Land of the Lead

For fear of doing a terrible paint job on any of my beloved minis, I put off painting for quite a while. Finally I obtained a mini that I’m not crazy about, so I’m not worried about botching the paint job.

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03491 Anirion, Wood Elf Wizard by Bobby Jackson.

This mini was a good choice because it has a lot of cloak area, and very few fine details. This gives me an opportunity to practice the process of applying a blue base coat, dark blue wash, and finally a light blue dry brush.

I’m purposefully making mistakes on this mini. For the time being, I’m ignoring the face, hands and staff entirely. The cloak is the only thing that concerns me. I may fill in details like the staff, boots, hands and face later. Ideally, I would have taken care of the face before the cloak, used different colours to differentiate between the cloak and the robe, and done something fancy for the trim.

Red Box Games is the company of Tre Manor, who’s produced a large number of the Reaper figures I’ve purchased and/or coveted over the past few years. His creations at Red Box Games are incredible. To date they’re divided into several factions including Aelfar (elves), Dvergr (dwarves), Goblin, HelsVakt (evil humans), Njorn (good humans). I’m a big fan of some of the HelsVakt and Njorn in particular, which remind me of Death Dealer and a certain Cimmerian, respectively. Eventually, Tre intends to create some sort of tabletop game for these figs. Awesome.

Nannulf of Arnholdt’s Hill

Thanks to saved searches in eBay and a great deal of patience, I’ve finally acquired a set of 4 Ral Partha gnolls that I had when I was a kid. These are dated 1984, and I prefer them to a lot of the gnolls that have been produced since.

Gnoll with morning star. I love the facial expression and the pose on this one.

Gnoll with battle axe. Snarling face is a nice detail.

Gnoll with two-handed sword. This mini was also released with a special base as Mage Knight Dungeons Gnoll Hunter.

Gnoll with spear. The animal skull is a nice detail.

I also picked up a set of 3 minis called Gnoll Champion with henchbeasts.

The archer was also released with a special base as Mage Knight Dungeons Gnoll Fletcher.

Finally, the same eBay seller was selling this.

Gnoll warcat rider. I’m not crazy about this one, because I wonder how realistic it is for a giant cat to be ridden by a half-gnome, half-troll dog/hyena-man. Yes, I spend hours wondering about this.

I’m taking a lot of my advice from the Getting Started section of Laszlo Jakuxovsky’s website Hot Lead. I also picked up his 3 DVD set called “Hot Lead: How to Paint a Better Miniature”.

From the local art supplies store I picked up some sable brushes sized 4, 2, 1, 0, 5/0, and 10/0. For paints I grabbed a pack of 8 Liquitex acrylic paints in bottles (black, white, red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple).

The paints required a bit of thinning. I know very little about mixing paints to come up with desired colours. I’ll probably invest in a set of Foundry paints at some point, should I enjoy this hobby.

After bending the minis into shape, the next step was to get rid of the mold lines. Sometimes, as with the Isabeau Laroche figure, it was necessary to remove a significant chunk of the out-of-the-package mini using an X-Acto knife. (In her case, it was the shield that was attached to the base.) This left quite a bit of excess metal stuck to the base.

I went to work with a set of small files. It was difficult to get rid of some of the mold lines without obscuring finer details, like hair. Using light presssure seemed the safest approach. I also filed the bottoms of the minis so that they would stand upright on their own. In some cases, the bases were too curved for this to be possible. Eventually, I hope to mount all of these minis on proper bases.

I primed most of the minis with Citadel’s Skull White. The exception were my black orcs, for which I used Citadel’s Skull Black. My rationale here is that the final paint job will be darker over all, and that this will be easier to accomplish over a dark base. We’ll see.

I stuck many of the minis to the tops of empty spice jars using some blue poster tack. Some people suggest using a box for spraying the minis, but I found that in order to get at the mini from all angles it was better to hold it in my hand, and spray it at arm’s length. The downside of this method is that one gets a bit of primer on oneself.

When I ran out of spice jars, I used beer bottles in a cardboard 6-pack. This worked great, because I could spray multiple minis at once, not get my arm primed, and move the minis easily once they were dry.

Black orcs, black orcs, and more black orcs. I couldn’t resist buying these minis, though I still haven’t done any painting. I didn’t buy all of the black orcs that Reaper has to offer, but I think I got the best of ‘em. These were all sculpted by Tre Manor. A few of those sculpted by Sandra Garrity are pretty cool too. These were found first on www.reapermini.com but purchased at the local comics and gaming store.

