Ann’s April PTCYAO Challenge

Ann of Ann’s Immaterium has once again thrown out a CHALLENGE to mini painters the world over. In a twist, she also included other hobbyists and their projects, which In thought is kinda neat. Now, if I only had another arcade machine I could finish in a month…

For my part, I can’t say that I got a lot of painting done. I’ve been chipping away at my latest Blood Bowl team. I thought I would have them done this month, but alas not just yet. Next month!

However, I’ve not been idle. On top of work and life kicking into high gear, I’ve managed to assemble four whole Blood Bowl teams. A few kit-bashes thrown in there to boot. Three of those teams are said to be the toughest to assemble, so things will hopefully go easier from here on out. Rough count of 80+ minis assembled and I should be priming the last of those teams this weekend. I figured take advantage of being stuck inside as much as I can! If I can get all that stuff prepped and out of the closet shelves, then most of the hard work is out of the way.

I thought about sharing pics of the assembly process, but I imagine we have all seen enough grey plastic in our lives already!

Back to the Challenge. Since I didn’t get too much done, I enlisted the aid of my little Elf.

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Keep going, only 79 more minis to go!

I’ve been meaning to find a way for my daughter to get into painting minis, as she expressed interest at a young age. When I saw some My Little Pony minis while shopping online, the light bulb went off “DING!”.

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Pony Power!

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Little assist from Mom on this side

I’m not sure if she will gravitate to painting more minis, as she quickly realized how much work Daddy puts into this stuff. Also, part of the idea was to keep her entertained while I paint my own minis, but I found that to be impossible and just focused on helping her. Will see how things go in the future.

And now for My Little Entry.

I picked this mini up to use as a “Dwarf Coach” for our Blood Bowl game. He could easily do double duty as a merchant, noble, etc. for other games. I might end up making a ‘Blood Bowl Coach base’ to place him on when I’m using him in that game. Will see how that idea comes about someday.

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I just finished up those chests yesterday, and I’m glad to be able to include them as some props. I left them pretty clean on purpose, perhaps being stored in a castle versus a dungeon. Or magical enchantments inside are leaving them looking newish. Later chests will be weathered much more.

The Chest minis are really nice and I picked up several of them for use in dungeon crawler type games. I experimented with different Contrast paints for the wood, which was nice and quick. The metal bands take a little more work, of course. The gold bands are showing up much brighter in the pic than in person, for whatever reason. I tried out some Army Painter Light Tone shade on those and really like the result. It didn’t tint the gold like Reikland Fleshshade would or make it too dark and dirty like Agrax or Nuln Oil might. I’ll probably be playing around with the AP shades some more for some metal stuff.

I don’t recall right now where I got the Dwarf mini, but he reminds me of something that I might see on The Imperfect Modeller’s site. Probably because of the bulk of my painting the last few years has been Games Workshop Blood Bowl or Necromunda minis. It’s a bit different working on smaller scale minis. I had started the base paints on him, and then kept passing him by over and over. Ann’s Challenge helped nudge me to finish him off finally. Thanks Ann!

That wraps up this post for today. I still have some more assembly work to do, but also chipping away at the next Blood Bowl team. Hope to be sharing some pictures of them shortly. Good health to you all!

22 thoughts on “Ann’s April PTCYAO Challenge”

  1. Very cool and a nice addition to the challenge, which is wrapping up on the 3rd. I’d be curious to know what paints you used for your wood experiments; very cool achieving three different effects. Also, if you don’t have any objections, I’d like to include the little pony by “Faust’s Little Elf” as a completed miniature for the challenge.

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    1. Thanks Ann. Oh yea, the My Little Pony can certainly be added. I’ll let her know what people have to say, she will probably get a kick out of that.

      For the wood, I’ve used all the brown Contrast paints. For these three specific ones, I used: Gore-Grunta Fur (opened chest), Wyldwood (darkest chest), and Aggaros Dunes (lightest chest). Aggaros gives a nice Pine look. Wyldwood reminds me of a dark stained Oak. Gore-Grunta looks a bit like Cedar. Hope that helps! Washes were only used sparingly towards the base on most of the chests. So it was pretty much a one coat application!

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      1. Great! The My Little Pony brand happened a few years too late for my childhood, but it is the sort of thing I would have loved at your daughter’s age. It is nice to see that she is developing an interest in painting miniatures. 🙂

        Thank you for the information about contrast paints. I think I might give them a try on some Etsy chests/mimics I have kicking around.

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        1. Thanks Ann. Yea, the Contrast paints are great for wood. I have a few other chests done in other colors, but I’m only working on them inbetween other projects. So it’s super slow going. Hopefully someday I’ll post all of them together as a nice reference.

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  3. Nice work here, especially on getting the little one involved. Now just keep priming her and you’ll have a basecoating apprentice before you know it!
    Merchant/Coach and chests look great as well. He’s got that filthy rich look of a team owner, doesn’t he? Oh, I also went to Amazon and looked up “deep cuts chest” to find those models. I found them, and also some other things I wasn’t quite expecting from that search!

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    1. Thanks mate. Oh really, from an Amazon search? Reminds me of the time I went to order a pizza at work, from one of our local places “Hot Lips”. I had pop ups everywhere!

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  4. Now a seperate comment for the more important model here – the Pony. Nice choice of colours – I assume that you have more than one red to choose from, so the super bright red for (her?) mane and tail works really nicely against the flatter pink of the rest of the pony. Likewise the blue/yellow patterns on the flank look great as well – all set off by the nice big eyes (and the eyelashes!!)
    Great work, Mini-Faust!

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    1. Thanks Az! I grabbed some old craft paints, and we mixed up the paints to match the colors for “Pinky Pie” as closely as we could. Thanks to her help, I think we got a pretty close match. I’ll forward along your compliments. 🙂

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      1. Thank you, thank you TIM. With kids it’s always hard to say. She could end up super interested now, and then totally hate it in her pre-teens. I’ll just see where that road takes us.

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  7. Pingback: April 2020 “Paint the Crap You Already Own!” Painting Challenge Round-up (Part 1 of 2) | Ann's Immaterium

  9. Great stuff all round, I really like the different shades of wood on the chests (that warm, reddish brown especially is just lovely!) the dwarf coach is a fine looking fellow and of course the pony steals the show!

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