Druanti the Arch-Revenant
I've been painting minis for a little under a year now. My friend Game Ready Painting first convinced me to get into the hobby last winter, so that we could play Kill Team at our annual "Wintercon" group vacation. I was into the idea of playing the game, but not sure about the hobby aspects.
Fast forward to July, and I was hooked – the hobby was past Kill Team, and past playing games. Game Ready Painting shoulder-deviled me once more, this time to enter the /r/minipainting 2024 Summer Contest.
For the contest, you had to begin with an unpainted mini. I had wanted to paint Sylvaneth after exploring warband options on Warcrier, and took this opportunity to pick up Druanti, to begin building my army.
I had an idea about a color theme, and was able to quickly test it out on a spare Zombicide mini, with the help of the Color Cube as a guide. This took under an hour, and convinced me that I'd be happy with the scheme.
In the end, I didn't use the purplish gray color here, but I kept the overall woods-in-autumn theme.
Most of these colors ended up being mixes of the 40 or so paints I had on hand, rather than exactly matching any particular one. Once I got a color I was happy with, I noted down the recipe, so that I could reproduce it later
The next steps were assembly, priming, and base coating. I knew I wanted to spend some time working on a blend on the wings, so I didn't fully glue everything, and carefully avoided painting over the attachment point on either the main body or the wing assembly.
Although I was a bit sloppy with the basecoat, both the brown and green mixes I was using cover well, and I was able to repair things later.
The basecoating took around an hour, but I wanted to paint something I was proud of in the first session, so I took a little extra time to work some orange and red drybrush highlighting onto Druanti's leaf skirt.
In the next session, with about another two to three hours' effort, I got some detail on to the horns, shadowing, highlights, and eyes on to the face, and very rough passes of the blending on the shield and glaive.
A big question in my mind was, would Sylvaneth carry any metal? Or would they stick to more "natural" materials, like Druids in Dungeons & Dragons? (At least as of 3.5e, the first edition I played). I concluded that, as trees given life by Alarielle, they probably wouldn't use metal. The shield would be polished hardwood, and the weapon some kind of glowing fey magic, but definitely not metal.
At this point, the blending was pretty splotchy. The "AI" in my iPhone camera also isn't doing me any favors here...
In the end, I let Druanti have a little bit of metal – the shiny baubles on her weapon and hip got a dab of gold, with green gemstones. About another 90 minutes invested, and the blends ... still weren't great, but at least were getting a bit better. I got a cleaner yellow, and more orange than brown in the midsection of the blade.
Finally, the part I had been dreading: the largest blended area, Druanti's wings. I haven't talked yet about how difficult yellow is to work with. The internet is littered with stories of yellow's poor coverage. Two thin coats? Try ten, or twelve. The good news is: if you are patient, eventually yellow can look great. Don't rush it, and resist the temptation to apply thicker coats.
Unfortunately, I didn't take any progress photos on the way from here to finish, but suffice to say, there was a lot of blending, a lot of glazing, a fair amount of questioning my life choices, and in the end, something that I'm really proud of.
Once the painting was done, I turned to the base. I wanted to create an autumn forest floor, so rather than green or too many synthetic tufts, I decided to use coconut coir as the main base, with a bit of grape vine from my back yard as a spooky magical vine wrapped around a log. Both the coir and the vine I baked low in the oven for a good long while to make sure no actual forest critters were calling Druanti's base home.
Finally, it was time for a photo shoot, for the contest entry photos. I've since upgraded with an inexpensive photo lightbox, but I was working on deadline, and had to make do with a sheet of printer paper and LED fill lights I had on hand.
In the end, I got a bronze medal in the contest! Maybe more importantly, I learned a lot along the way, and had fun. I definitely won't be spending 10+ hours on every mini I paint, but I'm glad I stretched myself with this project.
The final photos I entered in the contest.