Category: Miniatures

Miniatures, Workbench

‘Gloomhaven’ Paint Project, Part One

My friend (and Geekshow MVP) Rebecca Frost was talking about Gloomhaven one day, and I kind of lost my mind. I had to paint them. Why? Well, I had never seen them before. Here was a game set in the fantasy genre that I had never seen, let alone painted.

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Luckily, Rebecca didn’t call the police, and I was able to get started on the first batch of six figs. I don’t know what they are, who they are, or why they are, but they are a lot of fun to paint!

First up, a badass lady with a couple of axes. She reminds me of a classic orc, but I think her skin is made of stone or bark!

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Next up is a bard, but I think she might also be a plant person:

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I know a Rogue when I see one!

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I think the next two are druid/ranger types. I might also be waaaay off here, but they both fit a nature theme:

The last one in the first batch looks like a Paladin. We’ll have to see!

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I have another five of Rebecca’s figs, and I need to get them done soon, too. There are a TON of Gloomhaven minis, so this project should keep me busy a while.

It’s interesting painting board-game miniatures. They still have a lot of detail, but the need to keep the poses static to keep production costs down makes a mini that’s a lot easier to paint. For the simple joy of putting paint to plastic, this has been a pretty fun project!

Miniatures, Workbench

The Shambling Horde is Growing!

I have to admit something– I am allowing myself to go “full geek” on my upcoming Rangers of Shadow Deep campaign. I am also changing a few of the rules I set earlier, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

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The first scenario that I am going to play involves my Ranger and her crew searching for clues about a missing Ranger… and a town full of missing people. The scenario calls for a load of zombies, so I loaded a set of five into the Mars and got them painted up the next day.

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I went with a rough and ready paint scheme with lots of glazes. I wanted the skin to look leathery and mummified, and the metals to look really weathered.

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I also lucked out this month since Titan Forge has a bunch of undead up for this month’s Patreon subscribers, so I got some pretty great and pretty fresh minis for the game.

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That brings me to the first rule I am “breaking” for my campaign! I was only going to allow minis that I had printed, but printing and painting a whole slew of zombies was going to take forever. Plus, I have a bunch of orc zombies from Zombicide just gathering dust, so I am allowing 32mm figs that I already own for horde groups like zombies. Plus, I love the Zombicide figs, so I’m happy to get them going. I’m going to print some new bases for them so they fit the theme a little better, and I’ll have a post for them up shortly.

I will be posting Sundays and Wednesdays from here on out, so I’ll be back on Wednesday with the nerdiest damned project I’ve taken on yet. See you soon!

 

 

Miniatures, Workbench

Print/Paint Spotlight: Elf Ranger

Peeps, we have a winner! After quite a bit of soul searching, I have selected the Ranger that I will be using for my Rangers of Shadow Deep campaign. Drumrolls are not necessary right now, we’re in the middle of a pandemic and loud, repetitive rhythm might startle a neighbor.

Lila Ranger

I went with the Lila the Wood Elf Ranger model from The Dragon Trapper’s Lodge. This company releases a great range of figures, each with a main character on foot and mounted, as well as a dragon. The whole range is pretty cool, and very thematic.

Now that my printer is back up and running, I plugged the supported STL file into my slicer software with another five zombies on the build plate, and three some odd hours later, Lila was done!

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Once she got a UV cure, I went over the model with a black primer in the airbrush, then added a zenithol highlight with white. For those of you who don’t know, the zenithol highlight allows you to see your highlights and shadows before you even commit paint to the model.

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After the highlight, my first color pass went down using Citadel Contrast paints and Daler Rowney inks. This lets me get color on the whole model quickly, but at the cost of having to be really careful afterward. Contrast rubs off of models pretty easily, so use a paint stand and try not to touch the model with anything but your brush.

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The next step is the highlight pass, where I go over all of the main colors with lighter shades of paint. I use Vallejo airbrush paints for this, since the pigment count is higher, which lets you get more done in less time.

