Painting Descent - February

Here is my February update for painting - the month isn't over, but I don't anticipate finishing anything over the next two days.

Over on BGG, the Painters Guild runs a monthly "Challenge List". For February, my goal was a modest 7 figures: four Goblin Witchers, two Archyura, and Ariad lieutenant figure. I blew that goal out of the water and also finished: Queen Ariad lieutenant, Raythen Lieutenant, and two heroes - Ulma Grimstone and Logan Lashley. My goal has been to average a figure a week, but I know from experience that a group of small figures will take only a few days, so I felt silly saying all I'd get done  is one group of four Goblin Witchers. As silly as it sounds, I have thus far not quite averaged 2 figures a week, so I have tried to be reasonable about my estimates so I don't get behind.

 Here are my lifetime totals for Descent and the figures I finished for the month:

• 63 monster figures done
• 20 hero figures done
• 11 lieutenants done
• 17 figures done in 2019 through 9 weeks

Goblin Witchers

Archyura

Ariad Lieutenant

I wasn't a big fan of any of those models and glad to just have them done. I dislike doing multiples of the same thing anyway, but the goblins were really uninteresting to me. The spider/crabs were also fairly boring (but turned out better than I thought they were going to). I almost never cut the models from the base, but they were so low that I had to in order to paint the bottoms. Ariad was ok until I got to the gold. I hate lining anything with gold paint. No matter how carefully I do it - it always looks gloppy in the end.

I got through my original goal early in the month, so started work on a few "bonus" items.

Queen Ariad Lieutenant

Queen Ariad might be one of the worst large models that FFG has ever done. It is just lazy and lacking details. The reference art is also terrible, so I whipped through this model in no time flat, glad to be done with it.

Ulma Grimstone

Logan Lashley

I finished the heroes I had left to work on from the Labyrinth of Ruin expansion. I wasn't excited about these two models, but they ended up being more interesting than I anticipated. Ulma's reference art looked like she had blown up a potion with her goggles on, so I went with that and made he forehead and chin look darker - that turned out decently (her face and goggles are just about the only interesting feature of this model). Logan has a stupid number of belts and things which meant trying to color them all differently enough to stand out as different features. That being said, a whole bunch of green and browns and belts make for a boring (to paint) mini.

Raythen Lieutenant

Reference art

The Raythen Lieutenant model was also a bit junky. First, the model was crap - lots of mold lines and flash - worse than the normal FFG stuff. The reference art was also really lazy. Black cape and burgundy armor with silver trim. I went ahead and decided to try out two-brush blending on the cape as something new. It is hard to tell from the above picture, so I put another just below that better captures the true colors. The cloak is really a dark green with black radiating out from the head/shoulders. The cloak ended up looking good enough that I didn't really care that the rest of the paint job was fairly generic.

The only other thing of note - I switched from using black gesso to using Army Painter's brush on primer (grey). I've decided to give this a whirl and see how it goes. So far so good, but I can definitely see keeping the black around for some work. I also grabbed a new set of P3 paints and so far they are fabulous on the Army Painter primer. I still like Citadel's paint line for a number of things (metallic and washes and glazes), but I suspect I'm only going to keep colors I can't readily get in P3's line. Logan and Ulma were probably 85% P3 paints - I even printed out a nice paint rack for them:

Bonus, printed with glow-in-the-dark material

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