2025 in Miniatures

2025 was an exceedingly productive year, with 146 minis in total painted, plus a bunch of terrain! As with last year, my goal was to paint about half non-reaper minis. I hit 40% with 58 non-Reaper minis, and 88 Reaper minis. That beats last year's total, which included terrain! 

 

It's hard to say exactly how many pieces of terrain I painted, as a good bit of it is modular.  

I'm not sure what my favorite thing to work on this past year was, but the Pepto Norkers are definitely up there.  

 

My goals going into 2025 were: 

BFG/Other Space Ships - Success!

More Frostgrave/Stargrave - Success!

LotR Sauron & Ring Wraith on Fell Beast - Sauron yes, Ring Wraith on Fell beast, no

~50% non-Reaper Minis - Close

Build & Paint some Sci-Fi Terrain - Yes! One scratch built, the rest 3D printed. 

For 2026 I'm going to have some similar goals:

BFG/Other Space Ships - Finish the original Tau fleet ships I have and then get started on... something else. Eldar? Forgeworld style Tau? Chaos Battleship? 

More Frostgrave/Stargrave - paint some minis and use them in a game!

LotR Balrog & Ring Wraith on Fell Beast 

~50% non-Reaper Minis

Build & Paint some Sci-Fi Terrain - Scratch build a few more pieces with all the junk I've collected, including another trashbash spaceship

 More jungle scatter terrain for my alien ruins?

Amamao Paint Pens Review

2 years ago a friend gave me a box of Amamao paint pens for the holidays.. and I was skeptical. I'm really happy using my reaper paints on my minis, and I didn't see what advantages these brought to the table.

I remain skeptical on their use painting tabletop minis, but I discovered back in April that they are fantastic for working on my 3D printed terrain. I also this month discovered that they're great for my 5 year old to use to help me paint my terrain. 

Not only does it minimize the mess he can make as compared to the craft & hobby paints, but he has a lot more control with the pens. An additional benefit is that he has the entire array of colors to choose from, and a love of rainbows, so everything he's worked on has ended up a lot more colorful than it would have been if I'd been doing it by myself. 

Being 5, and easily distracted, he's a little sloppy, but with the pens it's easy enough to go back over and tidy things up. I've also made sure to use the craftsmart antique white somewhere on all the buildings to help tie it all together. 

As for the pens themselves, each pen actually has 2 colors, one on each end. Interestingly the tips on each end are different. One has a larger tip, and the other a smaller one. Both come to a pretty fine point, but for terrain painting, I've largely found the larger tip more useful, and have switched pens and colors if I wanted the bigger tip. There are a few narrow spots the pens can't reach into, but that's a minor issue overall, and mostly spots I'm going to paint a dark shadow color anyway. I've also found that the paint colors don't always match the tip. Not a wild difference, but enough that I've a couple of times swapped pens for something more to my liking. 

 

The color selection is almost perfect. My biggest issue is the lack of a good red in the set. Seems an odd oversight. The selection of metallic paints is fun, but I would have liked a dirty bronze color to work with. 

I have to say that for the price these are absolutely worth it, especially if you have a bunch of terrain to paint. 

Goblin soldiers

I built these minis a long while ago, and they were part of that batch that I printed with white spray primer that got super chalky and hard to work with. It was some years ago, and because it was so miserable to work with I put basically all the minis away, and didn't do anything else with them for years. 

It finally got to the point that they were taking up space in my figure cases that I needed for actually painted minis, so I pulled them all out and looked up what to do with them last summer. The answer was a wash with alcohol. 

It mostly worked. The primer still wasn't the best to work with, but at least the paint would stick and not rub off. I started with the frostgrave barbarians, then the gnolls & cultists, and now the goblins are the last batch of white primed minis I have to work with. THANK GOODNESS!

They were painted with reaper paint colors: 
Wilderness green for the skin
Leather brown
Purple for the hair
Linen white for the teeth, horns, and shield freehand, and adding to the other colors for highlights
Brown liner for lining
Dwarven bronze 
Gunmetal (vallejo paint)

The bases were covered with a rough blend of gravel and coffee grounds (dried) that I covered with gesso and then dry brushed with various shades of grey.

While not my best work I'm happy to have completed them, and can finally be done with that awful batch of white primed minis. 

