Putting off painting: Reaper Hill Giants

With Bones 4 just finished on Kickstarter, and Bones 3 being delivered recently, I looked at the veritable mountain of unpainted Reaper miniatures I have hiding in every corner of the hobby room and decided to make a token gesture towards resolving this.

Burrowing through the pile I settled on the pair of Hill Giants that were part of Bones 2 four years ago. (Four years? Egads!) Both are now available from the Reaper store: Golan, sculpted by Jason Wiebe, and Krug, by Tre Manor.

While cleaning them up and dry fitting parts they seemed to me to resemble a couple of movie characters, and so they have been dubbed Mr. Hyde and Mr. Gibbs. I'd note that mould lines became more obvious after undercoating... and could perhaps have been revisited (but weren't).

My previous experience with Bones had highlighted the hydrophobic properties of the plastic, and I wanted a really good foundation for the basecoat colours. Following advice from Reaper on priming and undercoating the miniatures were first washed thoroughly and then given a coat of Reaper MSP Murky Brown mixed with Reaper sealer (all thinned slightly to go through the airbrush).

The base colours were a mixture of Reaper (MSP), Army Painter (AP), and Vallejo (VMA/VMC/VGC), all in the brown range. The MSP Tanned Flesh was mixed with a little brown to darken the first layers, lightened on successive layers. AP tones/washes were used on the furs and hair, and MSP Flesh Wash on the skin areas.

Mr. Gibbs has iron manacles but otherwise I wanted to keep the metal areas in the gold/brown range so these were painted with either VMC Brass or AP Copper. These were darkened with AP Strong Tone, re-highlighted with metal, and then shaded with a mix of AP Green and Blue tone to create something of a weathered verdigris effect.

Golan got pink added to new scars, old scars were paled down, various skin lesions were added, and fur dry brushed to create texture.

Mr. Gibbs got some of the same, plus his bandages were painted using MSP bone shades, and the center shield on his belt coloured with VMC Black red to create a leather effect.