This is Lem, the Warlock/Bard Tieffelin (but usually goes disguised as a gnome child).

This is a HeroForge miniature and a joy to paint. It's detailed enough to you can have some fun, but it's proportioned in such a way that you also have a lot of room to test things.

I'm happy with the results. I used my tried and true techniques here, but also tried something special with the flame. It turned out ok, even if I think I should have made it brighter somehow. I also tried edge highlight on the coat. It doesn't show much, but at least it's not horrible.

I had a little accident while painting it. The paint I used for the base stuck to my paiting handle during the night, and the next day when I tried to remove it, the base stay stucked and the miniature broke at the ankle. A bit of super-glue later and it's fixed.

I had a bunch of mushroom Gormiti miniatures, so I decided to paint them. I like painting squads of 6-8 minis at the same time. I find it allows me to test new things and adjust my technique with several tries on various minis. Also, it's much faster to paint in batch of similar miniatures than one at a time.

Here is a close up of the main mini. I have five of them, and wanted to paint them in similar colorschemes, but with different top colors.

I only had of those, but I find they actually have a better pose.

Here they are after black priming and some color added. I started with a dry brush of a beige color, then added some green here and there.

I started by adding green on the body (as you can see in the back), but it looked too much like a swim suit so for the others I only put green on the feet.

I then painted the mushroom tops with various colors (blue, red, purple) and had the dots painted yellow. Then I tried adding a green wash on it, but it turned them way too green, so I used the trusted Agrax Earthshade instead.

Top view for the various colors. The red works the best, but I wanted some different colors to differentiate them in battle.

This is not something I build, but something I bought. A set of Pathfinder's Urban tiles.

Lem, our bard, decided to infiltrate the headquarter of a local band of thieves, in the Docks district. He managed to charm the bartender (even if such spells are forbidden in the city) and get information from him.

But when the spell ran off, the bartender sent thugs after him. I had to improvise a back-alley scuffle with the ruffians, and the guards arriving shortly after.

The tiles proved handy as I could give them to my players and ask them to place them so there was a central alley. They were then in charge of putting the as they wanted. Less work for me, more empowerment to them.

I tried to make some dungeon tiles out of cork. I had bought some isolation cork boards and thought I could turn them into dungeon tiles.

I had seen the Wyloch tiles video and other video about making tiles from isolation foam, but I thought it would take too much time. I thought that using cork would be easier, as I won't have to carve any stone detail into it as the cork already has some texture to it that could look like stone once painted.

Cutting

So I went into cutting my board into various sizes. I did a few 2x2, some larger and a few angled pieces as well.

Priming

Cutting the fork was actually quite easy. I cut some recess to delimit the various squares and went on base coating them black.

Painting

Unfortunately the paint in my can slightly warp the tiles. It's not much visible on the smaller ones, but on the big one you can see that they don't fit square on the table, one end is more elevated than the other.

I then went onto painting them. I first added some black paint into recesses where the can couldn't get. Then I applied two dry brushes, of dark gray and lighter gray.

At that point it looked too gray and not very interesting. So I went into adding some more variations. I took some white, brown and green and added some dry brushing and sponge blob here and there. I didn't really have a plan when I started and the overall look now is more interesting, but still quite bland.

What I discovered is that doing a dry brushing along the lines is what looks the best, like here:

Playing

And here is how they look like in-game when my group of adventurers went exploring an underground barrow with ominous statues. One statue was trapped, and 3 skeletons arrived to block the entrance. Only Melkor, the level one necromancer managed to get out.

Above, another group went into exploring a nearby barrow. To be honest, I don't even remember what they where encountering there.

I have been using the tiles a lot in our mega dungeon campaign and it worked pretty well. They're a bit fiddly sometimes, and not all cut to the exact same dimensions so it can create some slight alignment problems, but nothing major.

What I don't have it walls, though. As long as the layouts are simple it's OK, but when you have long corridors with many side doors, it can be more difficult to tell which room is which. In the future I might redo more tiles but paint them in a different color scheme so we can differentiate them.

More playing

Below are more pictures of the various games we play with them:

I bought a bag full of Gormiti plastic toys in a garage sale, so I could practice painting on them.

