So Lately I've Been Printing Off A Few Figurines To Paint, Rather Than Just Minis, Because Apparently

So lately I've been printing off a few figurines to paint, rather than just minis, because apparently my limited shelf space isn't crowded enough XD.

This figure was a lot of fun to paint, and I really enjoyed making the contrast between the mostly greyscale werewolf, and the very bright red riding hood. I really like how the whole thing came out, but especially red riding hood. That evil look to her sculpt was just so fun to paint and bring life too.

I also really like how the veins on the wolf just pop. Its always fun to highlight details like that and see how much extra dimensionality they add to the model.

Of course my problem now that I've finished this figure off is I have a bunch of minis and figures I'm really looking forward to painting, but I've got to pick just one to start with. Its not the worst problem to have at least. (I am also actively making it worse by printing more things every day over the last week).

This figure is Little Red Riding Hood and her new best friend!, by Arminas Didzioas.

The little mushroom added to the base is from Pellinors' Mushroom Collection.

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

I'm going to post a whole bunch of my minis, all at once because no one can stop me, so there. :)

Here are all my minis, nicely sorted onto my ikea shelves that I love, but also are very annoying because they don't sell extra shelves for these ones seperately >:(

All the minatures on these shelves are 3d printed.

Froghemoth! This is one of my older models, and I kinda want to redo this one at some point with what I've learnt since, but I still like him! printing him was a real pain, becaue I kept having clogs on large prints at the time. I ended up with like 3 or 4 froghemoth butts before I got a success.

Sharks! Embedded in resin cylinders with reef bases. These are some of my favourites, mostly because resin embeds are cool :D. It took me a couple of tries to figure out how to get these to work, between having to figure out how to make a smooth, cylindrical resin cast, and the first attempt melting the mini when I tried pouring all the resin at once.

If I could change one thing on these, I'd probably use just a little less dye on them. They're just a tad too opaque to really see whats going on inside.

More resin! A gelatenous cube this time, with some random bits embeded in it.

This one was simpler than the sharks, I just 3d printed a gelatenous cube mini, covered it in resin to smooth out the layer lines, and used it to make a sillicone mold I could just pour resin into. The hardest part was trying to get all the bits floating throughout, rather than just sinking to the bottom.

Kobold gang! not pictured: the 9 or so other kobolds I still need to get around to painting.

I've only fairly recently started trying to make more interesting bases for my minis, and I'm pretty happy with how these simple rocky/gravelly terrain bases turned out.

A muscly troll! Painting all the muscles on this guy was a lot of fun. It was my first attempt at highlighting shapes rather than just edge highlighting or drybrushing, and I'm pretty happy with how it went overall. Lots of room to practice the technique on this guy :D.

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 :)

Yarrr!

I've been painting this awesome pirate figure over the past week. I've been trying to get myself back into the habit of painting consistently over the week, rather than waiting for 'the perfect time' (which never comes), because my pile of shame is growing at a concerning rate.

This was a really fun model to paint, with some great details. Though I did get slowed down a bit trying to figure out how to navigate the tip of my brush into some areas. Theres a lot of semi enclosed spaces with awkward positioning, and in the end I left a few spots unpainted. You can't see them without turning the model upside down and at odd angles anyway, so I've decided to just not care, and save myself the hand cramps.

Besides just being a fun model to paint, it was also a chance to play around with how I paint metalics a bit. Theres so much dark metal involved in the cannon that I didn't want to just paint it all with a solid metal colour. And while I do want to try my hand at painting non-metalic metal at some point, I don't quite have the confidence and patience for it just yet. So instead I tried out painting the bits I wanted in a dark-steel/iron colour with straight black paint, and then just drybrushing dark silver metalic paint over it, and it worked beautifully. It really helps the metal look a bit more beaten and dull, its only shining on the edges and ridges, where its maybe been polished a bit by rubbing against its environment. This is a technique I'm going to try and remember in the future.

For all the other metals on this piece I just did straight metalic paint, and I just love how the gold contrasts with the reds and browns its up against!

I'm also really happy with the skin. It wasn't that long ago that I dreaded painting skin and always hated how I made it look, but now its one of my favourite things to paint! Getting to play with skin tones and highlighting them is just fun! I've still got room for improvement with where I place my highlights, but I can see progress in every mini I paint, which is really rewarding!

This figure is Miss V. Gomez , by Cast n Play.

Something a bit different to what I usually paint, but I saw this model and I just really wanted to paint it! Its just such a neat little model, especially that spherical cockpit.

The model is printed in resin on my Mars 2 Pro, and the stand was done on my Prusa in a copper silk filament. I love that copper silk for decorative things, it just looks so good.

It is a bit messy in some points, mostly because painting the cockpit wrecked me, it wasn't until I actually started painting it until I realised how fiddly it was to do. My metallic covers way better than my yellow does, so every little mistake took quite a few careful coats to fix.

That said, I really like how it turned out all the same! Most of my messy points fade away once its a on a shelf rather than right up in my face at painting distance.

The model is Red Stinger by Heriberto Valle Martínez.