Also, while working on them, I was pretty sure they were orcs, but when I finally found them online, they're listed as goblin soldiers. Pretty beefy for goblins, so should I ever get the chance, I'll probably use them as orcs. And yes, one is a frostgrave gnoll body with an orc head. I'll use him as the boss. 

Sauron

The Dark Lord himself, an imposing figure of shadow and death wrapped in armor with the One Ring blazing away on his finger, reaching down to slay Isildur at the height of his power, the moment before his defeat.  

I've owned this mini for literally decades. I bought it when it was originally released. Last year I decided I was finally going to paint it, and added it to my "to do" shelf. Then I didn't get around to it. This year, I finally did. It's honestly such a beautiful sculpt that it practically paints itself... but first, assembly. 

Sauron is a solid metal mini, and the connection points for the head and arms are both flat. Not ideal for such a heavy mini, and just asking to be knocked over and have an arm or 2 snap off. So out with the pin vice and wire, and make sure that The Dark Lord is solidly assembled. 

I primed Sauron with Stynalrez Metal Tone primer, a favorite of mine when the weather is too cold to spray prime, and also a great base layer for the armor. 

The cape I painted first with Reaper's Red Liner paint mixed with Brown Liner. I washed it with black wash, then did pure Red Liner, followed up with some highlights using Asmodeus Red, washed that with black wash, and then more Asmodeus Red mixed with some Cloudy Grey... followed by yet another black wash. Are you seeing a theme? 

For the armor, I highlighted the armor tone primer with Shadowed Steel, followed by yet more Black Wash. I repeated the highlight and then used a Numinara Rust wash splotched on to add a little more color. 

Finally the One Ring I painted first with Asmodeus Red, and then with Dwarven Gold, and teeny tiny highlights of Dragon Gold. I then went back and added just a bit of the Asmodeus Red to the shadows of the helm.

As seems to be a theme this year, I haven't done anything with his base. He deserves more than just some sand, but I haven't decided what yet. So here he is, finished, but not based.

Purple People Eater

One of the Reaper Challenge League challenges for this month was "one eyed one horned flying purple people eater" with the caveat that to meet the challenge for this category is that you only needed to hit one of the parts of the challenge... but what's the fun of that?

Of course I don't have a mini in my collection that fulflls all the requirements, so I went digging. I do have a large cyclops, but didn't feel like painting a giant. So I kept digging and came across my bag of early Bones Kickstarter demons, and the ape demon felt perfect. Well, aside from the 2 eyes and no horn. 

I can fix that. I just cut off his face, and grabbed the greenstuff. The hardest part was the teeth. I wasn't originally going for big flat mollar type teeth, but I liked how it turned it.

Once the greenstuff had cured, it was time to paint. I primed/base coated with Kraken Ink (purple liner) and the eye with linen white. 

I then used a mix of Kraken Ink, Clear Purple, Ruddy Flesh, Dragon Red, and Aged Bone to do the rest of the mini. The final step, aside from basing, was to apply a gloss varnish on the eye and the tongue. 

 

Not sure when I'll get to the base, so here's the finished but the base pic.

Wolf In Sheep's Clothing

 A wolf-in-sheep's-clothing is a vegetable monster that lurks in undergrowth or grassy meadowlands, creeping from place to place by pulling with its root tentacles. The body of the creature resembles a tree trunk, with a vertical maw full of jagged teeth, and 10–15 feet long eyestalks. It can sprout a growth that resembles a small furry creature to attract prey. 

This monster was originally published in the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and then reprinted in the AD&D MM2. 

It is a ridiculously silly monster, as befitting the same module that introduced the gaming world to the Froghemoth. On the other hand, when Reaper made a mini for it, there was no way I was not going to get and paint it! 

I'm not entirely happy with the eyes, but overall, I had a ton of fun painting it!

Reaper's Baba Yaga's Hut

 Back in the fall of 2023 I started working on Baba Yaga's hut. It came assembled, and while the chicken legs are great, I wanted to be able to use the house on its own. So I started the process to remove the legs in a way that I hoped would allow me to use them in the future. Ideally I'd be able to put the house on the legs and take them off as needed. They were very tight, and practically soaked in super glue, so I knew this was going to be a process.

First I boilded some water in a pot we no longer used for cooking.And while the water was heating up, I got some heavy duty gloves.

