Fool’s Gold

I’m still working on the post about my personal adventures in failure. In other news, the hotel block for ReaperCon 2020 is now open for reservations. If you’re not familiar with ReaperCon, it’s a great place for miniature fans of all companies to learn more about mini painting and sculpting, enter an all brands welcome contest, enjoy gaming, and much more.

And now, let us travel back in time to 2010. My title for this little diorama is Fool’s Gold.

A few days ago Reaper Miniatures reached out to me to ask if I could send pictures of a diorama I did some years ago. The main figure in the diorama is Crazy Pete the Prospector. Crazy Pete is available for purchase, but he is also being featured as one of the gift with purchase options on the Reaper site.

I did have pictures, but they were from 2010, taken with an older camera with lower resolution. And colour corrected before I had a proper greyscale card. Taking new pictures was complicated by the fact that Crazy Pete had become detached from the base.

I dug him out of my case and discovered that the damage wasn’t bad at all. Some glue and a few minutes touching up a little paint were all that was required to get the piece in shape for new pictures. I did a little bit of touching up, which I’ll go into more detail on below.

The vulture is also a Reaper miniature. If one vulture is not enough to meet your scavenger needs, Reaper now has a six pack of different vultures!

The mole is not available for sale. I started off sculpting it on top of an armature made from a Reaper squirrel familiar. But I am pretty bad at sculpting, and was even worse in 2010. Luckily Jason Wiebe of Pariah Artworks came to my rescue and sculpted this great mole figure for me! The mole was very important to my vision for the scene, so I’m grateful he took pity on me. 

One of the things that makes this piece dear to my heart is that it was a collaborative effort with a lot of support from my friends on top of Jason’s sculpting addition. Clever Crow Michael Proctor shared the piece of bark to make the mountain/cave, and a lot of great tips for painting scenery and true metallics. Ali Liu and other artists gave me great feedback and advice on ways to make the story stronger, and helped push me to try the freehand and texturing. (Way back before that became such a thing as it is today!) I would probably have chickened out if not for all of the support.

Above is a copy of one of my original photos. The touch ups I did included making the lining stronger in a number of places, adding a few more highlights on the vulture, more gloss sealer on the spilled water, and increased shading on Crazy Pete, mostly his skin and boots. 

There are definitely some things I would do differently if I painted this piece today, but I’m still proud of it, and it’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since I finished this one!