Leveraging Time (or Figure Fluffing)

This may be sacrilegious to some of you out there, but I hired a painting service to paint some of my miniatures. Now hold on there before you come at me with your sprue cutter... let me explain.

Since I have been out of commission healing up from surgery and getting my strength back, I have not yet been able to do any painting myself - heck, I haven't even been able to safely get to my my painting table without assistance until last week. So about 3 weeks ago, I contacted Trevy at www.trevyspaintingtable.com and asked if he would be interested in an unusual request. He agreed, and I sent him 20 figures (5 plastic Catachans, 5 plastic Orlocks, and 10 metal orc Blood Bowl figures).

Group shot of the entire order.

In a former life, I was a comic book colorist. I worked in Dark Horse's internal coloring department for about 5 years. In order to streamline the process and improve consistency, we had the pages fluffed/flatted prior to going to a single colorist (to add all the rendering and effects). Flatting is simply laying down flat colors behind the artwork. This allows the colorist to more quickly select areas to render, and from a production standpoint allows one colorist to easily complete one book (improving consistency).

Essentially, that's what I hired Trevy to do - flat my figures. I asked for his Level 1 service (without a varnish or any base work). I sent the figures assembled, so my cost was only 50¢ per figure! (plus S&H both ways). This will allow me to complete my figures much quicker! The shots in this post are the pics I was sent to approve the order. I don't have the figures in-hand yet, but at this point it is exactly what I wanted! Once I get the figures, I will add shadow and highlighting, and then base them properly, then finally matte varnish them.

 Catachans and Orlocks
These are for my Dark Heresy campaign and are stand alone squads.

Blood Bowl Orcs
These will need to match the 10 other figures on the team.

I will show complete before and after pics of this project in future posts.

These will be the first figures I own that have not been painted by me (If you don't count the pre-painted D&D and Star Wars miniatures) and is a little weird when I think about it. Please check out Trevy's site and see what he offers.

I think this is a great idea if you need to speed paint an army, or if you have entirely too much stuff on your project table! Base coating is my least favorite part of modeling, so I am really happy to have tried this idea. What do you think? Is this something you would consider?

Recovery Round 3

(Image used without permission)

I am finally home (again) after over a month in the hospital (minus a brief 6-day trip home). This procedure was only supposed to be a 3-4 day stay, but it turned into 3 surgeries, and a total of 12 days in ICU & 23 days in a regular hospital room.

I still have another week or two of recovery at home. During this time, I am not supposed to lift more than 5 pounds, cough, sneeze, sit up more than an hour at a time (or as tolerated), avoid stairs, or do any strenuous activities.

Over this endeavor, I have had many days to ponder my current projects (plus my desired future ones), and when I get back up to "painting strength" I will be re-prioritizing the "work bench que". However, right now the stairs to my garage (and my workbench) are more of a deterrent than my wife is (who stayed home from work to make sure I don't over exert).

Back on my Feet... sort of

Well its been a week since I came back from the hospital, and I finally had the strength to get out to the workbench last night. I've spent 3.5 weeks on my back after 2 surgeries (there is a chance I am going back for a third next week), so I'm a little week in the legs right now.

I spent a few hours last night and a few hours today painting. I didn't worry too much about completing any challenges or working on armies... I just painted what caught my eye.

The first thing I worked on was a small unit of RT era Penal Legion troops. The sergeant and 3 of the troops were acquired in the 80's and I recently picked up the other 2 troops from Laertes. They will perform double duty as Dark Heresy NPC's and members of a Rag Tag IG army I've been brewing up.

These guys were painted with a base coat, 3 layers of washes (2x Devlan Mud, 1x Badab Black), and then "highlighted" with the base coat.


I also worked a little bit on the wholesale repainting of my BFG Space Marine fleet by repainting a squadron of Hunter class destroyers, and painting 2 Grey Knight Strike Cruisers. I ordered the cruisers from Forge World about 2-3 years ago and I never got around to assembling them. The destroyers were ordered from GW around the same time, along with a pack of Gladius and Nova frigates and all three squadrons were painted straight away.