Kelf and Co's Painting Shenanigans

[Kelfecil]

The time has cometh. The time for me to start a thread with painting stories, pictures and other cool things.

Everything you see here is painted by, myself, my fiance and sometimes our close friend, Ezequiel!

We like to paint everything from board games minis to terrain, to inserts and other things.

[Kelfecil]

First post here since I gotta show something to get this started!

(Please note that I took the pictures under a very intense yellow light from a secondary light from IKEA that we use while painting!)




We just finished painting for our regular "Wednesday Painting Nights" and we got x6 new painted minis:

These are all miniatures from Descent 2nd ed. We decided to go through some minis today because we are starting a new campaign of Descent 2nd ed. tomorrow with Ezequiel as the overlord. Ezequiel actually already painted a few other monsters over our last few painting sessions in preparation for this.

For these, I primed with black primer and did some white base (corax white) drybrushing earlier in the afternoon so that we can have them ready for speedpainting in the evening. (Classic zenithal/slap-chop/whatever-you-wanna-call-it kind of technique.)

I painted:

• Trenloe the Strong. A warrior dude with an axe and a shield.

I actually really enjoyed this one because it has a nice mix of various metallics. I did some copper on the belt and the shield front with blood stains all over the wood. Silver for most of the armor and gold for some specific parts that shine more.

As usual, the head details were made by my fiance because I trust her more with those.

• Master Thorn, the "unagi" wizard that another friend of ours will be playing tomorrow.

This one was super easy just because I went the easy way of using snakebite leather for most of the thin "cloth" parts around his arms and for other things. Those parts are so thin that it did not matter what color they were, as long as they were something not too distracting from the rest.

As usual, the head details were made by my fiance because I trust her more with those.

• Shiver, a "chilly" wizard.

I think this one was my favorite just because of how simple it was and how effective all the paints were on him, being able to showcase all the glowy and cool parts (hehe) very easily.




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My fiance painted:

• Tatianna, the ranger she will be playing tomorrow.

She decided to make her hair purple in order to make her a bit more interesting in the way that she is just as colorful as the rest of the characters in the game/universe.

• Augur Grisom, a healer dude that she was thinking about switching to for the campaign.

Healers in Descent 2nd ed. are actually all super fun and unlike what the archetype name, "healer", usually suggests it's going to be like in terms of gameplay. She loved the artwork for this one and even opted to add the redish nose to the mix. The ring actually has that fancy colorshift effect which makes stand out a tiny bit when you look at the mini a bit closer.




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Ezequiel painted:

• Valyndra, the main antagonist of the mini-campaign!

Ezequiel is still very new to this and he is sometimes afraid of trying things because he thinks he'll "ruin" the mini. However, with our help, he picks colors and does all sorts of things that end up with him having some amazing results. I gotta say, he absolutely nailed the much brighter yellow-ish tint that Valyndra has on her wings with 3 layers of lighter red-to-yellow colors he picked for drybrushing!




(Valyndra as seen on the cover artwork of Lair of the Wyrm.)


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That's all for today!

Next week we plan on finishing the final few monsters we have to paint for Descent 3rd ed. (we have about 4-5 or so left!), paint the astronauts for Unsettled (super simple paint job on 4 minis with just a different color on each) and then start planning on how we will paint the Imperial Assault heroes for our next campaign in that one! Ezequiel is probably going to continue painting some monsters for Descent since he absolutely loved that.

Later and... paint more minis!

[Brophy]

Great start to a thread, I'm looking forward to more!

[romuloxx]

Very cool! I’m looking forward to seeing more! Are those 28mm scale minis?

[Kelfecil]

Very cool! I’m looking forward to seeing more! Are those 28mm scale minis?

Apparently they are 25mm. I had to google it because I had the suspicion they were slightly smaller than 28mm. Dunno if that's a significant difference, but generally, we tend to use quite a few minis from Descent in our RPG sessions (especially the heroes, the beasts and the dragons). They are sliiiiightly smaller than your average D&D mini, but the detail is great so it still looks good without standing out too much.

