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Hello all you Reaper people! So, Bones V will be hopefully arriving in the next few months, and one thing I told myself was that before I got my package, I wanted to finish the smaller Yephima sculpt before the new and larger Yephima shows up at my door. I really love both versions, and I just wish this Yephima would be available in metal. I tried painting her already years ago, started even a WIP in the forum, which I'd have to hunt down. My original thought was make her a very, dark dusky color and blonde hair with pinks and oranges, but at one point my inspiration went awry and I stopped painting her probably to be an eternal WIP. But then a few years later, I got a new copy and this one I did more sky blue and blonde, but it doesn't look as pinkish as I originally had thought. I also think I made my metals way too blue, but oh well. I actually enjoyed painting this lady to the degree that I could see myself painting her again with a different color scheme. One of the other benefits of Bones is the cost, I can grab a new one quickly for around 7.00, so that's also a nice Bones bonus! Anyhoos, here she is: With such a big model, after taking photos, I can see so many glaring issues, but oh well, not going to let myself worry about it too much and will rather maybe go back and paint her up gain some day, incorporating a few fixes.

I'm trying to improve my flesh tones, and for some reason it helps me to do it with inhuman tones to get the technique down before moving to more realistic stuff. I'm not quite sure how it's going so far. If nothing else, Yephima's proving that I need to practice some blending and feathering. Still need to highlight the Wereboar. I love the muscularity of this guy, he was fun to wash!

Howdy, She's from Cloud Nine... Kev! P.S. She's not big boned, she's fluffy! P.P.S the tags are acting weird... limit 4, no caps? P.P.P.S It's cotton ball material on the base

I'm participating in the Thanksgiving paint challenge. Here's my first figure. I really wanted to do better with the gems and her crown. There's a large seam line through her hair from side to side. I thought I should get some 22 gauge copper wire and create a circlet for her to hide it. The white fur on the edge of her armor isn't wonderful either. So much to learn! I've run out of steam on the figure so that will have to wait for later. Thanks for looking 77162: Yephima, Female Cloud Giant

I'm painting this mini myself, and was wondering if you had any tips for the finer areas like the garter & eyes.. Or (and just as importantly) how to correct a mistake like her eye.. Just paint over, or do you remove & repaint? Todd

I'm super in love with this mini. It was so much fun to work on. And I'm VERY happy with how the eyes turned out because that's something I struggle with a lot. The lighting here is not great, I have misplaced the power cord to my light box, and somethings are off color from what it should be.

So I'm going to try to keep up with a new WIP. I started painting Yephima yesterday and I hope to finish her by the end of the month. Here is my progress so far: I first put down a thin layer blue liner and then based her skin in MSP Ashen Blue and her armor and hair pieces are MSP Ancient Bronze. I missed a couple of bits of armor that I need to go back and do. I haven't yet decided what other colors I want to do on the rest of her. I'll normally plan this out ahead of time but when I went to my notebook nothing was written down on her page. Oops. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I had a lot of fun with this, but I think she looks more like a storm giant, so I painted her how I thought she would look. This is a better photo pair than the last Reaper quarterly contest (which I photographed and took a not-as-good photo of her). Her basing is made of the Happy Seppuku "Splintered Wood" stamp, the sand/asphalt stamp, and a resin railroad rock I cast myself to look as if it were "un polished marble." The pink/purple armor was a decision by my daughter, who wants everything to be pink and/or purple. As always, C&C welcome!

Yephima, painted up as some sort of ice giant instead. Second try with the "snow" (just did one test base first) so it's a little rough. It migrated up the silver paint, unfortunately, but I'm actually okay with how it looks like it's sticking to all the exposed metal.

