dungeons & Dragons – Grimmleigh's Lab

Big, Bad Bones

There is a fine line every hobbyist walks, where we balance our budgets against our love of our hobby. It’s especially difficult with the miniature hobby, because if you’re not completely dedicated to one single faction in one single game, you’ve got a lot of shiny miniatures competing for your attention!

I think that helps explain the appeal of budget miniature lines like Reaper Bones, which are priced low enough that you can get a decent amount of figures for your RPG or combat game without breaking the bank. But, the quality is often times lacking, which can be a bitter pill to swallow for people who regularly game with minis from Games Workshop or Corvus Belli!

The Reaper Bones Black Series promises better detail out of a new PVC formula, so I bought one to check out. The verdict? Much better! Not perfect, but a skeletal ogre for less than ten bucks is hard to come by, and the figure looks pretty great painted up!

I wanted the ogre to look like his armor has been kept in pretty good shape, but the rigors of time have taken hold a bit. The main body was painted with Studio P3 Menoth White Base, then touched up with Menoth White Highlight. I then went over the figure with glazes made from Daler Rowney inks, acrylic medium, and distilled water, and took some time to layer on some cool patina effects.

The skull was painted a camo green, and then layered up to white. All of the metals where layered up from a gunmetal to bright silver, then given a pretty heavy wash with a glaze made from Pthalo Blue and Burnt Umber inks.

Then I picked out all of the metals with Citadel’s Typhus Corrosion, which then got followed up with a little Ryza Rust effect to get some rust and funk going on with the mini!

I cut a base out of plasticard and built up the textures with Ave’s Expoxysculpt, then painted that grey with some dead grass for added impact. This guy was the unwitting beginning to a dead army, which I had no idea I was going to start when I picked this dude up!

Now the struggle is figuring out a way to make him work for both Vanguard and Oathmark, which are both games I would like to play when the pandemic is over!

Miniatures, Workbench

Fantasy Realms: Gronk Boomshot

One of the cooler aspects of owning a 3D printer is seeing something you love from a great sculptor, buying the file, and several gooey hours later, holding your new mini in your hot little hands.

One of my favorite companies out there right now is Artisan Guild. The sculpts are gorgeous, with tons of character and expression. The Ogres and Dwarves are neck and neck in my heart right now, but Gronk Boomshot here pushes things over the top.

Peg leg? Check. Bandana? Check. Loincloth barely covering his booty? Checkity check. He’s the whole package.

I also wanted to play with skin tones here, so there is a bit of blue in the shading, and a lot of pinks and reds on his facial skin. A true delight to print AND paint!

Terrain, Workbench

Scratch-Built Fantasy Village, Part 5

Things start to come together quick at this point in a project! Now that the base is dry, I brushed on a solid coat of cheap brown acrylic craft paint. This is about the only thing that I use cheap craft paint on– it’s perfect for this kind of job!

Now that the base color is down, a couple of dry-brush passes bring the base closer to what I’m looking for. I also paint in a layer of green for the moat, which will get filled with clear resin later. The stone work that I carved in earlier gets a coat of grey paint, which will get some highlights and shading later.

Color blocking is done, so now it’s time for flock. I use a couple of different colors of flocking, and will use some tufts, too. Foliage is never a uniform color or height, right?

I took some ground up dried leaves and stuck them to the bottom of the moat with watered down white glue. Shrubbery is the last step here, which has to be glued down using super glue.

Next up, it’s time to fill that moat and glue down the building!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!