Painting Descent - June

Halfway through the year already! June marks 26 weeks of the year done and gone. Summer is where I normally really fall off, but I've been keeping on, so let's see where I'm at.

Over on BGG, the Painter Guild runs a monthly "Challenge List". At the start of the month, I wasn't ready to dive into a bunch of Descent monsters yet, so I looked to another set of Descent Heroes and Monsters  - Treaty of Champions and pulled the heroes to paint. And that was it for Descent. I was only going to do four more figures towards my total.

Except that these were some of the cleanest and more interesting heroes I've painted in a long time. So I blazed through them. Now, I had other figures I was planning to paint along with the Descent figures, but I knocked all of them out too, so halfway through the month, I needed to adjust the goal to add a few bonus items. So I started some stuff, played with contrast paints a little, and finished a set of monsters. At any rate, here are my lifetime totals and the figures I finished for the month for my never-ending Paint Descent Project:

• 72 monster figures done
• 30 hero figures done
• 12 lieutenants done
• 35 figures done in 2019 through 26 weeks (my yearlong goal is 1/week)

And here are my heroes:

Jonas the Kind , Krutzbeck , Zyla , Grey Ker

Jonas was pretty straight forward, but I was playing around and decided to give him some 5 O'clock shadow, which came out great! 

Krutzbeck the dwarf was your normal dwarf-looking dude, but his reference art had him with tattoos, so I played around with giving him some on his arm and face. 

The tattoos ended up lookin pretty good for a first try and I was happy with how he ended up as a finished product.

Zyla was a bit of an oddity. Cool looking sculpt, but the figure didn't really match the art - the face was very different. The wings were also in the way. I ended up trimming them off, painting everything and gluing them back on. She also (like Sahla last month) had a spell effect in the art, but not the figure. I trimmed another translucent Reaper Bones figure for a bit of plastic, and added some white to brighten it and give it a little bit of OSL. 

The last hero was Grey Ker and while there wasn't anything exciting or special about him, I disliked the pose they had him in. His reference art has his sword out, but the model had him holding it across his body. I had to do some surgery on his arm to change the position. He turned out pretty good looking, except to say he might be a bit drab.

As for the bonus monsters... I decided to do the Dark Priests. I had actually wanted to paint them for a while, but after the great sculpts that were the heroes, these were a mess - just not clean. I had a plan for the robes, but they just never quite looked as good as I wanted. In the end, they came out ok, but honestly, I think I'd have just used contrast paints on the robes if I had to do it over again.

Next month is monster month! I have a whole pile of monsters to do, so we'll see what I can get through. I'll probably work on the Wendigo and then the Skeleton Archers.

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Painting Descent - May

Over on BGG, the Painter Guild runs a monthly "Challenge List". In April, I finally finished up everything that was left from the Labyrinth of Ruin. I didn't want to start another boxed set for my next "project" so I decided to work on a Hero and Monster pack which can be used in any Descent setting. My May goal was a modest goal of the four heroes from the Guardians of Guildhall expansion (I painted a couple of other items, but just the four heroes for my Descent project). I got them all done along with a couple of other random things. Here are my lifetime totals and the figures I finished for the month:

• 66 monster figures done
• 26 hero figures done
• 12 lieutenants done
• 27 figures done in 2019 through 22 weeks (my yearlong goal is 1/week)

And here they are: Lord Hawthorne, Mordrog, Sahla, Sillouette

There were a couple of interesting things about doing this set of heroes. First, if people are painting these, they aren't putting pictures out on the web. There was next to nothing to look at for inspiration, so I decided to mostly stick towards the reference art. 

Sahla reference art

The Sahla figure was a bit uninteresting - the reference art was cool, but the figure didn't have any kind of magic effect to paint - just a figure hovering above their braided hair. I decided to grab a piece of translucent red off a Reaper Bones figure and modified the figure to be cooler and frankly, to make sense.

The Mordrog figure is pretty cool, but his reference art sucked. It was like the only paint they gave the artist was mud. I went ahead and kept to the darker browns and played a bit with a couple of newer P3 metallic paints (which I really liked) for his armor. So at least the crappy color scheme got me to try something new. When I finally got to his axes, I didn't want to go with metal. I was originally going to lean towards stone, but while looking for anything that would give me a good idea how to get a good stone weapon look, I ran across a quick video explaining how to do ice weapons, so I gave him a couple of those.

Then there was Sillouette. Her face was a mangled mess (just a bad cast). I slapped some green stuff on her face to fix her up, but rather than trying to figure out her face, I just painted her with a scarf/mask. The last hero, Lord Hawthorne, was nothing special, the only oddity was that nothing I did seemed right. Its like every 4-5 figures I paint, one looks/feels like I just started painting. He ended up ok, but frustrated me for no apparent reason.

Not sure what I'm going to work on next month for Descent. I kind of want to do the monsters from this set, but I want to zenethil prime them first and I'm not sure I want to do that yet, so I may snag another 4 pack of heroes to work on. See you next month.

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