Friday, January 14, 2011

The rabbits are coming, hooray, hooray...

With all the school closings due to snow, I managed to get some painting in. I had a bunch of Splintered Light Miniatures 15s that were beginning to pile up. I previously posted the rank-and-file Kobolds that I finished but had not based. I had some rabbit archers and a number of dwarves to work on. The rabbits come in two poses. One rabbit is either shooting or just shot, the other is pulling out another arrow.


I based them as skirmishers. It just seemed right.

The other Splintered Light mini that I finished was a Dwarf wizard.


When I first finished him, I felt that I over did the black wash. But the more I look at him, I really liked the way he came out. For the base, I made a faceted rock out of black sculpy. The only thing I did to it was very lightly dry brush some highlights on the edges of the facets.

Bases: as I mentioned in at least one previous post, I generally don't spend much time on bases. They are time consuming, they distract from the miniature, and it always seemed a little weird that a rock or shrub would be following along with a unit of troops! Lately, I've doing some adding of do-dads to the bases. I've been also experimenting with various media to base the base, so to speak. With the rabbits, I tried using this air drying clay by Crayola. People have been using it for various terrain projects,its relatively cheap for the amount you get, plus its found a Walmart and a lot other big-box stores. Well, it didn't really work well for the bases. I use steel bases and glue with thin cardstock or construction paper on the steel base to hold down the miniatures better. It turned out that it was a pain to apply. I think you really need to work with this stuff fresh and mine is beginning to dry up. Second, once it dried, it pulled up the paper underneath it, even though the paper was glued down with superglue. What's the alternative? Sculpy. I use Sculpy on my 6mm infantry. It works just as well on the larger minis. Sculpy goes onto the bases very easily. I texture it with a toothpick, which helps to hold down flocking better. I have found that baking the bases with the minis on there does not hurt the minis at all. The dwarf and one of the rabbit stands had their metal bases covered by Sculpy.

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