Envy

[lederhosen]

Finished a couple more minis recently: a Frost Giant and a Black Legionnaire. Fairly pleased with both of them. The Black Legionnaire looks like he should be guarding an Emperor somewhere, and I managed to get his eyes at least halfway right despite having to work through a full-face helm which meant I could *reach* the area of interest, or *see* it, but not both at once. The snow-and-ice look on Mr. Frosty's base came out quite nicely, and because he's such a large model I got to do a bit more detail on his face. He even has little crystals of frost on his mustache, though you have to know they're there. Oddly, the paint just around the rim of the base seems to have contracted and pulled away from some spots - possibly because it was ferociously cold that night, and I took him outside to varnish. At least it didn't ruin any of the Fiddly Bits, or I'd have been very upset.

Then I had a look at the gallery on Reaper's site. In particular... this, this, and this. Keep in mind, these are 28mm scale miniatures - these photos are about 4x magnification of the actual work.

Now look at those scales and that tartan.



*sob*

(As silverblue points out, that sort of talent is not the prize in some grand lottery, it comes from years of hard work and practice. But would I like to be that good, if I didn't have to work for it? Hell yes!)

Spent yesterday evening cleaning, glueing, and puttying some more figures. Much frustration trying to figure out how the cthonian I bought fits together - usually when I get a multipart figure it's obvious where everything goes, with matching lumps and sockets, but in this one the shapes didn't match - I ended up just glueing all the tentacles into its mouth (and glueing non-matched shapes is a *pain*, it takes lots more glue, longer to dry, and the join is fragile). Then stuffed lots of putty into it until it looked halfway decent and a lot stronger. Annoyance of this mucking around increased by the knowledge that unlike the other figures I work with, this one was made of real lead, which means having to be that much more careful about cleaning up afterwards.

Ah well. In a couple of months, may have a bit more free time, for reasons to be posted later, which may give me a chance to catch up on the army of creatures who sit in the cabinet looking accusingly at me with their undercoated-not-painted eyes (or in some cases, miscellaneous sensory organs).

And once I have the cthonian painted up, I can look thoughtfully at it every so often while running my Ravenloft game...