I hate painting fire.

I did the model on the left, and my buddy Matt P did the one on the right.

This Reaper model has been a massive pain in my ass for years. I’ve tried painting it multiple times and it’s never looked right. It’s got all these little recesses that have been hard to prime, the paint scrapes off the tiny little flames super easily, and then there’s painting fire. Fucking fire.

I tried painting yet again. Better, I think.

The biggest challenge is unlike the Mantic model with long flowing tendrils of flame, the Reaper Fire Elemental is absolutely covered in tiny little flames. In previous versions I tried to do blending and gradations on a per-flame basis, but it just creates a pointillist mess.

So for this overhaul, I wanted to treat the whole elemental as one big flame and keep the gradations on any one flame pretty subtle. The face got lost, however, so I went back and redid the face as its own flame, which really makes it pop. I’m pretty happy with it.

Been off painting for a bit but got the 28mm itch again. I also wanted to try some new techniques and refine some old ones, while making headway against my overflowing backlog of unpainted minis.

Earth elementals are about as simple as you can get, perfect for practice, and would help me get past my latest painting block, so I decided to get two birds stoned at once, as Ricky would say.

I tried a bunch of different things, like wet-on-wet, layering, layering then glazing, stippling and crosshatching, dotting, and drybrushing. They might all look very similar but they took pretty different avenues to get there!

The biggest stretch for me was pushing noon shadows – much of the shading in these pics aren’t actual shadows from the lighting but painted on. I’ve never really tried to do that before, and it was fun and really helps convey mass.

After a rocky start where I really struggled with highlighting, I took a photo of the minis under a bright lamp and then cranked up the lights and darks to extremes to help me visualize how the shadows worked.

The big takeaway isn’t going to surprise anyone: simple drybrushing and washes is massively faster than any of the other approaches I tried, but the hit in quality wasn’t too bad. The ‘best’ model took around 4 hrs, but the worst only took around 1.5 hrs, and wasn’t that much worse.

The other takeaway is that what looks good up close and what looks good from 3′ away are two different things. An early version had some some really great, naturalistic stone coloration and highlighting that looked awesome point blank. But on the table it was just “muddy”, busy, and hard to read. The more exaggerated highlights are cartoony up close, but really pop on the table.

Lastly, tile grout makes a great dirt texture! The models are monopose and monochromatic, so to add some variety I sprinkled on patches of tile grout and flock on two of them. Helps sell the narrative of them bursting from the ground.

When social distancing ends, I’m not sure what game I’ll play first, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to involve earth elementals!

*Tip of the the hat to Ron for the title!