Sunday, September 14, 2014

A 4 Hour Speed Painting Challenge... Accepted.

On Monday of last week, I was browsing my Twitter feed looking over all of the #miniaturemonday listings when I came upon this tweet by Mocha Minis.

  The premise is simple. You have 4 hours to paint the selected model using a limited palette of colors. The goal, to paint the mini to the best of your ability with the time and colors available. I found that Bones #77131 is one of the pirates from the first Bones Kickstarter and it was in the Vampire Pledge box. And since I didn't need to go out and pick up a mini specifically to join in, I decided that I would take part and see how well I could do.


The miniature in question is this one here. #77131, Finaela, Female Pirate by sculptor Patrick Keith. Tuesday night, after I got home from work and ate dinner. I set the oven timer for 4 hours, selected my colors and began work.

My color choices were fairly easy to make. Since black and white are given, I went with a darker shade flesh tone, a dark and light brown, a dark and light red, a silver and a gold. This would give me a nice red color for her coat, plus browns for the leathers and metallics to make her weapons more interesting.

Since I knew what I was going to be painting and had time to plan before I could actually work on the mini. I
decided to make her gloves, boots and hair black. Her chest armor dark brown, her pants light brown and the belts and bags a medium brown. From there is was just a matter of putting paint to the model within the allotted time.

To save time I didn't prime the mini, which turned out to be alright, but not optimal. Reaper has said that
Bones will take paint regardless of being primed or not. Unfortunately with the mix that I use, which is paint+water+matte medium, it doesn't like to adhere to a naked model. This meant I needed to put on a thicker layer to start out with and it seemed to take longer to dry before I
could continue with highlights.

Overall, I think she turned out well. I ended up finishing an hour and 15 minutes before the deadline and it's possible that I could have done a bit
more with it. But I think she looks pretty good for a quick job. Plus it was neat to paint up something I maybe wouldn't have picked out of the box on my own.

I'm not sure if I'll be joining in on a weekly basis. But I liked the challenge of it and I could definitely see myself doing more of them down the road if the models being used are part of the Vampire box I have on hand.
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