A Ranger in the Temple

Recently as part of an effort to improve my figure-painting skills for dioramas I’ve been practicing with various 1:35 scale military figures and gaming minis. I can’t quite say I’ve got the hang of it yet but I’m on my way, and now starting on the first gaming mini I intend to use for actual play:


This is Talon Everhale, one of the heroes from the Dungeons and Dragons “Temple of Elemental Evil” table-top game. I bought the game as a Christmas present for myself: We’ve been making family game night a regular thing at our house and I felt like this would be both a fun addition to the game night tradition and a good painting project, as the game includes about 40 unpainted gaming minis representing the heroes and monsters in the game. I was also interested in the D&D table-top games because I’d heard the gameplay was similar to another game we’ve enjoyed, “Betrayal at the House on the Hill”. Betrayal has pre-painted minis for the player characters, but simple cardboard tokens for all the monsters, so with Temple I welcomed the chance not only to paint the figures myself but to have figures for the monsters as well.
I did a bit of alteration to the figure before priming it: I replaced the arrow with one I made myself, and added the bow-string. Both are made from 0.5mm piano wire. Having the bowstring the same thickness as the arrow isn’t ideal but I didn’t have anything better on hand, and didn’t want to use something fragile, like hair or stretched sprue, for a bowstring on a figure that would be handled in play. The figure’s original arrow was thick (about the size of her arm) and crooked, molded from the same plastic as the rest of the figure, so I feel like the new arrow is a big improvement.
I’ve decided to paint this figure by hand with Mr. Color. I think it’s an unusual choice, as acrylic paints are much more frequently favored for painting minis. However I have a lot of it on hand, and I’m familiar with it, and I’ve had some success with it in my previous figure-painting practice. So far, I’ve only primed it: the next step will be to paint the face. From my perspective this is probably the most challenging part of the build.
Applying the primer by hand with a brush was good practice, particularly as I don’t normally do a lot of hand-painting, but it’s also a choice I made in response to an unfortunate situation with my work-space: it’s a basement space that gets a lot of water, and unfortunately it’s entirely dependent upon our sump pump in order to stay dry. We lost electrical power for about 18 hours on Thursday, and this unfortunately resulted in the room being flooded. The situation’s not too bad all things considered, but we’re still working on drying it out, so my airbrush is basically unusable at present. I hope to have the place back up and running in a week or so, but until then, model-making is a bit of a challenge.