Bones 4 Miniatures: Black & White!

What's going on here?  Is it a badass Elven diplomatic visit to the Drow?  Or were these Elves caught snooping around underground, and a Drow matriarch will now decide their fate?  I had these Elves and Drow miniatures in my Bones 4 rewards, and they all fit into a single batch; I expect the stealthy subterranean Drow to wear black, so why not dress the Elves in High Elf white and call this batch Black & White?  Those ebony-skinned Drow were never going to fit into the color wheel, anyway.

These elves are a little rougher & tougher than I'm used to seeing Elves.  I thought it would be boring to just paint them in all white, so I did some pale pastels.  And there are 6 of them, so I did the color wheel in pastel.

These Drow look terrifying and aristocratic, as you would expect.  Again, boring to just paint them black, so I did dark colors.  Again, I had 6 of them, so I tried to do the color wheel in dark colors.  I painted their skin with a dark purplish gray rather than straight-up black, because it looked more naturalistic, and because they would just disappear into silhouette if I painted them flat black. 

The Dark Elf Queen on Throne by Bob Ridolfi sadly isn't poseable, so she can't really get off her throne.  I tried to make the throne look like the basalt I saw on Minnesota's North Shore of Lake Superior; this basalt is extremely hard and semi-crystalline, but very brittle and nearly impossible to carve.  Similarly, the throne is magnificent, but the details are crude; I the seat isn't curved, and there are chips in various places.  I imagine the Drow used various magical abilities to get the normally almost unworkable basalt into this magnificent spider throne, then they quit when they got tired and decided this was 'good enough'.

A word of advice: if you plan to paint this swell Drow Queen miniature, don't glue the Queen to the throne until you're done painting both the queen and the throne.  There is a very visible but difficult-to-paint area between the queen's back and the throne; so I recommend you paint the queen and the throne, THEN glue the queen to the throne.

The Drow worship Lolth, a spider goddess, so spiders are a big thing for Drow elves (note the queen's spider throne).  Big spiders are an even bigger thing for them.  This giant Cave Spider by Kevin Williams is the only spider I got with my Bones 4 Kickstarter rewards.  I was inspired to paint it blue with beige spikes after learning about Cobalt Blue Tarantulas and a newly-discovered electric blue tarantula.

Bones 4 Miniatures: Purple/Violet!

It's another lovely day underground!  Always the same cool temperature, always soothingly dark.  Certainly there is no better day for a clan of Gnomes to explore a treasure- and monster-filled cave.  Of course everything is in various shades of purple and violet, as the dial on the color wheel is pointing to Violet for this batch.

Here is our brave clan of gnomes.  Gnomes are about half as tall as humans and can see twice as far (and in full color!) in dim light.  They can magically speak with burrowing animals once per day and cast little illusion spells to help them survive in a world of big scary monsters.  Of course they make excellent miners and prize gemstones very highly.  As proud, magical beings, these gnomes are attired in purples and violets, with gold accents.

Purple shriekers like these don't attack adventurers per se; but if you get close to them, they emit a piercing scream, which tells any predatory monsters within earshot: dinner has arrived!  Intelligent monsters sometimes deliberately plant shriekers around their lairs to serve as living burglar alarms.

At last we approach priceless cave crystals, guarded by deadly violet fungus.  Those fungi don't look like much, but they can lash out with deadly tentacles, slathering unknowing passersby with a horrible flesh-digesting goo, which eventually reduces their hapless victims to puddles of raw nutrients which the fungi can then feed from and grow spores in.

My Little Pony Miniatures: Glitter!

It's a lovely day for a Pony picnic!

From the left is Alfa with her sister Proxima.

In the center is Dazzle with her sister Razzle.

From the right are Brandy with her sister Meade.

Happy April Fools!

Seriously, these are paint experiments.  I got some glitter paints, I wanted to see how they looked on various materials, and I had all these My Little Pony blind bag miniatures gathering dust.  I picked out several miniatures I didn't like much, and I decided to turn them into custom-painted original characters.

First I wiped the miniatures down with cotton balls soaked in acetone; this removed their cutie marks and (gruesomely) their eyes, and hopefully any mold release and other coatings, as well as fingertip smudges.  Then I soaked them in soapy scalding water just to be on the safe side.  None of this appears to have damaged or marred the ponies' plastic surfaces, unlike what the acetone does to Reaper Black Bones miniatures.

Each My Little Pony blind bag miniature has a little LEGO-like peg hole in one of their feet; I'm not sure why, but it accomodates a 24X machine screw, so I used those instead of glue to attach the ponies to painting pedestals.

The blackish ones were originally opaque pastel colors; I primed them black to see how the glitter would look on black.  The others are all cast in translucent plastic with some glitter inside.  Then I primed all of these with Acrylicos Vallejo spray matte varnish .

The 1st pony of each pair got FolkArt Glitterific Silver acrylic paint, and the 2nd pony of each pair got FolkArt Glitterific Clear Hologram acrylic paint.  Their mane and tails got a second coat of these, but I can't really tell the difference.  The paint is thick, like petroleum jelly, but the glitter is dense enough that it still covers well.  I can only apologize for the photos; they really do not do these glitter paints justice.  However, the multicolor hologram-like sheen of the Clear Hologram paint is really spectacular.  Only the black figures (Alpha and Proxima) hint of the multicolor nature of these glitter paints.

Then they each got a coating of satin polyurethane varnish.  In retrospect, I should have used a gloss varnish; the satin varnish really mutes the colorful holo glitter reflections.

The 1st (black) pair and 3rd (orange & yellow) pair were glossy lacquered with spray lacquer I got at a hardware store.  The 2nd (pink & blue) pair was dull lacquered.

Then I glued on googly eyes.  Googly eyes make everything better.

I looked into tiny stickers to use for cutie marks (my wife calls them tramp stamps), but they would need to be smaller than 1/4" in order to fit on a tiny pony's flank, and I couldn't find any this small; plus I kind of felt like it was cheating.  So their tramp stamps are lame and poorly defined.

Although I am presenting this as an April Fool's joke because I usually paint Fantasy Role-Playing Game (D&D) miniatures from Reaper Miniatures, there are numerous connections between My Little Pony and Dungeons & Dragons; I blogged about this 8 years ago.  Now there is Ponyfinder, a rich collection of fan-published rules for playing various Pony characters, in various Pony races, fighting various Pony monsters, in the D&D-inspired Pathfinder RPG.  You can even buy special Ponyfinder miniatures, but I think it would be cheaper and more fun to get a blind bag My Little Pony miniature and repaint it.