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The Dungeon of the Mad Mage board game came with three of these shadow minis. I struggled to find ANYTHING interesting to do with the paint job. By definition, I feel like a shadow wouldn't have highlights or anything (I actually did end up adding some very subtle highlights out of habit...they help bring out some of the sculpt's details somewhat). I also gave them a glossier finish. I'm not sure why...it just seemed appropriate. The main thing I like about this mini's design is the way it allows you to (kind of) place another medium-sized mini on the base and be "stalked" by the shadow (as shown below). It's a neat little feature. I know that they did at least one more of these guys in a different pose (maybe more...I can't remember). I may pick it up at some point for the sake of variety.

This is Talespinner's fault. And also OneBoot's idea. (In another thread Talespinner challenged people to try something that was new —to them— and then Oneboot mentioned OSL and this specific model.) So, I acquired one 77364 on Saturday. Then I headed into the paint area to make a start. At that point "a idea flew into my funnel" after I spotted newish bottles of Blue Liner and Black Primer. These paints got mixed... ...FOR SCIENCE!™ The other part of the idea was to prime the mini with this inky dark mixture (roughly 50/50 Blue Liner/Black Primer**) where the lantern light could not reach. I Probably worked too fast. I am thinking the back of her head should be all inky as well. The pizza happened later. **That made a nice rich black. Next: there will be a sword swap.

I have 2 of the clear bones shadows and 1 of the original spectres in metal. I might pick up another bones one. I'll be trying to paint these a few different ways, so they'll be distinguishable, but also similarly enough that they might be thought of as a unit. The metal spectre will be painted as a solid being, doing the reverse dry-brush, and glow-in-the-dark medium. One of the bones minis will use magenta, purple, payne's grey, prussian blue, dioxazine purple, maybe a pthalo and some warlord purple, and spectral glow for solid paints. I am going to do some experimenting. This will probably be done slowly through march or april I may do some zombies really quickly to go along with all this.

Probably my fastest paint job ever. Two nights, a couple of hours tops. He was fun though. It was my first translucent Bones and tried to use the translucency in a way that would benefit the model. Not sure how it ended up looking like this. I found it quite frightening when I was finished, like I painted something out of a nightmare.

So in my last Reaper order I ordered some big shiny stuff for other people, but for myself, I ordered a few translucent Bones, as I've had my eye on them for a long elf time. As I have the translucent dragon from Bones 3 eventually making its way to me, I decided to get some practice in too. So there was a thread around at one point about using Tamiya Clears on the translucent Bones minis, so I launched into painting mine with a similar approach =] I also got fed up with my SLR and its hatred of shooting indoors, so woke up its inbuilt flash and cobbled together the world's most slapdash flash diffuser, and was ultimately kinda pleased with the results. Annoyingly, a lot of photos are underexposed because they look fine on my camera, but the screen on that is weirdly bright and everything tends to be dark as all hell when moved onto my laptop. It is possible my laptop screen is funky, so I do apologise if the following image is now hugely overbright *facepalm* He's painted with Red and Shadow Tamiya clears, and then drybrushed very lightly with Citadel's Genestealer Purple, Khorne Red, and Evil Sunz Scarlet. His eyes are Evil Sunz =] I'm actually really quite proud of how he's come out.

Upon priming and placing my Bones Great Worm on a temporary working base I came to notice something that didn't fully occur to me beforehand. My normal working base choice is the lid to a dip can; awful habit, I know, but the tins make great rinse reservoirs and the lids are great for basing and a crude dry palette... I digress. Anyway, I ended up mounting the worm on a beverage bottle, which placed on my desk, and me seated in front of said desk, brought Mr. Worm to about eye level. I noticed that his model casts a pretty serious shadow on a fair portion of the front of his body, something I knew, but didn't really notice to what degree until I was looking at him eye-to-maw. So! My question is, for models that cast their own shadow, how do you approach shading that area? I can think of two basic approaches here. Either A: I ignore the fact that he's creating his own shade, and treat the entire underside uniformly, or B: I can move him and the light around until I get something I like, mentally bookmark it or even outline it, and actively paint-shade that area, so that no matter what light this guy is viewed in or from what angle, he'll appear to be casting shade on himself. Or of course, C: somewhere in between. TL;DR, would you shade areas 1 and 2 in this picture the same or differently?