So looking around the forums and I found the Year of the Giant painting contest. Since I was in an inspired painting mood I decided to break out Yephima and the male storm giant. I went and looked at alot of the other submitted giants in show-off, WIP, and Inspiration gallery. I was really inspired by Pragma's Storm Giant, especially the lava cracks on the shoulder. I decided to try and go the literal 'storm' giant route and went looking at photos of lighting strikes. I saw lots of blues, reds, purples, and whites, then I saw this one, I love the blue/green-teal highlighting the greys of the clouds and the ice-blue highlight of the actual lighting. Hopefully the final result will look similar. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Current state of the models Since I wanted the blue tint and I've been really happy with Buglips' brown liner discovery I went with Reaper's blue liner to base my bones. A technique that I've been playing with but not really focusing on has been to dilute the paint to almost a glaze to allow more of the undertones to show through. I figure that this color scheme would benefit the most from this to really try and get the blending and depth that I'm looking for. First up, the base of Deep Ocean. The first of the glaze attempts. Armour Grey.

Ok my daughter has painted a few things since Reapercon and receiving her Vampire box from someone (who I don't think is on the forums yet or does not visit much) and her paints from @Harrek. The first one she chose out of all the minis in the Vampire box was 77137: Sarcophagus: Next she chose a mini that she had painted from my set 2 years ago. 77162: Yephima, Female Cloud Giant: Can you guess which one was from 2 years ago? Today she painted 77067: Virina, Female Demon and wanted to base her so I got out the supplies received at Reapercon. I did the glue work and she did everything else. Front | Back | Alt Front View Any tips on what to do with the based mini from today and protecting it from losing the basing materials? Would the spray on sealer I have help in any way or just mess it up?

8th times the charm, right? (my pictures actually attached facing the right direction after about an hour of work. Blah!) So, last night at 8pm I decided to start a WIP on Yephima, because I love her. Aaand, I finished her a little less than an hour ago. So, I'm just gonna show her off, and do the wip on my blog at some point when my computer screen isn't full of blue. Alright, I got sick of seeing blue skin. They're beautiful but I was tired of it. So I decided, if girls can cosplay as lady loki and whatnot, I could make a female Neptune.(Edit:duh!) . I tried some new things, and I think she turned out pretty good! C&c always welcome! Enjoy!

Continuing to post from my latest latest photo session, here's the unnamed male storm giant and Yephima. Both loaded up on NMM, and a fun attempt at an aqua glassy armor on Yephima. The storm giant's face has a wicked moldline I don't think I've ever seen before until I got this picture linked up and previewed. I didn't notice it while painting, nor have I noticed it when handling it later... oh well. Next time I'll get them all. I promise. Maybe.

Yephima was one giant experiment for me. Not only did I have a new skin recipe to try out, I ended up with a new hair recipe, blued TMM steel, learned a bit about TMM gold, practiced blending, frosted her then damaged the varnish on her arm and got to practice defrosting and repair all at the same time. Oh, and I decided to see if cotton would sell as clouds. For the curious, most of these trials can be found right here, in our own WIP section. To start, the full rotation: Just in case the clouds didn't work, I took a shot before I started to make them. And finally, the action shot. Defeat those pesky invaders Yephima! ...and, uhm, ignore the camera flash.

Okay, just because it's kind of fun to record this kind of stuff, plus if I know I'm posting progress, I actually have to make some progress, I'm going to start up a new WIP. With this one, it's going to be a chunk of figures so it will probably last forever, but I've really got no hurry, so we'll see how this all goes. So I've got nine figures I'm going to put on this WIP, eight Ral Partha figures, and Yephima, my only and favorite Bones figure, so I'll also give my general impressions perhaps with some base of experience behind me, even though not too much for just as single figure. Four Ral Partha clerics I think sculpted by Julie Guthrie, and then a set of four figures that I really don't remember what they were originally called, sculpted by Dennis Mize. Included in this set is what I remember somewhere from this site as somebody have listed this figure (on the farthest right) as one of the world's most boring figures, so of course I felt obligated to paint it. With these then, I've got them all primed and ready to go! I also primed Yephima with Vallejo brush-on primer, just because I feel I should, even though as I was priming her, I really couldn't see the primer too well.