I like Gormiti toys because they are fairly large, so you don't need to be very precise in your painting. Also, they look like any generic monster so you can go pretty wild on the color scheme. And finally, they are very cheap, so I don't feel bad about trying stuff that don't work.

Here is how a few of them look now. The hard part of painting them once base coated is figure out what they are supposed to be: metal unit, big insect, weird demon, etc?

I went with a big metal unit for the first one and tried some OSL on it, but it didn't work out that much.

For the second I went all big insect. In the background you can see a shell elemental which I'm pretty proud of. This is a very original miniature and it turned out pretty great; I'll surely dump that on my players at some point.

The last one is some kind of draconic creature, but to be honest I wasn't really inspired by it, so it's pretty bland.

I like to keep those two minis on my bench, as they remind me of the progress I made in a little more than a year of casual painting.

The first one is one of the very first minis I painted when I got back to painting. Two colors, and a heavy dip into wood varnish.

The second one is after I tried on metallic paints. Dark silver and copper, and some light silver highlights to make it look like a dented old armor. And of course a Nuln Oil wash on top of it.

This is a group shot of what I was working on at that time. I picked up a few of the female miniatures from Zombicide Green Horde as well as some men.

The thing in the back is an attempt at making a lava elemental out of a Gormiti miniature. It didn't came out as well as I initially imagined.

Painting the armored Wolverine and Iron Man was fun. You only need two metallic colors and a Nuln Oil Wash to make them look good (enough). In retrospect, I should have added one other flashy color to some of their equipment pieces to make them pop more.

The Wonderwoman mini came out well, but I should have used another color for her dress, as it's too similar to the cloak color. Same goes for the woman in red. Both her clothes and cloak are red, and the kinda blend together. I think I tried some highlights on them, but as they felt too naive and broad I repainted on top. I should have kept them.

For the other women, I tried to stay with simple, neutral, colors and I think they came out ok and could work as generic fighters.

And a shot right before the varnishing.

I transformed a Yu-Gi-Oh toy into an iron golem

The mini on the left is from Zombicide Green Horde, and I was painting it at the same time, but the star of this post is the big hulking figure on the right.

I found it in a garage sale, and had no idea what it was, but I thought it could be good practice for testing out my new metallic paints.

Turns out to be a character from Yu-Gi-Oh, named Exodia. I have

no idea what their backstory is, though.

I painstakingly painted it all around with the metallic paints, trying to use various metals for various parts, but it turned out to be pretty boring looking in the end.

So I decided to apply a fair dose of Nihilak Oxyde on it to make it look like it was very old. The result is mildly convincing.

On one hand, it does give it a special look, like it was sitting at the bottom of the sea for a long time and finally got out. On the other hand it does look like paint and not real oxydation. I still haven't mastered how to use this special paint.

But the main lesson I learned here is that I don't need to apply metallic paint everywhere. I drybrush is more effective and much faster.

I made an Iron Golem out of Ronan the Accuser

I used this mini as a practice for testing the Nihilak Oxyde. I simply painted it silver, applied Nuln Oil and then tried to apply Nihilak Oxyde to its head.

I'm not so happy with the result, the oxydation does not make sense (why would it be only on the head) and the miniature overall lacks any distinctive feature.

In retrospect, I should have used this mini as practice for other techniques, like layering or highlighting (stuff I still don't know how to do) because it has a lot of large and easily accessible surfaces.

I made a couple of Iron Golems (or whatever other metallic construct) from a cheap Heroclix miniature:

I had just bought a bunch of metallic paints and I wanted to try them out, so I painted them with various shades of silver and bronze.

I then applied Nuln Oil on it, which is the secret weapon to have metal look good. I also tried some Nihilakh Oxide on it, but it was my first try using it and I'm not sure it worked really well.

What I learned is:

• For metals, you don't need to apply the paint everywhere like you would do with another color. A rough drybrush works as well and might look ever better
• The Nuln Oil will tone down the colors, so the various shades of silver won't be that different. I would rather keep only one shade in my future minis, but use a light or dark one depending if I want the mini to look dark or not.

Overall, I'm satisfied with the result; I think they look great, they were cheap to do, and I learned about my paints.