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After the highlights dry, I use a combination of citadel shades either straight out of the bottle or diluted with acrylic based floor polish, depending on how strong of a shading effect I am after.img_3523

Using this technique has been a pretty tried and true process for me, and has taken me the better part of 20 years to perfect. Before Contrast Paints came into the picture, I was using inks diluted with acrylic medium, and I only stumbled across zenithol highlighting about 8 years ago! It’s been a long process, but at this point I can get a figure like this one knocked out in about an hour.

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Which means if I did nothing but paint, I could get the pile of shame painted up in about 400 hours…

It won’t win any awards, but it’s a damned good table top quality that will make me real freaking happy to play a game with!

I think I’ll keep her name as Lila, I just need to come up with a cool last name, and get her stats together! One step closer to my first game of Rangers of Shadow Deep!

If you have a cool last name for an Elf Ranger in mind, leave it in the comments!

Miniatures, Workbench

TRAGEDY…Averted?

On April 10th, my hobby world changed in an interesting way when my new Elegoo Mars 3D resin printer showed up at my house. I had been debating the purchase for over six months, but I had a pretty good bonus, the bills were paid, and I decided to jump in.

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The first week was pretty rough, with a lot of failed prints and hard lessons learned. I finally got my settings dialed in, found a good little heater to keep the resin liquid in our chilly April weather, and managed close to 3 dozen fantastic prints. So many cool minis joined my collection, and I joined 3 cool printing communities to celebrate and share pics of our amazing prints.

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Successful Print #1, Gino the Dwarf from Artisan Guild

Then, the unthinkable happened. About a week ago, I noticed a weird hole appearing in some of my mins, like someone had drilled a hole through them. It was baffling. I hopped on one of the 3D communities, and some really cool people broke the news to me gently.

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Pope Blobulba from Artisan Guild

My LCD screen was burning out.

I had only had the printer for 3 weeks, and while it had already paid for itself easily, I wasn’t ready to pay to get it serviced. I contacted Elegoo directly, a really patient customer service rep walked me through a diagnosis, and yep. The LCD was fried.

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Dragonborn Hero from Titan Forge

I was told a replacement part would come, and that it would take two weeks to get to me. I resigned myself to painting some of the finished models, and settled in for my two week wait.

That two weeks was three business days. My replacement screen arrived Monday afternoon, and after work I settled down to watch a YouTube video from Elegoo on how to change the LCD screen.

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Druid Hero from Titan Forge

The video showed a fairly complicated procedure, but I figured if I took notes, I could get through it. Then the video switched to motherboard model B, and it was just a couple of swapped out relays. Then motherboard model C came up, and it was literally one quick swapped out relay, pop out the old screen, and replace it with the new one. Connect the relay, and test your settings.

I have a motherboard model C.

The whole procedure to replace my LCD screen took less than 10 minutes. That’s pretty staggeringly cool in my book!

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Ogre Mage from Artisan Guild

I ran the diagnostic, and everything came up aces. Tomorrow, I am printing up my Ranger and a whole slew of zombies! My enthusiasm for the Elegoo Mars really went up a couple notches today.

I can’t wait to get more prints ready to paint, and get my Rangers of Shadow Deep on!

Miniatures, Workbench

Winding Up for”Rangers of Shadow Deep”

Rangers of Shadow Deep is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a new game. The table top skirmish game was released about a year ago by Joseph McCullough, and shares a ton of the DNA of one of his other games, Frostgrave. As a matter of fact, if you have played Frostgrave (you should), you’ll be able to pick up on Rangers of Shadow Deep in a jiff.

Shadow Deep has a few really cool aspects that set it apart from Frostgrave, though. Rangers is a co-op game, so you don’t face your fellow players in combat. You work together to solve riddles, battle monsters, and find clues about the encroaching darkness that has been wiping kingdoms off the map.

And you can play it solo. It’s pretty amazing. The game has a simple AI baked into it, but it still proves to be plenty challenging.

I’m getting ready to play my first game of Rangers, but I figure I might as well go bonkers with the project. I have set a few rules into play for myself, which I will outline here:

1- All the minis I will be playing with will be printed on my Elegoo Mars.

2- The terrain for each scenario will be scratch built, of printed here in the lab.