Here, for your amusement is my very first WIP thread. The plan here is to show 77162: Yephima, Female Cloud Giant having just put down a dwarf intruder. I figure she needs something to justify that smug look on her face. I plan to pose her with her victim (Stonehaven's Unconscious Dwarf SHD20) underneath that massive club of hers. In order to do this, I will need to cut her club away from the rest of the model. The leaves me with two surfaces (one on the club and one on the loincloth) with no detail. The loincloth surface isn't a big deal; I'll simply remove a small protrusion where the club attached, smooth it out and it will look like part of the garment. The club surface on the other hand will be a bit trickier since it's very detailed. After a bit of brainstorming with Minicannuck, I've come up with a solution. Using some Instamold, I created a mold of the good side of the club's head and made a replica using green stuff. This was my first attempt at using instamold and it didn't work out quite the way I'd hoped. It seems that the mold warped a bit while it cooled resulting in a fairly odd-looking club head. My second attempt worked out much better. This time, I left the club in the mold until it had completely cooled. As you can see, the replica on the left looks much better than the original (pictured again on the right) The next step will be to cut away part of the club head and replace it with part of the green stuff replica. More to come as progress is made. Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome.

Yephima is one of my favourite new sculpts from the KS1 set so I decided I would make her my second bones paint. First I had to fix her left foot though - the last three toes and part of the left side were simply missing, so I used some liquid green stuff to create some new toes. You can see the result here. There was also a weird, sinuous, flash mark along the ground between her left foot and the edge of her skirt where one side of the ground was a little higher than the other so I couldn't really file it off. Since I was mucking around with the liquid green stuff in the area anyway I dabbed it around a bit as a way of hiding the line. Next I used some brush on primer to cover up the green stuff and then I used Nightmare Black and lots of water to make a dark blue wash which I coated her with so I could find all the details and see if I missed any flash lines. (Amazingly, I hadn't!) Cloud Giants can have skin tones ranging from "Milky White to Sky Blue". I've seen several examples of Cloud Giants with the "Milky White" with blue highlights and also a lot with the bright blue of a hot summer sky, but neither felt right to me. In the end I decided to go with a soft grey-blue, closer to the colour of the pieces of sky that peek through the clouds in Spring or Autumn, like this: So I fiddled with a few of the KS1 blue and grey colours until I found a mix I liked. In the end, the base coat colour I settled one was Aircraft Grey, Maggot White & Soft Blue in a ratio of 3:3:1 (I also used the same base coat on her skirts because I'm thinking I might make them "cloudy", so it seemed reasonable to start with the same sky colour as a base. Not 100% sure that is what I'll do but since I had the colour to hand it made sense to use it now.) Then I took a deep breath, and started glazing shadow and highlights to her skin. Prior to getting the Bones KS, all the mini's I'd ever painted were done in enamel paints with washes and dry brushing, so this whole "glazing" thing is a really new technique for me. I used it a little when I was painting "Vaeloth, Helborn Paladin" for the Summer Exchange and made the colour on his sword darker towards the sharp edge but that was all. This was going to be a learning experience. My plan was to glaze down to shadow first and then back up to highlights. So first I mixed up a shadow colour using Soft Blue, Maggot White and Nightmare Black in a ratio of 4:1:1 and 6 drops of water. Then I started with her right leg ... and discovered I'd already screwed up as I got way too much colour off the brush and instead of barely increasing the depth of shadow I now had a dark blue blemish on the outside of her upper thigh. (Sorry, no photo!) sigh. So I repainted her thigh with some of my base coat colour and then I went online, did some research on the technique to see where I went wrong, and decided the problem was that I hadn't thinned it enough, so I doubled the amount of water with another 6 drops. And that was much better! I started glazing down towards the creases between her legs and her clothing, and also areas of her left leg that would be in shadow such as her hamstring area, around her lower calf and her thigh where light would be blocked by her hair. So far so good. While I was doing that research I also found some tutorials for faces so I knew to use the shadow in her eye sockets and along her nose, under her jaw line, along her neck where her hair blocks the light and all along her hairline. Next I mixed up more of the base coat colour and made that into a glaze so I could go back over some areas that should have remained mid-tone but that I'd accidentally gotten some shadow glazing on. This worked well until towards the end when my mixed colours started to separate into distinct patches of soft blue and white/grey! I didn't notice this at first so suddenly found myself layering on a colour that was far more "white" than I expected. I managed to fix this by mixing some straight Soft Blue with water and glazing it a few times over the odd spot and then I fiddled with this now separated colour to see if I could save it. I managed to determine that I could continue working with it if I remixed it with my brush, dipped the brush in water to remove the excess pigment after the mixing, dried the brush on a napkin and then used the remixed glaze. After that I could usually get two or three glaze passes done before it started separating again. Then I created a highlight colour with Maggot White and Soft Blue in a ratio of 4:1 and thinned it for glazing. I expected that this mix would also separate after a while, and it did, but this time I was ready for it to happen and knew how to deal with it right off the bat. This I used on her right hip and the front of her right leg, her left thigh and calf and part of her left hip where light wouldn't be blocked by her hair, her left bicep and lower arm, the top of her right arm and her shoulder blade - basically anywhere the light should hit directly I also used the highlight colour glaze on her face to emphasize her nose, cheekbones, forehead and chin. And here's the result of my first serious glazing attempt: I think it looks okay, for my first try with this technique. Any comments or constructive criticisms would be appreciated. Edited for typos.