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03405 Black Orc Hero by Tre Manor. This is my fave of the bunch. I dig the mix of spiked plates, chain mail and cloth.

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03429 Black Orc Archer by Tre Manor. I like how the fur blends into the chain mail.

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03489 Black Orc Warriors (2) by Tre Manor.

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03400 Orc Spearman and Swordsman by Tre Manor.

Okay, okay… so I haven’t done any painting yet. Actually, I’m inclined to give my minis a coat of ink as suggested by a pal of mine, to give them a metal soldier look. The thought occurred to me that minis ain’t nothin’ but sculpture for today’s sculpture-illiterate, and that painting them is a bit odd.

I’ve gone and bought a few more Reaper Dark Heaven minis through paizo.com. I believe I must’ve gone through paizo’s entire offering of Reaper minis before choosing these. Here they are:

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03364 Isabeau Laroche, Female Paladin by W. Klocke. Shield came upside-down and attached to base. Handle of sword required bending. A relatively small mini.

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03175 Gerrin Greystone, Dwarf by J. Manor. Axe shaft required bending. There’s a beer mug on his shield. Nice. The beard has a lot of potential.

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03362 Kjell Bloodbear, Barbarian by M. Gubser. Lots of flash to remove. Quite massive.

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 02918 Mason Thornwarden, Ranger by G. Van Horne. Bow, quiver and sword came detached. This mini is pretty big.

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03393 Vistaril Quillscratch, Wizard by T. Manor. Staff required bending. This old man is tiny.

These are all Reaper Dark Heaven Legends miniatures. The first three I picked out at a great gaming shop in Vancouver, BC called Strategies Games & Hobbies. The guy behind the counter knew a lot about WFRP. I picked up the goblin’s at J&J Cards & Collectibles in Waterloo, ON after seeing them on the Reaper website.

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03179 Roshtan the Green, Arch Druid by Tre Manor

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 02745 Ulern, Anti-Paladin by Tim Prow

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 02186 Alfred Redlute Bard by Sandra Garrity

Reaper Dark Heaven Legends 03189 Goblin Warriors (4) by John Manor

Hot Lead (hot-lead.org) appears to have a decent Basic Painting Guide. I’m lacking a few of the figure preparation tools/materials, but do have a good set of X-acto knives. It sounds like I might even be able to finally make use of the Dremel tool my Dad bought me when I was a kid.

Step one was fairly intuitive and I did it without doing any research first. A few of the miniatures had weapons that were bent out of shape. Bending these in place was relatively simple, but I was conscious of the possibility of creating a second bend, resulting in an S-shaped blade.

Step two was to remove any thin flashing. This I did with my old pocket knife (probably not good for the knife). There was some thicker flashing inexplicably connecting two unrelated (but nearby) parts of two figures. This was a bit tougher to get rid of. I used an X-acto knife and a great deal of pressure to first make a rough cut or two. I then made a few finer cuts using a variety of X-acto blades (shorter, longer, narrower, wider). Sometimes a careful sawing-motion was necessary. Care had to be taken not to scar the figure with the back of the blade. Wire snips might have been a better tool.

Upon close inspection of one particular miniature and comparison with a photo of the same figure on the company’s website, I discovered that the left hand and the bow it held were detached from the left wrist. An extremely thick piece of flashing held the bow to the miniature, quite out-of-place. I wish I’d taken some photos of the figures before these operations so that I could show the difference. The hand and bow will of course have to be re-joined to the rest of the figure at some point. I’m just not sure when that should be. Perhaps it was meant to come like this, to make it easier for me to reach the figure’s shin with my paintbrush.

Finally, I should have done the work in some sort of container to catch all of the tiny pieces of flash that went flying as a result of my high-pressure cutting.

I haven’t painted any lead fantasy miniatures since about 1990 when I was about 17. Back in those days, I played a lot of Commodore 64 games, Dungeons & Dragons, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, played alto and baritone saxophone in my high school stage band, read Conan the Barbarian comic books, took Karate and had fantasies about becoming the next Bruce Lee. Now I’m 34, play an MMORPG (Lineage II), read a lot of old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay rulebooks and Conan the Barbarian comic books, take Wing Chun classes, play jazz guitar and have fantasies about being the next Wes Montgomery or Yip Man. Recently I got my hands on a few Reaper Dark Heaven Legends miniatures and feel the inclination to do a touch of painting.