[mhamann]

Thanks for sharing your work and looking forward to seeing more!

All the minis are awesome, but for some reason I’m really liking the wizard. Nice detail with the face paint/tattoos. Cool stuff all the way around!

[Kelfecil]

Lately it has been the busiest we have ever been but we promised ourselves that we would find time to play more board games and also paint more. With that in mind, we had some chill nights of painting minis and we went through some more minis.



I painted:
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• The Unsettled astronauts:

I really wanted to do a quick paintjob on them so that they look a bit better than the blunt "one color" thing they had as minis (as they came in the box). I can see myself putting a lot of details on their armor, especially some kind of glare on the helmet, but the astronauts are supposed to be generic (and very expendable per the game's theme and story). I really like seeing how fast I can pull off paint jobs like these now which allows us to have painted minis for our next game session.

Games that we want the minis to have more detail usually take us much longer and I always let my fiance finish off the faces just to make sure they come out looking awesome.

This is the only reference available by the way (the player board):

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• Luna from Unsettled:

I think I should have honestly done white base on her so that she is a lot brighter, but whateves. The somewhat dirtier look fits the whole "we're exploring alien planets" vibe for a robot and I'm quite happy with how the bright eyes turned out (it took about 4 layers of various contrast mixes).

I might go back to her to add the little dirt marks at some point.

Reference:

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• Dragon Zombie from Castle Ravenloft board game:

This was quite the experiment for me because I wanted to try mixing certain speedpaint and citadel paints. I mixed a lot of Blinding Light (speedpaint 2.0) with a bit of Algae Green (Citadel) and the result was amazing. I also added some medium to thin it out a lot so that it retains that white-ish zenithal look it has after priming still. I then went over it again with a bit of a thicker mix of the same things and the gradient turned out pretty great imo. I definitely need to get thinner brushes for myself in order to do finer details like the crevices in the wings (which were a pain to do with a "1" brush).

Here you can find the original pre-painted mini from the DDM line. I like the original too, but it doesn't feel like a zombie honestly so I'm glad we have the board game unpainted so that I can make these minis look awesome. I honestly can't wait to see how my fiance will paint the old Strahd mini!
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My fiance painted:
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• Galaden from both the core and the expansion sets of Descent 3rd ed. (legends in the dark):

It's paint jobs like this one that make me feel extremely lucky to be with a person that is a professional illustrator. She barely has any more experience than I do in painting minis but she knows exactly how to use colors and how to make the details pop the right way. She actually said she is not too happy with the "glossiness" on him so she might do some matt varnish to fix that in the near future.

In regards to the white eyes on this elf ranger; per the lore, he is blind and is depicted like that in some artworks actually.

References:


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• A bunch of Rat Swarms from Castle Ravenloft:

We both wanted to paint something simpler, which is why we started painting some D&D minis inbetween other things. I absolutely love what she did with the different colors on the rats because most examples we've seen are just monochromatic and look like... well... poop on the ground. This gives the mini a bit more character and actually shows what it is exactly without the chance of mistaking it for... poop.

Plus, I love the little eyes and ears that help set them apart from one another.

Here is the original pre-painted mini that looks like gray poop. (This is the most I've ever used that word and it's all in one post. Yay.)
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And that's all for today! We started working on a bunch of other minis as well, preparing ourselves to sloooooooowly go through our gray pile of shame.







In there are minis from various D&D games and Descent 2nd ed. (it has a gazillion more monsters to paint), and some other things. We still have some Arcadia Quest heroes to paint, so we might move back to that after we're done with Descent.

D&D minis are generally SUPER easy to paint in comparison to everything else we have and it's honestly really nice to have easy minis to revert to when you are feeling a bit exhausted from a long day of work but still want to do some painting. The goblins above are a great example of this "ease" because it took me no more than 20 minutes to get 7 of them looking decent already. I just need to do some red cloth below their leather armor and some silver for their weapons (arrow tip, etc.). It's also just really fun to mess these up sometimes.
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Also, here's my progress on my "CAPSTONE" piece; a 3D-Printed Kel'thuzad Statuette.
This was a surprise gift that my friends gave me on my birthday! It is my favorite character from the Warcraft universe and actually the guy that inspired the nickname that I've used since I was 11 years old (-> Kelfecil). I'm having a blast painting him and because I want to do it right, I am going veeeeeeeery slowly with everything. I will do more layers of purple to make it pop even more and I will definitely use some colorshift paints to make the gems shine even more (we have some red glowy stuff).


