Clockwork Minotaur And Shield Golem! Metallic Paints Are A Lot Of Fun To Play With.

Clockwork minotaur and shield golem! Metallic paints are a lot of fun to play with.

The clockwork minotaur was a lot of fun both to paint, and to design a base for. I imagined this guy as being some sort of gladiatorial arenas trump card, for cocky fighters to get wrecked by. Its my first attempt at a base that tells a bit of a story about the mini, rather than just being an attempt at a terrain it might be found in.

Beholders! And an old gazer, because he makes me laugh. The beholders were the first thing I painted once I got my hands on an airbrush, and they made playing around with it super fun. The blue one got significantly less fun once I realised I'd commited myself to painting half a million tiny spikes though.

I also really enjoyed painting the big central eyes, particularly on the green beholder. You might recognise that eye if you look closely ;) .

The lump on the gazers tongue over on the right is from where I managed to snap it in two while painting, followed by hasty and poorly thought out superglue+baking soda repairs. I like to imagine he maybe got stung by a bee on it right there. Serves him right for licking the floor like that, the gross little eyeball :P

This hill giant was a bit of an experiment with the airbrush. I tried doing his skin by doing a zenythal prime, then spraying over it with transparent ink to get easy highlights and shadows. It sorta worked, but I'm not convinced by the skin tone and I kept having to start over because I'd try adding a wash before the ink had fully set. After the third time I had to start over completely on him I just couldn't be bothered to take another shot at it and left the skin tone as it was.

I also tried making his fur look a bit like grass, I thought it might be a cool idea if when sitting down he could be mistaken for a hill. It doesn't quite look right to me though in the end.

IDK, I'm just not totally sold on this guy overall.

A whole collection of buggy minis. Most of these are from earlier on in my attempts at painting, since the bases are all pretty plain.

It was when I was painting all those spider thingos at the back that I realised how boring it was having just a whole bunch of minis all in the same pose. Since then, I've made a concious effort to find multiple poses when I'm printing more than just 1 or 2 of a creature. It makes finding minis a bit harder, but I think its worth it for a more interesting end result.

And finally for tonight, this is either the first or second mini I ever painted, I'm not entirely sure. I've definitely come a long way since then, but I like keeping him around as a reminder of how much I've improved for when I get frustrated at a mini not turning out quite how I hoped :)

Another Figurine!

I really love this one, it's just got such a dynamic pose, and it's pretty different to what I normally paint. It's good to shake things up now and then. I probably could've done a bit more work on the details of this one, but I was working on a time limit to get it done, and I'm pretty happy with where I got it all things considered.

I wasn't sure at first what sort of detailing I should do on the metal armour parts. I was considering just leaving it all silver at one point, but I thought it'd be just a bit too boring like that. I think the few gold details really help keep it all interesting, without being gaudy or overwhelming.

The panel lining isn't quite as crisp as I'd like, but it's not something I normally have to do on a lot of what I paint, so I'm ok with that. It really helps make things pop having that separation between panels. It was kind of hard getting wash into just the cracks though, since I wanted to avoid toning down the silver and gold. It's got me thinking that I should try oil washes though. Being able to put wash all over something, then clean it up off anything you don't want to be toned down seems pretty cool. I've just got to get over that anxiety of trying out something new without knowing how it'll turn out.

This figure is Mecha Knight Odessa by Dinamuuu3D.

Carrying on from my last post, heres some pictures of me pouring resin on my octopus mini!

Got all my materials together. Resin, blue alchohol ink, measuring cup and my mini all set up with its resin dam from my previous post.

I like the patterns the alchohol ink forms when you add it to the resin. I'm doing 3 30 ml pours for this mini. I've found on previous attempts that doing the full 90ml all at once can soften the PLA I print my minis in enough for them to start peeling paint and distorting. This resin sets fast enough that I can pour the next layer after a couple of hours, so its not too annoying to have to wait.

First pour in! Doing these on a plastic plate, just in case any resin manages to get out of the dam. I've gotten pretty confident in making these dams resint tight, but I'd rather be right and waste a 2 dollar plate, than wrong and out a cutting matt and anything else the resin makes it too.

I was a bit incautious mixing this layer, and theres a lot of bubbles that never managed to rise out. I really should get a vacuum chamber if I'm going to keep doing resin stuff, I guess.

second and third pours in. Still a fair few bubbles, but much less than the first layer. I was a bit more careful mixing up these two pours, but I still ended up with a fair amount of bubbles in the end product.

