago came with some pitting on the shield. As it was not enough to really bother complaining about, I merely filed it off and painted a simple quartered pattern. Since the mounted version should match my footed version, I did the same here. So if you want to see a WIP of the horse tone colours, let me know! I'll pick 4 Reaper horsepeople out of my collection when the new ones come in and paint 'em up.

Did another random pull from the Box of Yesteryears, this time drawing yet another oldie, Nicole of the Blade: Nice bright pics this time, but they have washed out the darks slightly. So. Garrity Eyes strike again, and these were the smallest yet. The first thing that caught my eye was her chain mail. In the past this has been steel/silver, so I wanted to change it up and do a nice bronze. Unfortunately, the closest I had was Antique Gold, so I went with that. Basically everything not flesh or hair got a base coat of Cloudy Gray, then went metallic with Honed Steel, Blade Steel, and Polished Silver, with Antique Gold for the filigree work and the dragon on the shield. Then hit everything with a light Black Ink wash to grunge it up and fill the cracks, and a little bit heavier to line around her legs and skirt and such. Her hair is a mix of 3:1 Desert Sand and Leather Brown, which I only note because I don’t want to forget it. Again. And finally some purple for her hair ribbon to counter the grungy and morose. C&C welcome!