Painting and Miniatures Part 4: Pins and Progress

Hey it's a post about my creative hobby!




I've been a lot more productive in the last few weeks than I had been in awhile on painting things. Inspiration from D&D has helped, and also a weekly session or two of Stellaris with my cousin (which I do from my painting desk late at night.) Stellaris is a fun 4X game, the style he and I enjoy playing together where we build a civilization and explore/conquer the galaxy. It's also the kind of game where I can issue a bunch of orders and then wait for things to happen, it can have varying levels of micromanaging, which gives me time to paint on the side.

Here's what I've been working on.

I painted a dove (a plastic white thing I got about 20 of in one lot off eBay) to be Talna's Spiritual Weapon. Apparently one of her friends then started commandeering the dove on their Monday games for his raven familiar, so Talna requested a second dove. I decided to actually make it a raven.

The original model. I painted up Talna's dove but I didn't get a picture before I gave it to her.

To make the dove more raven like, I looked up some pictures of ravens online, and decided the important thing (other than painting it black) would be the beak and the tail feathers. I've also been following Kaeli Swift on Twitter, who studies corvids and does a weekly "Crow or No?" quiz, which is actually why I know about the tail feathers.

The beak was elongated with some modeling putty, while I cut away the tail feathers. I then drilled a hole in the bottom and glued in a length of brass rod with which to attach it to the base I found. Here is the finished product.

The modified raven. Note the beak and tail feathers.

It's black with a light dry brush of grey. I made the eyes grey, even though a raven's eyes are black, because I figured a little depth to the model would be nice.

Another model I've been working on for D&D is a miniature for Maximiliano de Forza II. I actually ordered a figure off of Heroforge so it could be custom printed (there aren't a lot of pirate goblins out there). A little expensive, but I feel the end result is worth it, and I quite enjoyed painting him. I made him left handed with a rapier, and gave him a tricorn hat. Here he is:

I think the color scheme was influenced by Disney's Captain Hook from Peter Pan crossed with the Lego Imperial sailors from their old sailors and pirates days... 

Of course I added the wine jug to the base. A goblin has to protect his wine.

My favorite bit, is I promised to chop his arm off if Max hadn't recovered his arm before I finished painting the model. He has not in fact done so in the game, so off with his arm! But I put in one of my smallest rare earth magnets, so now the arm is magnetized:

I painted over the magnet with black, then speckled it with white to be a sort of starry void.

We also fought owl bears recently, so I picked up some owl bears. Here's the finished one:

I love the bulk and pose of this model from Nolzur's Marvelous Minis, my other model from Reaper minis is a little scrawnier.

I had fun deciding how to paint it. The body is obviously brown, but I looked up a horned owl for reference to the head, and they are a lighter color than I thought so I lightened up the feathered bits.

Another project I've been working on is simply cleaning my workspace. To that end I've been doing a lot of touch ups on dinged and damaged models. In particular, the first dragon I ever painted. A wood elf forest dragon from Games Workshop, there's a joint at the ankle that has broken multiple times, and it's last tail segment snapped again. Super glue alone is not enough, and in that case, I drill a hole in each side of the join, and insert a piece of paperclip or brass rod to give the glue more surface to bond to, as well as a sort of "bone" in the miniature to resist fractures. Then I cover the join with modeling putty. I've not yet repainted the dragon but here are some pictures.

I've definitely gotten better over the years, but I still really enjoy this one.

You can see a green break in the right leg here, that's the troublesome join. The green is the putty. (I use GW's 'Green Stuff')

You can barely see where I made the join in this picture, but the green stuff is a slightly different green than what I originally used as the line between the belly scales.

As I've been on a pinning streak, here is a look at an unpainted brass rod. Eventually, an elf on an eagle will sit on top of this (I have had this base for a long time, intending to remount that eagle onto this nice resin scenic base...)

I like scenic bases.

A preview of a model I'm working on for Cassian:

There are surprisingly few half-orc with great sword models. This is as close as I could find (I can only afford so much Heroforge...)

And finally, as I was doing Heroforge, I wanted to remake Sadun now that she's been using the great sword Briarblade, and to better show her without the armor of the original figure I found. Here is the result:

I made the guard of the sword green and put red flower spots on the blade (I'm not the best at freehand). I kept the color scheme the same otherwise.

I feel like Sadun is trying to be the responsible party member, so I showed her carrying her backpack. I also made the model taller than usual because she's taller than the rest of the party.

And there you have it, some shots of my recent endeavors in painting! I've been really feeling good about this, motivated, inspired, and finding time to do it. It's been a really nice and refreshing return to the hobby for me.