3- Everything used in game will need to be fully painted.

4- I will present write-ups of each game, as well as behind the scenes looks at the processes that I will be using to bring the game to the table. I’m really freaking bored, and this might be the only thing that keeps me from going kookoobananas.

5: This guy needs to be in the Ranger’s band of heroes:

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The first thing I needed to do was settle on a Ranger. In Shadow Deep, your Ranger can be just about anything; Spellcasters, classic barbarian types, sword-and-board twinks, dump-truck babies in bear suits, you name it.

I have always been partial to half-elf Rangers, especially the classic, archetypal bow wielding bad-ass. I would also like to play with a female Ranger character, because I’m tired of beefcake.

I’m also pretty burned out on cheesecake, so finding the right Ranger proved more challenging than I thought!

(I don’t have a problem with cheesecake mins. If you want a little T&A in your games, have at it! There are some great sculpts out there! It’s just not what I want right now!)

But I want a mini that looks fierce, and has the sense to go adventuring with something covering her vital organs.

My usual go-to STL model files have been from Titan Forge Miniatures, Artisan Guild, and Lion Tower Miniatures. They all have some great figs, and I came really close to going with this awesome Ranger from Lion Tower:

But, I kept looking. I also found Lila from The Dragon Trapper’s Lodge, and a few minutes later found another set of files that had Lila with an amazing mount. So, she’s in the queue, as is the earlier Ranger from Dan Kelly at Lion Tower Miniatures.

You can’t have enough Rangers, after all!

Next up: a big batch of zombies for the first scenario!

Miniatures

Warhammer Underworlds: Getting Trapped-up in Hrothgorn’s Mantrappers

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When that crystal-clear moment of honesty hits me full on the face, I have to admit to my decades-long love/loath relationship with Games Workshop. They make some good games, and a whole ton of just… okay games. They have some really petty policies when it comes to Indy game stores, because they know full well those stores absolutely rely on geedubs to make the rent every month.

The other thing about honesty, though? I have to admit that they have stepped up a ton when it comes to their sculpts, especially when it comes to fantasy offerings. Warcry has some gorgeous stuff, but Warhammer: Underworlds, especially Beastgrave, has been taking the cake.

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Look at Hrothgorn here. He’s a giant slab of ogre, who has a giant bear trap mounted to his harpoon gun. I’m sure the thing gets about ten feet before wind resistance off that trap drops the spear to the ground, but it looks cool.

He comes with a couple of idiot grots, here’s Luggit and Thwak, who double up to try and hit new heights of awesomeness:

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Quiv is literally a walking quiver. He carries extra bolts for the boss:

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Then there is Bushwakka, he’s the real brain trust of the bunch:

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Thrafnir rounds out the warband, and just happens to be a giant kitty. Meow.

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The minis are a blast to paint, the gnobblars in particular took about 10 minutes each with Contrast paint, and you can tell. Up close it’s a pretty slap-dash job, but they look fine from over a foot away. I took a little extra time on Hrothgorn and Kitty, and they’re a lot of fun to look at as I wait for quarantine to end so I can get down to Shiv and get a game in.

That’s a joke. I pretend to play games. I really go to Shiv Games to hang out with my friends. I’m a rabid painter at heart, the games that I occasionally get in are just a perk!

Miniatures, Workbench

Marvel Crisis Protocol, Part One

We got our demo copy of Marvel Crisis Protocol at Shiv Games Games today, and I wasted no time at all diving in to the box. It’s a pretty impressive affair, with ten Marvel characters, rules, tokens, and terrain crammed into the box;

I’ll have more on the minis after I get them painted, but I can honestly say I am really happy with the look and quality of the miniatures. The hard plastic looks great, and they are pretty easy to put together with the included instructions.

I would say the quality of the sculpts is a bit higher than Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars: Legion, but not quite as crisp as Wyrd’s Malifaux line. You also don’t need an engineering degree to put them together, so take that, Malifaux!

The minis took about three hours to Assemble (pun intended), and they look fantastic after a quick zenithal priming session!

I’ll be tackling the paint jobs on these beautiful figs in the next installment!