Saturday, September 13, 2014

Reaper Bones: Deenah, Female Barbarian; Spirit of the Forest

This week's figure for Monday Miniatures is the first from the Fighters set: 77062 Deenah, Female Barbarian.






This was another fairly clean figure with minimal mold lines (the most noticeable ones were on the fingers).  I like the sculpt, as it is very dynamic and has an uncommon pose with the second hand reaching to grab the sword hilt.

Since it is a barbarian, I wanted to stick with browns for the furs and leather.  However, since the figure has a very little amount of fur, I decided that it would probably work better as a barbarian from a temperate area (rather than a far northern arctic environment).  To give the figure some color, I painted her mail blue.  To further emphasize her barbarian nature, I added facepaint to the figure.  Initially I had it painted as a stripe across the eyes, but it looked too much like the ninja turtle Leonardo's eye mask so I changed it to a vertical half-face pattern.

Also of note are my further attempts at non-metallic metal (NMM).  I don't think I got the patterning quite right as far as where the lights and darks are positioned, but I am happy with the blending I achieved.

Conclusion:  I like the figure, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.  I plan to continue attempting NMM (though maybe not on every figure), and hopefully I'll get the positioning figured out.  I'm also pretty happy with how the facepaint turned out, as it's not too saturated.

But that's not all this week!  I managed to complete 77184 Spirit of the Forest from the Forces of Nature set.





As you can probably tell from above, this is a bulky figure and required assembly.  The figure did not require much clean up, though it was challenging determining if there were any mold lines due to the sculpted textures.  I plan to base the figure once I receive the bases from Bones II, but the figure stands on its own quite well.

In keeping with the figure's nature motif, I stuck almost entirely with browns and greens.  The exceptions are the various flowers and fungi.  I went back over some of the more obvious plant details with a brighter green, as the figure was rather drab prior to that.  To provide a little more interest to the face (which is primarily woody, and thus brown), I added a "glow" effect for the eyes.  This was my first attempt at doing so, and I think the effect works well.

The mushrooms are painted like the 1-Up mushrooms from Super Mario Bros. (and the heroes might just need them after facing off against this foe).  If I had known I would go into orange-red with the flowers, I would probably have painted some of the mushrooms red (as another nod to Super Mario, and for more variety).

Conclusion:  Despite the relatively bland palette, the details really made this figure drag on; getting the initial basecoat of browns and greens was very quick, but I kept finding new details that needed attention.  That said, I think it was worthwhile as the figure turned out quite nicely.  I also like how the glowing eyes turned out, and look forward to trying that again on another figure.

Next week's figure for Monday Miniatures is 77055 Anval Thricedamned, Evil Warrior.  This is a nice looking figure, and I'm looking forward to getting him painted.

- M:M

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