The Sheriff

Well, I survived the over-eating over the holidays and I'm back posting.


This time a master-level character from the City expansion. Anyone can become the Sheriff by demonstrating their strength at the royal castle. After that you get the bonuses and abilities of the master-level character added to your old abilities. Very nice.

My officer of the law is a English civil war sergeant from Warlord Games. Not sure about the sculptor, tho'.


A happy New Year to everyone!

The Werewolf

The Werewolf of the inner region of the Basic gaming board.

Another plastic from Reaper by Ben Siens.

The Dragonet

The Dragonet followers from the Dragons expansion provides useful tips about those fiery beasts. With the Dragonet you can combine strength and craft for combat against dragons.

Metal from Reaper by Kevin Williams.

Arachnophobia, Or A Giant Spider

An 8-legged monstrosity from the Dungeon.

I finally RTFM, and I learned to stop worrying and love the Reaper "Bones" plastic. I had a lot of problems earlier with getting the paint to stick to the plastic. The problem was water. I usually use a rather wet brush, which makes the paint flow better. But with this material even a little water in the paint caused the recesses to repel the paint leaving a very uneven coat. Simply by using a dry brush for the first layer of paint solved the problem. The following layers can be thinned down with water with no problems. The paint sticks very hard, you don't need a coat of primer and you don't need any varnish.

I also like the way the the torchlight came out. I highlighted with a light shade of the colour where the light would fall further away from the light source and then used yellow / orange highlighting close to the torch.

Quite Elemental

More elementals from the City, Water and Air.

Like the Fire Elemental, I left these guys as I painted them, at the tender age of maybe 13-14 years. Enamel paints on unprimed metal. I know, it's lazy of me not to redo them, but remember being so proud of how they turned out, that I don't want to change them.  The minis are oldies from Ral Partha (see 11-427). I also have the Earth Elemental (11-426), but his paint job is too crappy to keep, so he'll be getting a new coat of paint one of these days.

A Ghoul

An enemy from the City expansion. There is also the Ghoul player character in the game, but this mini just isn't cool enough to get that important a role.

A Reaper plastic by James van Schaik.

Mephistopheles

This faustian fiend is an event from the basic game. He grants craft to evil character and for the others, lures them to change their alignment to evil.

A metal mini from Reaper by Julie Guthrie. I tried to make the lava glow, I "reverse drybrushed" the base with an undercoat of white, washed with yellow and then drybrushed with red, grey and finally black. I also added some yellow highlights to the demons feet and the sword as an attempt at reflections of the smouldering magma. Stuff like this is a fun challenge!

The Golem

This unholy mockery of life, stiched together is the Golem, enemy from the expansion set.

Plastic Reaper by James van Schaik. It's hard to see, but he does have bolts in his neck!

The Man-At-Arms

A follower from the Adventure supplement.

A metallic fellow from Reaper by Jim Johnson. The freehand shield is not very sophisticated, but I had fun painting, I'll probably be doing more shield motifs in the future.

An Ogre

The basic box contains two ogre monster enemies. The first one done:

More plastic from Reaper by Jason Wiebe. Far from perfect, but I do like the way the skin turned out and also the metal bits.

The Pilgrim

The Pilgrim player character from the Expansion Set. Keeping it very simple, as should fit a humble pilgrim.

The mini is from Reaper by Bobby Jackson

The Princess Bride

Real princesses are not simply born, they made. This is how I made mine, to play the role of the follower Princess from the basic set.

Start by taking one lovely metal princess by Julie Guthrie. I love her sculpts, probably all the more, because some of the very first minis I ever owned were hers.

Cut the tab shorter to facilitate basing.

Build the base, a flower from a short length of paper string, a bit of wire for the stem and leaves of paper.

Some coarse sand and chopped up bits of bark for flagstones.

Add the princess.

A grey basecoat.

I start the painting with the base. I have two reasons for this:

1. 1. I find it easier to satisfactorily cover up any mistakes I get on the base while painting the figure itself than the other way around.
2. Sometimes I get stuck with no idea what colours I want to use for the mini, but doing the base seems to help break the "painter block" I sometimes get when looking at a basecoated mini.

So, first a dark brown undercoat with a mix of green and red paint and black ink. I now use Citadel and Vallejo paints. I like the bottle that Vallejo paints come in. You can squeeze paint drops of quite consistent size, so it's easy do 1:1, 1:2, 1:1:2 -mixes of colours and get pretty much the same shade as last time.

Then highlight the base with a lighter, yellower green.

Dark grey for the flagstones.

Highlight the flagstones. I was looking at some stones in a park and realized that they aren't just grey. So, a whitish blue and red for some of these.

Green for plant life.

Roses are red.

Highlighting the rose.

A mix of warm red, cold yellow and white produces a skin tone I quite like.

The same basic orange mixed with black ink to shade the skin.

Highlighting the skin with the same mix as the base colour + more white.

White for the stockings and petticoat.

Really thinned down black ink to shade and a bit of bluish grey for highlighting these a little off-white.

A mix of cold and warm yellow for the base colour of the dress.

Tint the yellow a bit orangey and darken with black ink (and thin down with water, as I always do) for shading.

Highlight the dress. (I don't think I used red for this, I wonder why that bottle is in picture?)

A dark red for the shoes.

Highlight the shoes, again, slightly orangey.

A light orange turned toward brown with a bit of green for the hair.

Highlighting the hair.

Blue and green for the details of the corsage.

Pale blue for the details, eyes, pearls, tiara.

Brown pupils.

Touch up the base edges with yellowish green.

And so, after a coat of matt varnish, to shelter her from life's misfortunes, a princess is ready to step forward!