More pics of the ronin to follow today. Almost done with her. Let me just say a few things about my experience with Wyrd minis first. As well as a few things I have learned from this project. Remember, this is for the WAMP competition due on April 26.
They aren't for me. At least, not at my current skill level. But even if I were great, I'd still probably take issue with a few things.
1. Minis are too small I think that 28mm is probably about as small as I can handle. Smaller than this and it just becomes a struggle to make worthwhile blends on tiny details. I'd say Malifaux minis are about the 25mm range.
2. Assembly is too much This lady came in 5 tiny parts. With as small as she already is, it was like gluing together gardening wire. Not easy. Especially with my combat stress related tremors. I use painting as a therapy and with this mini it was not.
3. Parts don't fitThis was perhaps the most frustrating part of all with this mini. I literally had to craft my own neck from greenstuff and liquid greenstuff. This took 2 days. And the head fell off of the shoulders about 5 times. There is a noticeable crack now where the neck meets the torso. I filled this in with paint, but it reappears every few days as the paint sets and sinks. Also, I just reapplied the arms and painted them, only to find that they don't fit right either. Too late to fix with greenstuff, so now it's just going to have to look like crap where the elbow meets the forearm. ON BOTH ARMS!!!
4. Details are sculpted poorly. She has about ten bows on her, but only a few are recognizable up close as bows. The rest are really just shapeless blobs. How do I paint a shapeless blob to look like a pretty purple bow, with shading and highlights? It turned into just putting a dark spot here and a light spot there. Those tiny details are what I was hoping would help me improve as a painter, but they just frustrated the hell out of me. Oh and the eyes. They weren't really shaped at all, or if they were they would have amounted to a tiny narrow speck. So I had to paint outside of the designed area when placing the borders of the eye ball. Well then if I dark lined her eyes it wouldn't look good, so I left it as just a poorly defined white eye ball, then dotted this with a green pupil. To do more would have made it look wrong.
At first glance, this mini is beautiful. I had a lot of fun with her hair, and especially trying sheer effect for the first time. It worked for me and looks great. If you're new and want to try sheer for the first time, PM me. But the poorly sculpted details and the difficulty with assembly ruins everything. It's like, why am I glazing hundreds of layers when, because of some basic issues with parts fitting together, the joins are going to look chewed up.
After I finished her hose, lingerie, and hair, the fun was robbed from this project. I'm to the point where I'm just going to slap on the paint and get her done.
My next project is my Chaos Lord. He is all blue NMM with gold trim, then frozen cracks painted on. I'll get to mess around with some snow effects too. I'm thinking I'll use the crushed glass. Really excited to get this contest over with so I can move onto this mini, because it highlights all of my strengths.
...Didn't really want to say anything about it but WTH-I am kind of in a hurry. Suffice it to say that I could be going somewhere soon where I may not be able to paint for years. This could start in six minutes or six months. Stressful and sad, yes, but i'd like to paint something enjoyable. And fast. Wish me luck.
