So I'll jump on the bandwagon and chat a little about painting miniatures. I've made a concerted effort to work thru my backlog.
It all started around the time of this year's Epic Game. I was frantically recruiting people to help paint buildings for the party's village. These are some really great terrain pieces from Tabletop World (http://www.tabletop-world.com/). At the time I only had a couple of dozen bottles from Reaper's MSP/MSP HD series so there was a lot of recycled color on the buildings, but they ultimately for "done enough" for Game time! I was really impressed with the support for six straight weeks we has three or four guys sitting around painting for a solid couple of hours.
Then the weekend was over and I felt like I kind of let everyone down. The game was fine but it wasn't wholly satisfying. A bit truncated for all the effort that went in to it. So I decided that I would start preparing for the 2018 game in August. I re-read the module and took down some notes on what I was going to need as far as miniatures for encounters.
I really liked this group of Ogres from Bones 3. So I got started painting them. As this project developed, I did a few things that really got me excited to do more. First off, I started thinking about each figure and who or what they were in the game universe. Although I was painting something like six figures at the same time, I hit some stumbling blocks along the way. Color choices for skin, hair, fur, and leather weren't immediately clear, but I created little rules for each as I went. For skin I went with a cool blue-grey color, for me I don't like Caucasian skin times, I feel it's too confusing with Giants for identification. For me Ogres are goblin-kin as as such need to fit into the niche of blue, orange, or green skin that you find with most Goblins, Orcs, Snotlings and the like.
I ended up finishing the the female miniature first, whom I affectionately referred to as the "Milk Mother". She had with her a sniveling goblin on a leash.
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| Reaper #77568 |
That detail came in super happy when I went to paint the goblin drummers and standard bearers in the set. The rest of the male ogres ended up coming together pretty quickly after I had sorted out highlights, shadows, and rules about the clothing/weapons/ornaments they might have on them. I did get tripped up by the heavily armored ogre.
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| Reaper #77566 |
I ended up painting his patchwork plate armor a sort of green-blackish color. Going with the sort of rough and dirty forging I thought would have been used to make his armor. I ended up going back and repainting a substantial portion of the armor to give it a rusting, ill-kept appearance that I feel was much more successful. I finished with the goblin standard bearers from the command set. I was really proud of how they turned out!
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| Reaper #77567 |
Or maybe it was the fact that they completed the set and now I had a cohesive unit that looked really neat.
I am not a professional level painted. But for tabletop quality I was really pleased. It also helped me start thinking about color theory and how to best utilize accent colors in units or groups of figures. So now I've been looking at the inventory of minis needed for next years game and I've separated them into different units.
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| Reaper #77454, 77456, 77455, 77568, 77566, 77567 |
Next up: the Coldfire Knights.