Into the water it goes. I think I ended up soaking this thing half a dozen times total. After each soak, which got the legs wobbly soft, I would take it out of the water and pull as hard as I could. That was enough for one leg, and it popped off, but the other leg I had to get my xacto knife to cut at the glue

Eventually I got there! 

Of course there was then so much water in the house itself, I needed to let it drain. 

But I could get the legs back on! Success! 

It would then be more than a year before I actually started to paint it. 

It started with a coat of Brown Liner, followed by Redstone Shadow for the walls. 

The roof was a succession of Desert Stone, followed by Desert Sand dry brushes, which were also done to the walls. I wanted this looking as dusty, rotten, and in desperate need of some TLC as it could. 

I went lighter on the roof support beams, and then began splotching on Olive Drab, followed by Olive Drab plus more and more Pure White

Then it was onto the windows. I made sure to repaint them with Brown Liner to get them dark and clean up any stray brush strokes from earlier steps. and then hit the glass parts with Kraken Ink. Initially I kept the highlight on the broken edges of the glass small, but it didn't look as good as I wanted. 

So I made the glass less dark overall, and that worked. 

Finally it was adding a few details to the doors and the chimney, and it was done!

Actually painting the hut only took a few evenings worth of work. Dry brushing once the main colors are blocked in made it go really quickly, and then it was just a matter of going back and cleaning up the details. 

Now I just need to do the base and the legs so it can be a proper hut for Baba Yaga!

2024 in Minis

Another productive year, with 122 minis painted (including some terrain) 65 of them are Reaper minis, which is just slightly more than half. As my goal for the year was to paint more non-Reaper minis, I'm going to count that as a win! 

 

Further breaking it down, about 10% of the minis are sci-fi, a stat I want to bring up for 2025. Once again Undead are also sorely underrepresented, though there are a good number of Demons.  I'm also happy to have put a good dent in the old WotC Chainmail minis collection I've got.

 

And that doesn't count the 19 trees I make and painted this past summer! Adding them in brings the total up to 141, which would be my best year since I started tracking it.

As for my other goals from last year:

• BFG Tau fleet - Never touched. Didn't paint a single spaceship in 2024
• Frostgrave & Stargrave figures - Success!
• LotR Sauron - Never touched it.
• Baba Yaga's Hut - I painted the hut! I have plans for the base & legs, but I'm not there yet. 

The other fun thing about this year's work is that after I put them away after taking the picture, I ran out of space in my figure cases. So I just ordered another one that should get me through this next year, assuming I keep up my average painting rate.

I don't know if I'll manage more than 100 minis next year, but it isn't just about the numbers! It's being happy about what I got done, and this year, I am. It wasn't all great. I had some issues with the white spray primer I used on a lot of the Frostgrave minis I worked on, which made them chalky, even after a wash with isopropyl alcohol. Of all the minis, I think I enjoyed getting the Chainmail Drakes done the most, but it's hard to pick one, or even one group of minis as my favorite.

Anyway, for 2025 here's what I'm thinking:

• BFG/Other Space Ships - no particular goal, just paint some
• More Frostgrave/Stargrave Minis!
• LotR Sauron & Ring Wraith on Fell Beast
• ~50% non-Reaper Minis
• Build & Paint some Sci-Fi Terrain
  

Blood Demons

"Do you hear that grunting?" 

"Who's working out in a dungeon?"

 Looking through the doorway, the party sees a wide circular chamber that stretches down at least 60 feet, with a winding stairway wrapping around the wall. Down below, half a dozen buff red demons were busy flexing, stretching, doing one armed pushups, squats, box jumps and jump rope with a chain...  

"According to the map, we have to go down there." Allianora grumbles

"I hate gym demons" Rathgar moans. 

"Who doesn't." Feris says. "Ice storm?"

"Yeah, lets not get into their reach if we can avoid it." Nimble says, looking down at the bulging muscles

Blood Demons

Armor Class: 6
Hit Dice: 4* (M)
Move: 120' (40')
Attacks: 2 claws/ 1 gore or special
Damage: 2d4+1/2d4+1/1d6+1 or special
Number Appearing: 1d6 (1d6)
Save As: F8
Morale: 11
Treasure Type:
Intelligence: 7
Alignment: Chaotic
XP Value: 175

Monster Type: Demon, lesser (rare)

Blood demons are the gym bros of the demon world. While they love the chaos and destruction that they can cause, they also enjoy psychological intimidation that their impressive physical forms can instill, and will mock anyone and anything that is less physically developed than them. Because they're so energetic, unless properly restricted by the summoning spells, they will continue to cause mayhem and destruction until banished or destroyed. 

