Well, not really this time. Actually I painted some mercenaries, elementals and ships last weekend. The near constant rain did not make me regret the decision to concentrate on painting.

Two of these groups were figures that had been sitting on my desk for quite a while while I picked up the elementals because I wanted to see how the fancy translucent figures I got from the Reaper BONES Kickstarter would paint up.

The mercenaries are from Gripping Beast. Even though the company is best known for their Dark Age stuff, they actually have a pretty nifty moderns collection as well. These had been bouncing around my desk for quite a while, but I finally decided to paint them to test out the new Foundry colors I got. The uniforms are done in Moss while the webbing is Drab. The colors are a little bit too alike, the figures would benefit from a little bit more contrast but otherwise I'm pretty happy with the results. At this point I have almost the entire Foundry basic color set (+ I got the flesh tones palette). I'll probably pick up the remaining ones when I order from Foundry the next time. I just like painting in this style.

The ships are 1/1200 metal models I got to complement my Revell plastic kits. I got them used off eBay, but I think they are all from MY Models. All came badly painted and removing the paint was quite a chore. I think next time I will just get pristine models instead.

These are actually pretty fun to paint and I'd love to do small scale actions with them. The only problem is that the MY range is infuriatingly small. I'd love to do the Battle of Narvik with these, but there's no German 1936 class destroyers (only the later 1936A Narvik class with twin turret) and no British H class destroyers, or even G or F classes...

The downside of just doing these without a clear plan is that I didn't dig up detailed painting reference for them and therefore the deck colors are mostly just standard deck tan. The Tribals have dark gray deck because I happened to have a reference handy for them. And no, I really didn't feel like doing naval camo on these. Fortunately ships at sea had to be repainted constantly and it's fairly safe to say most of them were plain gray at some point in their career.

I admit part of the reason for picking up the BONES was that I thought they could be finished quickly. Well, I was nearly right. I thought I could just slap an inkwash on them, but unfortunately the plastic was too slick for that and the ink just ran off. So I gave them a coating of matte varnish to begin with. After that treatment the wash functioned pretty much as I figured it would. For final accents I gave the figures a light drybrush, which was a bit of a mistake.

You see, I had not removed the mold lines from these figures. The lines were very hard to spot on the unpainted figures and the material is very soft and gummy meaning the lines can't be filed or scraped off. I guess carefully slicing them off with an extremely sharp scalpel would be the only way. On these particular examples, the mold lines remained fairly invisible -- until the drybrush picked them out. Oh well...

The translucent material is quite a neat gimmick, but otherwise I can't really say much positive about the BONES figures apart from the obvious price point. It seems to me the smaller and more delicate the figure is, the worse BONES suits it. I had to literally support the figures while painting to stop the brush pressure from bending them. If I ever buy more BONES, I think it will only be the big monsters and such.

Alright, so much for that. Next it's more orcses...

P.S. And I am actually working on an armored train...

maxxon