Category: Miniatures

Most of these guys were donated to me by Mike Monaco when I was getting back into painting a couple years ago.  Mike has more minis, by far, than anyone I’ve ever known.  And astonishingly, they are almost all painted.  How he does it, I’ll never know.  But he cranks out painted minis.  His blog, Swords and Dorkery, showcases a lot of his work.

Painting these minis reminded me how fun painting is and got me re-hooked on the hobby.

The dwarf here is standard dwarf fare; armor, helm, axe, shield.  I was just trying to make a clean look.  The ranger is meant to be concealing himself in some tall reeds or swamp grass.  His colors were meant to be hunting colors, so he’s pretty drab.  The female is shown completed in the next set of pictures.

On this pair I was focusing on shading clothing and highlighting hair.  I went with a monochrome blue on the male’s robe and cowl.

On several of these early photos, I still hadn’t figured out how to take photos of such small things, so many of them are blurry.  This one’s blue background throws off the colors of the mini. It looks much less saturated in real life.  There is a blue ribbon tied to his right leg, indicating he has won a tourney or something.

The wood plank base and the striped bandana were the fun parts to do on this guy.  More camera difficulties has washed out the color in these photos.

I spent a lot of time blending the pale yellow into orange on this girl’s clothes.  The little silver dot pattern on the cape and the hair highlighting are also features I was proud of when I finished this mini.

This guy’s pose was difficult to make sense of.  I figured he was winding up to make a backhand strike at something.  I was trying to bury the original base with basing of my own, but got the mix of grain sizes WAY off, so it ended up looking much more chunky than I intended.  I just tried to make it look like rubble and put a clump of moss in front of him like some plant creature rising up in front of him.  His shield is also unusual in that I rarely see shields with this kind of dramatic distinctive sculpting.

I don’t like minis with big helm decorations like this guy has.  I almost never know how to paint them realistically, and still don’t.  I did take the opportunity to do some freehand work on the shield that came out pretty well.  Experimented with some sculpting paste on the base, didn’t work as I intended.  It looks too droopy and gloppy.

This ninja is intended to be torch-lit from above and to his left.  This is typically called Object Source Lighting (OSL), but for this mini the “object source” is not part of the mini, just implied.  The shadow on the ground on his right isn’t a real shadow, it’s the original color of the base before I painted on the torchlight color.

This set of small rats from Reaper was painted for a D&D introduction for my niece and nephew.  The “Bones” plastic that these are cast with rounds out detail, so I’m sure the originals had more detail depth in the fur that didn’t come out in the final minis.  That’s typical of Reaper’s “Bones” figures.  These also suffered from the Armory matte sealant, so the final colors were dulled by the final spray.

This is a friend’s mini that I offered to paint for him.  I don’t know what company made it.  Perhaps he’ll comment on that…    We’ve been playing a Boot Hill game for the past year or so, so we need lots of cowboys, indians, and other pioneer types.  It’s not exactly a high-quality sculpt or casting, but it looks very nice on the table.  If you look too long you realize that the oxen are way too small compared to the size of the wagon.  Regardless, it was fun to paint and looks great on the gaming table.