Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Idle Hands: Angry Villagers

With the Stonehell draft finished, I've had a few precious free moments to kill and I've used them to catch up on my miniatures painting. I've been choosing minis that are offbeat and unlikely to be found in one of the WotC prepainted sets. When I stumbled across the "I Just Don't Feel Put Together Right" set produced by Blue Moon Manufacturing, I was overjoyed. Not only does it come with a mad scientist, his hunchback assistant, and a Frankenstein's Monster, but it had an assortment of pitchfork-and-torch-wielding angry villagers to boot! Just the sort of thing that comes in handy when the adventurers get a little to big for their britches.

I painted the villagers in batches of twos and threes, learning a little bit with each set. The earliest ones are the man with the tree-trimmer, the goodwife with the rake, and the geezer with the scythe. Out of those three, I'm most satisfied with the geezer.

The second batch was the maiden with torch, the sea captain with the pitchfork, and the one-legged codger with a length of pipe. I'm very happy with the captain's and the maiden's blue clothing. Learning more about base coats, washes, and dry-brushing helper make them "pop" and the splash of color is a nice change of pace from the rest of the villagers' drab clothing.

The preacher and policeman finished off the mob and, as they're monochromatic, they were a snap to finish up. While it's not really clear in the photo, a bit of highlighting made the preacher's somber black garb more three-dimensional than what would have resulted if I painted him earlier on. My only complaint with this batch is with the matte varnish I used to seal them. The policeman's shiny buttons and helmet were dulled by the spray. Still, I prefer a matte finish over a glossy one as I've too many bad memories of glossy, cherry-red Testor paint minis from my youth.

2 comments:

Jayson said...

A lovely Anti-Flesh Golem Committee taskforce!

Unknown said...

These are looking good! I have always wanted to get back into painting minis (after my VERY brief encounter with the art back in 7th grade).

On a side note, I jumped on the computer as a little break from detailing the walls of the Ogre-face Arch drawing, which is looking AWESOME if I do say so myself. And it is portrait oriented :)