In combat, the demons will attempt to intimidate their opponents and flex and pose to show off their physique. Anyone viewing this must make a save vs spells or be in stunned for 1d3+1 rounds. While stunned they will suffer a -2 to all attacks, AC, and saves. This effect can only be done once per day per opponent. 

Like all lesser demons, they can be turned as undead (as mummies) and have the bonus demon strenth of +1 to damage (included above), and are immune to sleep and charm spells, and are immune to fire. 

Terrain: any

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These demons are from the Reaper Miniatures Blood Demons set, and were painted with the following reaper paints: Red Liner, Asmodius Red, Seoni Scarlet, Sunrise Orange, Dragon Copper, Carbon Grey, and Skeleton Bone

Miniatures: Chainmail Felldrakes

I've been wanting to paint more of my non-Reaper minis, and I have a good sized collection of old Chainmail minis kicking around. They're generally fun, if a little on the flat side. Not all of them were bought new, and I had in my collection these 3. The green one I painted sometime around 2001-2002. The tan one I have no memory of where it came from or who painted it. It wasn't me, I know that. The unpainted one was probably bought sometime around 2004-06 when I picked up a bunch of Chainmail minis on discount.

 

As I'd already painted a trio of drakes, I wanted these three to be visually consistent with them, so all three minis got primed, and then painted with Pine, Wilderness, and Naga Greens for the main bodies. I added in just a bit of Candlelight Yellow for the final highlights. I used Runic purple for the crests, and Skeleton Bone for the teeth, horns, claws and spikes.

The bases were covered with a mixed gravel that was based with brown liner, then brought up with Russet Brown and dry brushed with Cairn Stone.

And here they all are together!

DGS Freeblades Snake Sorceress & Thief

As 2024 is my year of trying to paint as many non-reaper minis as reaper minis (at least) I picked out these 2 to work on. I bought both at ReaperCon not because I have any interest in the Freeblades game (who needs another game that I'm never gonna get to play) but because I liked the sculpts.

However, as much as I liked them, they gave me issues. I think this is in part because I was using some old Stynylrez primer to start them, and the bottle of yellow seems to have gone bad. The reddish brown that I switched to worked, but then fought me as I went along. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that I'm so used to using either black primer or Brown/Blue/Grey Liner (all dark colors). 

The thief and snake sorceress both gave me problems with their skin tones. I started with tanned flesh and worked up with Rosy skin, and they looked ghastly. Literally. Somehow their skin ended up looking grey. Since I was using auburn shadow as the base for both their hair, I gave their skin a glaze of it, which helped but still looked wrong. I then used that same glaze and mixed a drop into the rosy skin. Finally I had something that didn't look dead, and I could work with.

For the thief I painted her jerkin with carbon grey then washed it with black wash, followed by a highlight of carbon grey. I used the same color for the sorceress' pants. The thief's cloak was Orchid Purple largely to give it some color. One of the problems with painting thieves is that they're going to tend toward lots of dark muddy colors to help them blend in to shadows, but that can be really boring to look at. I try to compromise with using dark colors, but still having them be colors other than brown and grey.

The snake sorceress’ top and snake were painted with a base of wilderness green, brought up with viper Green for highlights. I decided to use bronze for her bracers and greaves, gold for the necklace and belt. Originally it was all going to be gold, but I didn't like the way it looked, and painted over it.

All in all these were fun minis to paint, and they'll look even better when I get around to basing them.

2023 in Miniatures

 Another productive year, and again largely thanks to the Reaper Challenge league. 

It's kinda hard to count how many "minis" I painted, depending on how you define mini vs terrain. If w divide it up by things that were 3D printed vs from a miniature company, I painted 113 minis, plus a bunch of terrain. If you want to count things like the tent and the scatter terrain statues and stuff, then closer to 100. Either way, it's still a respectable amount of minis

There wasn't a whole lot of sci-fi represented this year. In fact it was probably outnumbered by the normal animals I painted this year. Chances are 2024 will probably be similar, unless I really buckle down and get some more Stargrave minis knocked out.

Also underrepresented this year were undead. Only 2 skeletons painted (only one shown, the other joined the ranks of the Ed Sculpt legion at ReaperCon), which is less than the 3 from last year, and the 7 from the year before. I guess the massive amount of undead from 2020 has kept me off that bandwagon. 