I went back and took a closer look at my sharks, and I think I had the same issue with them, but the darker resin helps hide it. Something to remember the next time I do something like this I guess.

Resin all set, and dam removed! I didn't end up having any resin leak below the base at all, which is always nice.

I did have some marks left behind on the resin unfortunately, you can see them if you look closer. In a couple of places it happened right between resin pour layers, and I suspect those are because I was overzealous popping bubbles with my barbeque lighter, and I think I melted the laminating sheet a little. There are also some marks on the top layer, where the resin was still just a little soft and the sheet stuck to it. That'll teach me to be impatient I guess :/.

Adding some wave effects to the surface. This also has the neat effect of helping to disguise the lip of resin that forms from it clinging to the edge of the dam.

I just use Liquitex gloss gel for this, and shape it with a paddle pop stick. It looks pretty thick now, but as it dries over the next day or two it'll mostly turn transparent. Then it'll just need a quick drybrushing of white to pick out the ridges, and it'll be done! I'll upload a final pic when thats done!

I'm glad I finally got around to getting this guy off my shelf and into resin. He was staring at me judgementally while I painted other things.

I do wish the resin had turned out a bit better, but given that its not something I've used a lot, I'm not too upset about it, and I've got some ideas on how to improve with it next time so it wasn't a wasted effort.

I put these in my drafts and forgot them! Red and Blue fire elementals. They were super fun to paint, lots of drybrushing which is always fun to do with a lot of sculpted detail.

This is my first time trying to paint fire effects, and I think it turned out fairly well! Room for improvement certainly, but it does read as fire when you look at it I think, and thats the main thing.

I tried making some sort of obsidian-gravel looking bases to put these on, but they didn't really work out, so I just tried painting a sort of gradiant like they're glowing from the elementals on them. It sorta worked? IDK, its fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

This model is Armour-bound fire elemental by Rocket Pig Games.

They've got a great patreon that has a bunch of awesome minis like this every month: https://www.patreon.com/rocketpiggames/posts

Finished painting this neat sculpt of Samus the other day!

I just did a fairly simple paint job on this one. Partly because I think it works well for the video game kinda look, and partly because I'd forgotten how poorly my orange and yellow paints cover, and I decided I wanted to deal with that as little as possible. I think it turned out pretty well though, the dark wash I put in the seams of the armour panels really helps make up for the lack of highlighting.

Theres a bit of an attempt at a glow effect in the barrel of her arm cannon, and on the bits of her armour mid-assembly. Its not amazing or anything, but I think you can kind of see what I was going for with it. Having lighting effects beyond just highlighting from above is something I've mostly avoided in my painting so far, but its somethign I want to start playing with. Its a bit daunting, but I think it will be rewarding if I can get it down.

I also realised as I was painting this that I've never actually played a metroid game. The most direct exposure I think I've ever had was watching one of my cousins play one of the games on his Gameboy at christmas. I feel like this is something I should rectify at some point.

This neat model is Samus Aran - Metroid - 25cm model by Printed Obsession. (The print pictured above is scaled down from 25cm to fit with my other prints).

New mini!

This is Atropos, a half elf (?) bard, painted for Yoshikagequeens' character in an upcoming campaign! Atropos will be in the same party as Frix! I'm looking forward to it.

I'm weirdly chuffed with my choice of dark red for his pants, and I think the highlights along the creases look really good. I also got the opportunity to finally properly use some of the colour shift paint I got like half a year ago, to put some glitter in his hair, so that's neat. I put the colour shift just in the parts and underside of his hair, to kind of make it looks like some sort of underlayer shining through. I really like the effect in person, seeing the glitter shift as you move your viewpoint is quite cool! Photos don't really do it justice.

My least favourite bit of this mini is the base. I shoved a generic column into a generic base, rather than using the desk base that comes with the stl for this mini. I wanted to push the character more into bard territory, rather than the professor character it's originally meant to be. I think it works for that, and I like the column he's leaning on, but the ground of the base is just a bit too plain. I put some cracks in it with an Exacto blade and added some cut up grass tufts to give it a bit of texture, but it's still not quite right. In the end, I just had to stop fiddling with it before I made it worse.

It's a learning experience to remember next time I try and make a custom base though, gotta remember to have texture or something on there.

The mini used here is Professor Syiva, by Twin Goddess Miniatures.

The column used on the base is Socket Pillar, by Phillip Meys.