So for two straight Kickstarters I've shown the restrain necessary and didn't end up getting any Bones and I'm still reasonably okay with that because I like metal, I won't lie and I really appreciate the detail metal provides. But those dastardly Reaper people put out a few that couldn't be gotten in metal, like Yephima, so I ordered one from my hobby store and sooner or later, actually probably later or sooner, I'd like to think about painting her up. Here's my dilemma: after giving her a sudsy bath and letting her dry, I think I really would like to prime her, even though everybody says it's not necessary. Is there any bad aspects of priming Bones? I'd use a Vallejo brush on white primer, which is what I've got. Has anybody had any bad primer experiences?

Figured that since I have been lurking so long then I might as well post my most recent learning experiment. I started painting miniatures in September at Dragon*Con and have sense fallen in love with it. I'm still learning a lot of techniques to see what works best for me and what just doesn't work at all....example: I'm terrible at glazing. @_@ That's my first bit of work, not sure if its a Reaper miniature though, but sense then I have achieved this sort of quality. She's only half way finished but so far I think she's pretty good. I can tell where I have improved but I'm am totally open to where I could use improvement! I hope to post her here again for you guys when she's finished. :D I guess for the details. Ummm lately I started using a mixture of paints. Mostly to experiment with wear and tear and how they mix together. (Plus some desperation) Most of Yephima is Reaper paints but I used a mixture of Vallejo's Gold with Folkarts Metallic Inca Gold. (after that particular experiment I went out and bought several other colors of Folkarts metallics). Why? Because when it came to painting the armor, though this picture doesn't do it justice, this mixture made an interesting 'armored' look. It's slightly reflective like you would imagine armor or something metal to look. It also glazed over slightly uneasily like it had been tempered. The only downside to this concoction is that it goes on very thin and it dries very fast! I'm going to have to use a drying retarder next time I paint with it. The thing I like about Folkarts metallics is that the 'metal' look is very slight unless you add a lot. I think for this armor I used 2 drops of folkart gold and 3 drops of vallejo gold. I was bummed about the casting lines at the top of her head and I know I'm going to have to carve at her again, but I'm glad I got to share my newest project and painting attempt with you all.