I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We hosted family who came down in an RV (cue the National Lampoon Christmas Vacation jokes), we had 5 people, 5 dogs, 2 cats running about. It was a lot of fun, though it didn't leave much time for painting. I was able to get some work done Sunday night once I had some time to myself. I decided to work on Arthrand Nightblade for the Reaper forum's Secret Sophie 2016 painted mini exchange. He's almost done:
I'll need to clean up the chainmail and the bit of sword paint that managed to get on the tunic fold. I'm still working on the bracers. At first I painted them as leather since that's what an archer would usually have. However, as I painted them, they looked more & more like metal bracers in their perfect cylindrical shape with a rounded lip. I also figured this would be an opportunity to paint another piece of metal on the mini and visually balance out the metal on the sword hilt. I really should have done True Metallic Metals/Shaded Metallics here but oh well.
While there's more work to do on the metals but the real question is, what to do with his hair. Platinum blonde would look cool but I don't want it to look too much like the gold on his dagger. It's either blonde or warm brown. I think a blonde color would provide good contrast to the cloak but I'd risk muddying the cloak and having to repaint sections of it. Eh, I'm overthinking it.
In the meantime, I've based him with Oxide Paste and some tiny clay-based gravel and Army Painter battleground sand. This way, it looks like his boots will be sunk into the mud a bit. While it's risky to do this after he's been mostly painted, I'm up for the challenge! I'm going to let him sit overnight and then prime & paint the base (very carefully!).