Hobby Update: Tracker

At least I think. The helmet makes it difficult.

Behold, the test model! He looks excited to be here!

As mentioned in another post, this lucky hunter was selected to be my Herd's test model. He got a little conversion work done over the weekend, and is now all primed and ready to receive some glorious paint, and boldly blaze a hobby trail for the rest of the Herd to follow. Go Tracker go!

I don't have a great backstory or overall plan for my Herd. I knew I wanted to play them with some MSU flair and use a ton of troops. That's the way I play, and it seemed like lots of troops and thereby having lots of charge potential was the best way to take advantage of all the units with Pathfinder and Thunderous Charge. I also knew I wanted to avoid the usual pink flesh/brown fur colors that nearly all beastmen I have ever seen have, and so I eventually settled on "tundra" for my overall theme. This Herd will be traversing frigid lands.

I used the Vallejo White Pumice Paste again, sloshing it around the base of the Reaper fig. The model was primed black, per my usual approach.

The paints I ordered were from Reaper Miniatures. I've been ordering characters and stuff from them for a while. They do great things that can be used for Dungeons and Dragons. When you order through them, occasionally they drop in a free sample, usually just a complimentary paint. (I even got one teal-like color free in this order), which is a nice touch. I've been wanting to try other paint lines for a while, and figured the Herd would let me explore a bit.

If you click on the link above, you can see how they bottle their paints. Namely, in bottles, not pots. As someone who paints on canvases as well as on minis... this was great. Acrylic paints come in similar squirt bottles or tubes.. and even raiding my grandpa's stash of old paints (years and years old), they were still usable. Bottles help the longevity of your paints.

To properly use a bottle, you need a palette, but you can pick up little plastic ones for $1-$2. Avery minor additional cost. This gives you so much more control than the Citadel paints I was using for Warhammer Fantasy. Citadel pots go fetid all the time. Here, I squirt only what I needed (just a few drops) and the rest should stay nice and safe.

So far... damp, but good.

So, before I was side-tracked by a tangent on bottles, you may recall that this mini was spray painted black.

Black is my usual priming color. Generally it works well, but in this instance, black is not a color one thinks of when one thinks about tundra.

The first thing I did was paint the ground white. I did not want the paste to be sand this time around. I'm going for snow! Once that dried, I took a tiny bit of Frost Blue from the MSP paint line, and with a wet brush, spread it thinly around the base, resulting in a light blue tone which you can see to the left. Once that dried, another round of white was lightly brushed along the bumps with a dry brush.

The paints were really runny. Eventually, I ended up with about the look I was going for, but it took several coasts to get there. You can sort of see what I mean on the left. The picture was taken moments after applying the gray color (Snow Shadow). That was at least two layers of the blue color (Glacier Blue)... so yeah, runny paints. Much more so that I was expecting. I will need to get some more practice with these paints. I might not have shaken the bottle well enough, or had an overly wet brush.... I don't know what the issue was, or if the paints were working as expected. I will have to experiment a bit.

After about hour or so (I wasn't really paying close attention to the time), I ended up with this paint job on the right. 

The model still needs a little work though (like a wash for the flesh; probably a wash on the bow; a touch up on the strap; and probably a highlight on the helmet eye slits to set them off). Still, setting aside those little imperfections, I think this was a successful test. I think this scheme will look good on an army and look really striking all together on the table.

I can't wait to put more paint onto these minis. I've got a busy few days coming up, but I'm glad that I got to work on this tonight, and doubly glad it went well. I will hopefully get some hobbying in this weekend at least, and have some more painting progress posted soon!

I think I'll tackle some Tribal Hunters next....