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!

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:

Primer: White

Skin: ??? -> Flesh wash -> Dwarf Flesh -> blackline wash

Shirt: Blood Red -> Carroburg Crimson wash -> Blood Red -> + Yellow

Pants: That ancient 1990s Citadel dark blue with no label, and the less dark but equally ancient Citadel mid-tone blue with no label

Shoes: Abaddon Black -> + Mechanicus Standard Grey

Helm: Boltgun Metal -> Nuln Oil Gloss wash -> Boltgun Metal -> Chainmail

Leather: Scorched Brown -> Mournfang Brown -> Snakebite Leather

Bow: Snakebite Leather? -> Agrax Earthshade wash -> micron pen Brown grain -> very thin glaze Balor Brown

Arrows: ???

Base: Amsterdam Burnt Umber -> + Amsterdam Burnt Sienna -> + Americana Sand

Flock/Grass: Woodland Scenics Turf -> Static Grass -> Army Painter Woodland Tuft -> various flowers, clump foliage, and debris

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.

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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 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!