Ugh… it’s been so long since sat my butt down and painted a mini. (I’ve sat my butt down plenty… just not to paint.) It’s good to get back into it again.
My motivation to paint this mini is due to my fellow D&D player in our Sunday campaign for Storm King’s Thunder. He plays a warlock, but wanted this particular mini painted up, using dark blue for the cloak and silver for the armor. The mini is from Reaper, and is titled “Sir Conlan”. (Note: there are actually two “Sir Conlan” minis from Reaper, but one adds “Crusaders Sergeant” to the title and it appears to be pewter. This one is plastic.)
I started off by removing mold lines and filling a couple of small dimples with Liquid Green Stuff. His cloak required smoothing, too. Looks like the plastic swirled a LOT as it was molded, leaving lots of little lines around on his cape that definitely showed through the primer. So, I used a thin coat of LGS to fill in those little lines and smooth out the cloak, too.
After letting the LGS on the cape dry, I sanded it smooth using very fine 1000-grit sandpaper and hit the model with a coat of black primer. The base colors ended up being, just as requested, metallic silver for the armor (RMS Honed Steel) and dark blue for the cloak (RMS Nightsky Blue). The shield stayed black, with metallic and blue accents. The sword is also silver. I started off with the eyes and face, then went to the armor, then I hit the cloak, and I wrapped up with the sword and shield.
I added highlights to the cloak by lightening the blue with just a touch of white, hitting the high points along the fabric. I also used RMS Polished Silver to add an extra-bright highlight to some of the armor pieces, particularly items like rivets or sharp edges that would gleam in sunlight.
The last few items… I needed to add a little touch of color to his amulet, so I used Citadel Fulgurite Copper for that. And I added writing on the shield banner in Cirth runes that match the language of Angerthas Daeron for the name Gilgeam. (Hopefully I spelled it correctly in Cirth.) The reason for this, rather than using the dwarven alphabet in the D&D 5E Player’s Handbook, is because it took up too much space. And because this warlock is supposed to be an elf, and it made sense to use this dialect because it originated with elves before the dwarves picked it up from them. Writing the runes with a paintbrush is one of the hardest things I’ve done, so far. It’s hard to get the spacing right, and it’s difficult to keep such a thin line. It’s not perfect, but I’m happy with how they turned out.
To cap things off, I added a little embelishment to the cloak by painting a black border with silver linework. Again, this part was really tough. Keeping the line thin was the worst part. I had to keep touching up around the line with black to make it look good again. But it eventually all came together.
And there you have it! I give you Sir Conlan.
The DM's Apprentice 