At Adepticon this year, my friends at Panda Cult Games were selling a bust to help promote their upcoming board game Wander: The Cult of Barnacle Bay, which had a very successful Kickstarter run and has proven so popular at the demo tables that I personally haven't been able to get a game of it demoed.
| Before Adepticon, I was shown the model and instantly fell in love with it. It was a goal of mine to get to the marketplace as soon as it opened, rush to their booth and buy one of them. The goal of which to paint up as part of my growing Let's Paint series, and help them get more exposure. Panda Cult Games is a very small operation, headed by Johnathan Phillips-Bradford and Heath Foley. Their studio artist is the amazingly talented Elizabeth Beckley-Bradford, Johnathan's wife and one of my fellow Golden Kobold judges. Then, last but not least, their community manager Logan Johnston is a social media machine. Anyway, as soon as I was back from Adepticon I started work on Mary and G.R.I.T.T. and began recording the process for the Let's Paint series, which just completed airing on YouTube on Thursday. She was great fun to paint and I especially enjoyed working on all the textures on G.R.I.T.T.. I think my favorite parts of him have to be the backpack and blanket, but I'm also pretty proud of the wood on the pauldrons. The metals turned out really well too and I was able to push my true metallics further than I had ever done before. I love how I was able to pull off the color reflections, I had tried that before with the Deathwing Terminator Captain's power sword, but it wasn't well executed there. On G.R.I.T.T. though, it looks much better and more believable. I love everything about Mary. Her pose is fun and when I look at them together I always picture her saying "This way to adventure!". I had a lot of fun painting her face and her fur. I had some problems with speeding up dry time on her with the hair dryer though, because the thin resin legs on her didn't like the hot air getting blown at her and at one point I broke one of her legs. That was an easy fix though, and nothing game breaking. Overall, I am really happy with this piece and how it all turned out. It's a nice solid chunk of resin and it was easy to do clean up on. Finding a plinth for her took some time, but I finally decided to do one similar to the one I used for Vlad, but this time I painted it gloss black instead of staining it. That's pretty much it. If you're interested in seeing how I painted this piece, you can check out the Let's Paint section of the site. If you want to paint your own Mary Fix-It and G.R.I.T.T., Panda Cult Games is now selling her on their webstore. Until next time, thanks for reading! |     |
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