I spent part of my Bastille Day basing this model. You know what’s great? Having friends with 3d printers who just randomly send you cool models, and then having other friends who are waaaaaay faster at hobbying than you and are happy to paint it for you. That’s right, all I did for this model was base it to match the rest of my Nature army! That is some top tier General Sloth laziness.
I especially love the face work. Nice job on the eyes and lips, Matt!
Oops, don’t look at the tufts. Looks like they need touch ups.
The mini comes from the Iain Lovecraft Feywood series. I just don’t understand the tits & ass elf chicks in bikinis thing (seriously, guys, there’s this thing called “The Internet” that has all the titillation you will ever need), but the rest of the line is pretty good.
Alternatively called “Archers of Loaf” but I wasn’t sure anyone would get a 1990s indie rock band reference.
Second batch of miniatures that I started 25 years ago is now finished. My goal was to finish all the retouching in 10 hrs, but it took me 15.
To recap: These are 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles Bretonnians that I got in the starter set around 1996. Then-Private Sloth slapped down some base colors and that was that. I think in the 2000s I put down a flesh wash and some sand but didn’t finish them.
I have a lot of projects in various states of completion and it drives me crazy. Units abandoned from games that never caught on with my friends, models that just didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped, or projects that were just too challenging or boring and so I got burnt out.
My goal during the 2020 pandemic is to get at least some of these projects finished to a tabletop or tabletop+ standard, but also to do it as quickly as possible. I still have a really hard time turning off my completionist brain that wants to paint and detail ALL THE THINGS, but I’m getting better.
I think I’m going to work on the knights next. Here are a couple I started 25 years ago. That’s… gonna be a lot of retouching.
Paint Log
I might get some command models for these archers, so for my records here’s a paint log:
Finished the rest of the Bretonnian archers! I cannot tell you how excited I am about this. I started them 25 years ago, with just a basic base coat, and I finally went back and finished them to my current tabletop standard. I normally don’t paint blocks of infantry because I just get bored out of my mind, it turns out I just need a couple decades in between layers.
I had one fun little experiment – testing out bows. The third one here was the winner:
I used a brown Micron pen to draw in some wood grain lines, and then gave it an ultra-thin glaze with a light tan to blend it in. Micron pens are totally cheating.
And now to do it all over again with the second unit…
I started these miniatures waaaaay back in 1996, in the 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles starter. But I only did a basic paint job, and then I sort of fell out of the wargaming & painting hobby other than the occasional RPG miniature. I finally got back into it in a big way around 2015.
The model on the right is more-or-less my original paint job.
The model on the left (with the broken bow – I like to use damaged models as test pieces) is what happens with an extra hour of highlighting and shading.
I didn’t actually notice much difference until I put them side-by-side! I have like 40 of these fuckers, so I dunno if I’ll commit to doing this for all of them, but it’s nice to see what the extra effort yields.
I ran a horde of (unpainted) air elementals a couples times in KoW 3e. They were… OK. They need Brew of Strength to be a threat. They are good flank/rear harassers but you really want a Surge source nearby for shenanigans. Once you pay for BoS and a character with Surge, and then go through the trouble to keep them close, you start to really it’s a pretty hefty investment for debatable ROI.
Or I just suck, which is totally an option. Either way, I dunno how much these will see play. If anyone else has had good experiences with them I’d love to hear it!
These are Pathfinder Battles Deep Cuts Air Elementals and come as translucent plastic which, on paper, is a cool idea for something made of air, but on the table they just look like hunks of… translucent plastic.
Original Pathfinder Battles Deep Cuts Air Elementals (not my pic but I forgot the source)
So I was thinking of ways to give them more color and texture and variation and came up with “swirling dust and leaves and debris”. I used tile grout, thinned washes, flock, and various dried herbs. If I were to do it again I would go lighter on the grout, smooth out the transitions, and carry the dust and leaves higher up on the body. But all in all I’m pretty happy.
I did the model on the left, and my buddy Matt P did the one on the right.
Left: Reaper metal Fire Elemental SKU: 02779, and Right: Mantic resin Fire Elemental
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.
Pathfinder Battles Deep Cuts Unpainted Miniatures: Medium Earth Elementals
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!
Original models
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!
A family emergency meant I spent a lot of time this week waiting around in a hospital (everything went as well as could be hoped, thanks for asking!), and after hours of staring blankly at my Kindle or endlessly scrolling through Facebook or Reddit, or procrastinating over work emails, I realized “Wait a minute, I could be painting!”
Heroics & Ros 6mm MAF 1 Gaulish Infantry, WIP
I’m not gonna lie, it’s not great. The lighting is bad, my posture awkward, the dry air drinks in paint, and the limited infrastructure that I could smuggle in with all the more important stuff makes for a pretty challenging environment.