So. I tried painting some minis without WIPs and found myself having a hard time keeping track of what and how much I had done. So I'm back, although these may be sporadic and really slow to update. We'll see. Anyhow, after painting a lot of tiny figures for the January Bones Beauty Pageant, I decided to move in the opposite direction and tackle some of the big figures from Bones I to clear out room for Bones II. So I am painting dragons. Five of them, if you count the Frost Wyrm. Each one gets its own thread, though, since I don't know how I'm going to progress through them. I'm painting each dragon up as inspiration takes me. I thought this one, 77108, the Shadow Dragon, looked slightly aquatic, like a river deity. So I decided to paint it up in cool, watery shades. Maybe like some kind of frog or sea creature. I don't know yet. Anyhow, first I put on a base coat of Reaper's Brown Liner, the paint which sticks to Bones like gangbusters, thanks to Buglips for the discovery, and then a wash of medium blue mixed from Phthalocyanine Blue and a little Titanium White. I don't expect the final dragon to be straight blue like this, but I needed to give all the dragons a distinct color scheme at the start since none of their wings are glued on yet and I need to keep them straight. The other dragons I'm painting concurrently are Deathsleet, Ebonwrath, the Fire Dragon, and the Frost Wyrm.

Hi, guys, You might remember me from such twisted artistic experiments as the translucent figures from Bones the First. I've been playing today with Tamiya Clear paints and the new translucent figures, and here are some of the more... not completely awful results. These are all fairly simple test pieces so I could work out how I was going to paint the remaining figures, although they came out well enough that I'll probably keep them as is. Apologies for not having the correct SKUs - they seem to have gone missing from the Preview Gallery. (Edit - found them!) First up, the Shadow. I was basically trying to find a way to paint the purple 'shadow' translucents using Tamiya Clear paints. I used Clear Red, and Clear Blue, and while they were OK they didn't come out purple. Then I tried mixing up purple from the colors available to me, but the mixtures were (a) too dark to use and (b) about as purple as a ripe lime. So I eventually tried the Tamiya Clear Smoke and that came out quite well indeed. Next, the Ice Wall and Crystal Golem. I was aiming for an 'ice elemental' look with the Golem, and the Ice Wall was simply a test piece to see how well the blue translucents worked with Tamiya Clear Blue. The answer is, I think, very well indeed. I'll probably do the Water Weird's body using this method, and take the fins up to white foam. Next up, we have the clear translucent Slimes from the Gelatinous Cube option. These I dithered over a bit - I wanted to do one as a green slime, and the other I was debating doing a black pudding or ochre jelly, and eventually came down on the side of the ochre jelly: I'm not sure that the Clear Orange I used on the jelly looks ochre-ish, but I think it's quite effective. Lastly, we have the Gelatinous Cube. This I painted up on the outside only with Clear Yellow - I'll probably paint the inside to see how well it works, but for the moment I'm very happy with how effective it is: the two shots here have it first empty, and secondly with a figure engulfed inside.

So this is using 77108: Shadow Dragon! Thanks to Ub3r, he provided me the mini for me to compete in the Sci-fi contest =D Space dragooon! I made up a little story! "The planet V-138, a great swirling gas giant located third in its solar system, was ringed by seven moons. Of these moons, only one was inhabitable with a sentient species populating it. These were the Draconis Galaxis, a winged, four legged alien resembling the mythical dragons on Earth. The Draconis Galaxis is not a dragon, but instead an alien that resembles the mythical dragons known by humans. The ancient tales of dragons are actually envoys of Draconis Galaxis trying to make contact with the humans on Earth, but getting mistaken for great beasts and slain. Their planet is in almost constant darkness, with the 'day' being just a low-light change to the landscape as they orbit their planet, so far from the heat giving sun. The Draconis Galaxis therefore has evolved a great tolerance to cold and excellent eye sight to see through the gloom. The patterns of their wings and sides mimic the bright stars and galaxies visible in the skies of their planet, allowing them to fly unseen by prey below." Pics! Edit: Giving up on the diorama idea. I am really unhappy with the base and I'm not going to worry about it right now. Changed up the story too =P

Here's The Black Mist for the Trash It Beauty Contest, though I don't have any appropriate trash for his base (so I'll be skipping the basing contest with him). The cobblestone street was given an extra coating of gloss varnish at the end, so the street would look wet. I'll definitely look into getting some better photos for the actual contest entry, though. As always, C&C welcome!

Hey again, I figured I would stop by and show my progress on my next project. Like the topic name suggests I am answering the question of "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" the answer being obviously: Reaper 50217: The Black Mist (*Cough The Shadow cough cough*) Now this is only my second miniature and I'm not finished with him yet (lots of touch ups that I need to finish up), but here is my progress with him so far: Biggest issue I had so far would have to be the eyes...between the scarf and the hat it was a pain to paint the eyes. Don't mind the strange texture that seems to show in the pictures since the figure itself doesn't actually look like that. Still working on using the spray on primer, but making progress as I didn't really care for the paint on primer. Aside from that I'll post again when he's all finished. I look forward to seeing what you all have to say.