In the early months of COVIDMania I started on painting some orcs. These were among the first minis I’d printed when I first got my Photon… meaning in many cases they were printed with a not-quite-properly-aligned plate, or not quite the right support settings, or… a host of other early teething problems. A few had mis-printed weapons, a one or two had slightly squished faces, etc. Not to mention they weren’t the most detailed of models to begin with. On top of that, I’d primed them on a hot, humid day without realizing those conditions would mess up the texture of the primer.
So my orcs were mostly chalky low-detail misprints. I figured I’d paint them anyway and they’d be usable on the table and recognizable as orcs even if they weren’t the prettiest of orcs. I also wanted to wanted to use them to practice layering and highlighting, especially on the exposed skin areas.
To make a long story short, very little worked the way I hoped it would, and in my frustration I set them aside to work on other things for a while. “A while” in this case lasted until early June. I had other, nicer minis I was looking forward to painting, though, so I made myself power through the orc pile before I moved on. Since then, I’ve been alternating between rounds of doing quicker paint jobs on groups of less detailed minion-y minis and longer, more focused work on ones I want to end up more elaborate. It’s helped my put a dent in my unpainted Pile of Shame, and I’ve made some improvements in my actual painting skills along the way.
The Little Stuff
Besides the orcs, I finished off a bunch of gnolls. Neither group is pictured here in its entirety – there are a few more of each that look about the same. For the gnolls I played with a few different color schemes and washes to obtain different (mixed but passable) results. On a pair of bullettes, in part because I was tired of all grays, greens, and browns, I decided to make the upper parts of their carapace/shell/hide things blue. The intent was to make them fade from a lighter shade at the edges to a darker one near where the plates overlap, but I think the shades I chose were too close together to make the effect noticeable.
I ended up buying a few STLs from Heroforge and printing a couple from DesktopHero3D for some recurring and/or upcoming characters from my Mighty Protectors campaign. These include Busybody in a few variations, Flower Child, Invisigoth, and a few others not yet revealed in the game.
The back row are merrow, with their fins highlighted with some metallics.
The mini you want, not the mini you need
I actually keep a spreadsheet of minis I’ve printed and ones to look for. “Skeletal thunderbeast” has been on the list for a while, because that’s a possible encounter in the Storm King’s Thunder adventure my meandering D&D campaign will eventually get to. I’d run across a zombie ankylosaurus at some point and that seemed close enough, so I printed one… only to realize later that it was scaled far larger than the creature described in the encounter, and that I would actually need four of them. Still, it was an interesting print and given its size it presented an opportunity to try out some bark chips as a basing material. (Pictured below with Lark Featherfoot, halfing rogue-warlock, for scale.)
I think I did a reasonable job of creating some shade variation on the skin, though some some striations are still visible to a close look. Overall I’m pretty proud of the results.
Getting the band back together
Last year the Artisan’s Guild Patreon released STLs for a trio of trolls who could be printed either as mellow musicians or angry warriors. I loved the musical trolls and printed a set even though I didn’t have any particular use for them.
With well-defined musculature and lots of exposed flesh, these seemed like another opportunity to see if I could find some success at highlighting the (green) skin with successively smaller and brighter layers. After seeing a video somewhere that mentioned using red to shade the darkest areas on a green mini, I tried mixing a little red into to the darkest of the greens I’d planned to use, and painting that on as a base coat. (So… brown, basically. I painted the trolls brown.) I went ahead and started adding successively brighter and smaller layers of green anyway, and found that I liked the look it created. In the end, these ended up being probably my favorite of my painting results so far, and I was eager to post pictures of them to here and to social media to scream, “Hey, look what I did!”
But there was a problem.
They were a troll band, but were not in fact a rock and troll band, and the bad pun opportunity made the next step worth waiting for.
I printed a stone golem from another, more recent Patreon release (I can’t find the reference to which one it was, unfortunately). He didn’t paint up quite as well as I’d hoped. My attempts to make his crystals look translucent didn’t really work – I should have used shades with wider variations, mainly – and my drybrushing of its rocky skin managed to eat up most the subtle shades of blues and browns I’d sponge-stippled onto the previous layer. Still, it didn’t turn out horrible, and I had an excuse to try out that new Tesseract green color from Citadel to add a slight glow to the runes on its body. Some green flocking was glued on in a few spots as moss, and a couple of tufts were added to suggest grass and flowers had managed to sprout out of a few of his crevices.
Finally the band was ready for opening night! A Q-tip, a toothpick, and a small wooden circle made a quick microphone and stand to project the singer’s gravelly voice during their gig at The Henge.
I’m tentatively calling them “Petty Thom and the Heart-eaters”, but I’m pretty sure there are better names to choose from. Leave a comment if you have a suggestion!