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As a bonus, here are the board games we played too:

• Star Wars: Rebellion

Absolutely fantastic and VERY thematic Star Wars game. Not many come as close as Rebellion does.

• Lands of Galzyr

We tend to like anything between light and very heavy games so we were quite afraid we might not like this one because of how "casual" everyone is saying it is. We loved it. The writing is fantastic and it really is the perfect game for a chill evening. Feels like you are reading a book with the rest of the people at the table.

• Descent 2nd. Ed.: Lair of the Wyrm

We finally started our Descent 2nd. ed. campaign! It was a rocky start because our overlord (Ezequiel) missed a couple of setup things for us (the heroes) but after that we were smooth sailing and playing as normal. The game is way more strategic than I expected and both sides are quite well balanced. This is exactly what I wanted from more strategic "dungeon crawling" type stuff. I generally try to avoid heavy strategy in my TTRPG games just because I know I can find it a 100 times better done in board game form. TTRPGs for us are light strategy and tons of roleplay.

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Later and... paint more minis!
~Kelf

[Kelfecil]

We had the absolute pleasure of attending a terrain workshop yesterday and we made some awesome terrain!

The thing is... ever since we started watching some terrain crafting videos a year+ ago with my fiance, we have been saving all sorts of materials and random bits and pieces here and there to at some point start crafting things.

We experimented a ton already with foam and cardboard by crafting inserts for more than 30 or so of our board games and we started feeling more confident with how to apply glue, the drying time, how sturdy things become, etc.

However, we never took the time to sit down and make any furnishing or scatter terrain yet and finding a lovely little workshop that was organized by an awesome person (Anna) at our favorite RPG bar, we jumped at the opportunity and had the most amazing time ever.

Anna walked us through a gazillion different techniques and I have to say that I felt like the "geeky and over-prepared student" since I was happy to see that she was enthusiastic and happy to hear that we knew so much already about the hobby (like glue types, material details, techniques, etc.). We just never sat down to make anything yet and it was great to have someone so experienced to show us everything step by step.

During the workshop, my fiance and I, made all sorts of fey-style mushroom scatter terrain and for the most part, we are not even fully finished since we want to add some highlights and some other extra touches at some point.

Here's my fiance's work-in-progress photos up until the final shot (I added a little river on one of my own with resin that cures fast with UV light!)

What my fiance made:










What I made:



All together:





Knowing all of this now, we seriously can't wait to hit IKEA and a bunch of other hobby stores to stock up on tools and materials so that we can start crafting all sorts of things.

I am so glad I never gave in and bought any of that EXTREMELY overpriced WarLock furnishing or even some of those 3D-printed things. I mean, they can be great for some more intricate things, but even then, being able to customize your own things is a whole new world and also so much more unique and beautiful-looking on the board.

We are beyond happy with the results and knowing that we can only improve from here is just getting us excited to craft more.

Up next, we want to make:

• Bundles of Candles (Scatter terrain)

• Tables & Chairs

• A Bar

• Foods and stuff to put on the tables

• Shelves with books

• Shelves with potions

• A couple of desks

• An Astrolabe

• and so much more...

My fiance is already making plans for a "Wizard's Sanctum" kind of room filled with all sorts of sparkly and magick-y thingies.

It's amazing how beautiful and yet super cheap this all is when you just sit your butt down to make something with your hands. And I am saying that as someone who still believes is not exactly very adept at this whole crafting thing.

Oh, we also painted some dinosaurs and dodos from the Dodos Riding Dinos board game, but I'll post this tomorrow probably. They were for a competition that the company was running (just a random giveaway thing) and it was a good reason to switch to painting something completely silly and fun.