But I will say it let me zone out and relax for a few hours at a time, and at least feel a little productive.
I hope you never have to end up spending days at the hospital, but if you do, know that with just a couple bulging pockets this is an option.
Our miniature collections are often more than just gaming accessories – they are the tokens of our friendships, losses, laughs, triumphs, perseverance, growth, and more.
When I was working on these minotaurs, a flood of memories came rushing back and made me realize how there is more to our hobby than pushing toy soldiers around.
I believe these were given to me by my good friend Bryant some 25 years ago as a going away gift, before he departed for college and I got caught-up in the first dot-com boom. We could not have been more different – he was a talented basketball player while I was (and remain) athletically-challenged, a devout Christian when I was a firm atheist, academically successful where I struggled, first generation of immigrant Chinese parents to my white and 150 year-old American family, etc. But we became good friends, in no small part to D&D.
The models saw heavy use in our AD&D 2e Dragonlance campaign, but never got painted because painting is hard and I gave up on it. Then they sat in a box for years.
Then I was contacted by some guy on an RPG board, Andy, who was new to my city and wanted to play a game. So I invited him and some other internet strangers to my place for a new D&D campaign.
Andy was very nervous about meeting up in a basement with a bunch of strangers for D&D and — no joke — had a giant fucking kitchen knife(!) concealed in his jacket in case I turned out to be a psycho or something. (Yeah, *I’m* the possible psycho in this scenario?)
Andy and I became good friends, and he brought in his mathematician brother, Stath, who liked to paint minis. One day he fished these models out of my collection and gave them a nice paint job as a gift for me. Thanks to him, I got reinspired to paint and after all these years became halfway decent at it. Eventually careers took both Stath and Andy to NYC, but the hobby stuck with me.
A decade later, I was hanging out with a bunch of middle-aged dudes with kids and careers and whatnot we were all reminiscing about the “good ol’ days” of playing D&D, and thus the “Irresponsible Fathers of Hamm” society was formed. With a mix of chefs, grillmasters, and scotch aficionados it had a weird dynamic.
We were either a gaming club with an eating and drinking problem, or an eating and drinking club with a gaming problem.
D&D 4e was too complicated and tactical for our drunken murderhobo games so we landed on Warhammer Quest as our game engine. Now there was a game that you could drink, laugh, loot, and smite to!
Better than HeroQuest, even!
And what was the most lethal monster at low-levels in Warhammer Quest? Yup, you guessed it: The dreaded Minotaur. Out came these two models, and lo! many a would-be hero fell before them. That group was a monthly cornerstone of my life for several years, and these two minotaurs starred in much of it. But as we slid into our 40s and 50s new demands arose that pulled us all from the game table, the campaign came to an end, and back onto the shelf went the minotaurs.
Kings of War 2e: Herd vs Empire of Dust. I got utterly annihilated.
A few years ago, I got back into tabletop wargaming in a big way. And once more these ancient models are being pressed back into service, this time as “Guardian Brutes” in my Kings of War “Herd” army, and ready to see new friendships.
And so I touched up their paint jobs and gave them fresh new decorative bases, and thought fondly of my friends who have fought with or against them over the years – Bryant, Andy, Stath, Jeremy, Mike, Alexi, Alex, Matt, Joseph, Hans, Tony, Ari, and Matt. Happy gaming, y’all, wherever you are.
So I’ve done a shite job of posting updates to the KOW Forum, or even keeping this blog up to date. In my defense, I’m a goddamn sloth.
However, I’ve finally finished up my Trident Realm warband! That’s actually a pretty big deal for me, even for something that was supposed to be just a table-top quality speedpaint project.
OK, not entirely finished. Gotta clean up the base edges, and I want to gloss or satin coat some of the minis to look more ‘wet’. And there’s always more layering and clean-up to do. But I’m going to call it here – realistically these aren’t going to hit the table much in the near future as our Vanguard campaign is ending soon, and I’m already feeling the draw to build a new warband. (Preferably tanky, as all I’ve really played are squishy finesse factions. Abyssal Dwarfs, maybe?)
Anywho, here’s how they ended up:
Naiad Heartpiercers
Naiads – Centurion, Envoy, Standard Bearer, two Lurkers, six Initiates
Water Elemental (not Mantic), Mythican/Aquamancer, two Thuuls
Treeleaper and two Riverguard
A sizeable chunk of these were painted by my buddy MattP (I traded him a bunch of neglected Cadians). We independently landed on very similar color schemes, so that worked out nicely!
FYI, I’m in the market for one more Heartpiercer so I can at least have an MMC troop on hand for regular Kings of War! Ping me if you have a spare.
General Sloth 