Bones 4 Miniatures: Green!

Because my color wheel clock points to green, this batch is all green monsters from the Reaper Bones 4 Kickstarter rewards.

I've still got plenty of goblins left to paint; here are 7 of them, decked out in dark green clothes.  I thought these goblins would get easier to paint, but I still miss areas on them; I think I'm finishing them more quickly, though.  In this scene, the goblins are the protagonists, using a mossy, algae-laden raft to salvage a wrecked ship.

Unfortunately for the goblins, the wreck is infested with malevolent pirate ghosts!

The North Shore of Lake Superior is a 3-hour drive from here, so I had an idea to adapt the Gordon Lightfoot song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" to describe the shipwreck inhabited by these pirate ghosts, but the more I read about the song and the original tragedy, the more I felt that joking about it was in poor taste.

These pirate ghosts are cast in translucent fluorescent green plastic, so I wanted to paint them in a way which preserves this translucent vibrant quality.  Accordingly, I could not prime them with my usual white primer.  I found a recommendation to prime translucent minis with Testor's Dullcote before painting, but I took a chance on Acrylicos Vallejos spray matte varnish.  This varnish looks a little foamy when it goes on, but as it dries the foam disappears and the varnish preserves reasonable detail.  The dull nature of the finish and the translucent green material reminded me (perhaps appropriately for shipwreck ghosts) of beach glass.  I discovered that my acrylic model paint adhered very well to the Acrylic varnish, as I expected.

I wanted to paint these with something vibrant yet eerie that would highlight details.  I first laid on a wash of fluorescent chartreuse and fluorescent green, but the result turned too transparent upon drying, and basically disappeared.  Next, I tried a wash with non-fluorescent chartreuse and fluorescent green.  The paints become opaque when the figures are backlit, but I don't mind the ugliness; they're hideous terrifying ghosts, after all.

I put a GrimLight in one of these pirates, hoping the entire figure would glow like a lava lamp, but the material is cloudy enough and the shapes have so many twists and turns that they don't provide for much internal reflection nor allow direct illumination.  As a result, the point source of the GrimLight brightens up the immediate vicinity of the light element, but does not infuse the entire miniature.

However, the fluorescent effect is quite powerful, if you can light your game table with a UV lamp.