The Hills Have Cankles

An update on the state of project hill giant. I want to finish before September arrives (the giants, not the post). I'll keep it brief so I can return to the painting cave ASAP.

I suffered a setback as a result of my basing. Of late I've been going ever smaller with the size of basing grit in an attempt to get a better in-scale effect. I've also noticed an issue in that I unintentionally wind up removing some of the the grit during the pre-primer wash. With this in mind I washed the giants, applied the grit, and then primed (in that order).

That was a mistake.

Once primed and basecoated it became obvious that a layer of fine dust had been deposited on sections of the mini and that consequently the final product was pretty well ruined.

There seemed no easy remedy so, after much cursing and a fair amount of hesitation, I hit the offending bits with steel wool, fine sandpaper, and a motor-tool equipped with a wire brush attachment. I then gave her a good rinse and re-primed. This greatly improved the state of things but it did take some time.

To paraphrase Ricardo Montalban from The Wrath of Khan: time is a luxury I do not enjoy. The on-schedule completion of the project is in doubt.

On the positive side of the ledger, I've gotten to play around with Reaper's olive skintones that were originally meant for the OW stone giant. I'm pleased with the results thus far.

Much work remains to be done.

Don't even get me started on the current state of the Otherworld hill giant.

Mean Green Painting Machine

I closed last time with the thought that my next project might be either a hill giant or fire giant. It was idle musing more than a concrete plan but, after some encouragement from Chris at Duke of The Blood Keep and in view of the fact that I really enjoyed working on the stone giant, project hill giant was born.

Not really a project to start. My intent was simple enough; build, paint, and present the Otherworld hill giant as my July painting challenge/pledge entry. I liked the mini "as-is" thereby avoiding my need to "improve" on the efforts of professional sculptors by attacking their work with all manner of tools and green-stuff.

Quick and easy. I would finish my entry early for once.

That was the plan anyway.

Here the first draft of this post went on to detail how my "simple'' task morphed into something unmanageable. Not exactly compelling reading as it turns out. Suffice it to say that my July entry wound up as a dwarf/jackalope/slime combo while August's will hopefully consist of two hill giants (one a heavily converted Reaper mini) and a piece of terrain.

Some pics of the aforementioned July combo for your viewing pleasure:

The jackalope is quite small and sits on a 20mm base. I sculpted the base to match the dwarf's using tools built in accordance with this tutorial. Very handy.

The hill giants are in the works. More on that next time.