I've already blogged about most of the terrain, so I'm not going to focus too much on that, but I will say that I plan on making more of the alien jungle scatter terrain. I want to have a really nice looking set to play in.  

It's really too early to guess what the year will bring, but of the 5 minis currently on my painting desk, only 1 is from Reaper. While I have a LOT of Reaper minis, I do have a sizable pile of non-Reaper minis, and I've been very focused on Reaper minis with the Reaper Challenge League the last few years, and find myself wanting to work on stuff that isn't Reaper for a bit.

I will say that I've got a couple of specific plans/goals/things I want to work on:
BFG Tau fleet
Frostgrave & Stargrave figures
LotR Sauron
Baba Yaga's Hut

We'll see what I actually tackle this year.

Minis: Man at Arms & Weird West Oz Scarecrow

While thematically these are very different minis, I used basically the same colors on both, painted them at the same time, so you get them together. Also, I didn't really take any good WIP pics, so you get final pics plus some description of what I did.  

First up, the Reaper miniatures henchman. I love the old school simplicity of this guy, and in keeping with the sculpt, I wanted to keep the paint job simple, but I also wanted it to be a little brighter than I usually go for. 

Next up is the scarecrow. I wanted to really lean into the creepy with this figure, and I think I pulled it off. It's funny how even using the same colors there's nothing cheerful or bright about this guy. Granted the sculpt helps a lot, but especially on the coat, minimizing the areas of highlight and leaving more shadowed areas really makes a difference. 

The greens and browns on both minis are going to look familiar, as I used the same base colored for these figures as I did for the plant folk in the last mini post, wilderness green, highlighted up with candlelight yellow, and russet brown. The design on the shield is the same candlelight yellow. 

I used reapers Pathfinder reds, starting with the asmodeus red as the base, and using the seoni scarlet to highlight it. 

The black on each is Carbon Grey given a black wash

The wood and bones on the scarecrow were a mishmash of colors starting with a base of russet brown with various hints of other colors added in to get different shades. 

The metallics all started with a base of stynylrez metal tone primer, and then brought up with shadowed steel or old bronze. Most of it was then hit with a wash of black, and a tighter highlight to pick up the details. 

Freeblades Vinelings, Dryad, and Saryad

Some years back at Reapercon I picked up a couple minis from DGS Games from their Freeblades skirmish game.. and like many of the minis I've gotten over the years, it was a LONG time before I pulled them out to work on them, but last month, I finally did... spurred on by the couple of vinelings I added to the pile of opportunity. 

After washing them, and gluing them to their bases (I put the dryad and saryad on slightly larges bases than the vinelings) I decided to bend the vinelings into slightly more active poses, and then primed them with a red-ish brown primer.  You can see the color on the base of the vineling below.

Once they were primed, I used Russet Brown as the primary color to paint them with, and added Osirian Sand to lighten the color for each successive highlight. Mostly this was dry brushing. Then it was onto the foliage. 

I used Wilderness Green as the base color, and then lightened it up with more Osirian Sand.

Once that was all dry it was time to add some basing material. I started with a mixed sand to give it texture and to cover the gaps in the bases. I then painted the base with the same Russet Brown, and gave it a quick Osirian Sand dry brush.

 I followed that up with a mix of various turfs and static grasses to tie it all together. After cleaning up the edges of the base with pure black, they were good to go! 

Simple paint jobs, but absolutely lovely sculpts. My next Freeblades mini is a necromancer that I'm combining with a Mantic Zombie to make a little diorama.

Kalanzar the Wicked part 1

 It's time to paint another dragon! This time I'm going with another of the Bones 5 dragons, my favorite, the red!

Just look at that beautiful sculpt!

 

Out of the bad though, I wasn't as thrilled with it. Sure, it's unpainted, unassembled plastic, but that base... It just doesn't give me the proper feeling that this big dragon deserves. First off, 3" is just a little tight, so digging through my bigass pile of bases, I grabbed a 4" round and... realized it isn't just about the diameter, it's about the height. 

It's a little hard to tell, but the feet aren't really in their slots. There's a little warping, and unless I want to do a lot of work to get it all to fit together, and I don't, I need to scrap the the included base. 

That's better...

 And it better matches the base height of Aganzaraxthe Foul too. 

More to come!