writes:I have been fascinated over the years as I have seen the ingenious ways in which the large painting services successfully pack finished figures for shipping, and I have been remiss in not writing about this earlier. The problem is that I am so eager to open the boxes, I forget to take pictures of how the figures are packed! 
So here is a package that arrived at TMP today from our friends in Ukraine, Old Guard Painters. (OK, I already started to open it…)
Opening the box, you find a layer of bubblewrap and an inventory sheet.
Remove the bubblewrap, and you see that the box is full of ziploc bags containg brown bundles. (Ignore the writing on the bags – they re-use bags, so the writing has nothing to do with their current contents.)
Here's a random bag drawn from the box. Note that there's a slip of paper detailing what's in the bag. It's quite useful that they put this on a slip rather than writing it on the bag, because if you need to move the figures to your workbench, you can keep the slip with the figures rather than having to keep the entire bag.
Emptying the bag, you can see that the brown objects are painted figures wrapped in brown paper. Unwrap slowly, just in case there are multiple pieces (or, worse, anything broken).
Here are the unwrapped figures, which are 28mm Goblins with maces. (You'll see them again someday on TMP, after I get them based.)
The packing system is very simple, and there's not a lot of padding. But my experience over the years is that this system works. The figures arrive safely and undamaged.