Barrels

I recently finished up one of those "back of the workbench" projects that seems to hang around for months and months.

A few years back, Dwarven Forge advertised their big dungeon kickstarter on TMP, and I bought a few sets. One of the perks I received was a bunch of barrels, made out of that same rubbery stuff they do doors and special parts with.

Now, a word about barrel usage: I'm not big on decorative scenery in my dungeons. I like functional scenery, something that adds to the tactical challenge of the environment. That means that I'm not sure about these individual barrels. It seems like they'll just fall over then the table gets jostled, and then roll around annoyingly. I guess I can always glue them into groups for stability.

The other thing abut barrels is that in some dungeoncrawl rulesets, barrels basically function like 'power ups' – you walk to a barrel, it goes away, and you get some health bonus or other reward. So that barrels (and crates and similar things) work as tokens in the dungeon. For this usage, I may eventually place individual barrels on bases, so they don't roll around so much.

I didn't take work-in-progress pictures, so I'll just tell you how I painted these: I primed them with flat white spray paint. To keep them from blowing away, I put blue painters tape on cardboard, then placed the barrels on the sticky tape. I primed them, let them dry, then flipped them over to prime the bottoms.

I did a little research, and it seems barrels can come in all shades of brown or gray, and the bands can be metallic or leather. I decided to go with plain brown barrels with iron bands.

I then basecoated the barrels with Coat d'Arms 217 Leather Brown. (Yes, I've restocked since my previous article.) You can't basecoat the barrels in one pass because you have to sit them down to dry, so I did one pass of tops, one pass of bottoms, and a final pass to fix any spots I missed.

Normally, I'd do a highlight, but these are barrels so I've skipped a step.

Next, I painted the bands with FolkArt Gunmetal Gray. This is a craft paint which is a pretty decent 'iron' metallic at a low cost. I use it all the time, but sometimes you need a higher quality metallic. Depends on the project.

This is the part of the project that means the barrels end up on the back of my painting desk. Despite my best efforts, the metallic paint strays off the bands, so I end up doing touch up after touch up until I'm satisfied. So lots of quick painting sessions.

The final step is to wash the barrels with Coat d'Arms Superwash Dark Brown. I love this stuff! The only issue is that these are barrels, so you have to wash one end, let it dry, then wash the other end. And the barrels are, well, barrel-shaped, so the wash doesn't always run where you want it to go, so lots of touch-ups if you're picky like I am. You could go crazy trying to get the wash to look the same on the tops, the bottoms and the sides!

The wash is a bit glossy when dry, and it can be sticky. Sometimes, when I pick a barrel up for a touch-up, the wash adheres to the surface and the paint peels off down to the primer coat!

So this is the kind of project I work at in dibs and dabs, in-between other projects, until finally all the barrels pass my inspection.

The final step is to spray them with Dullcote to remove the glossiness (and stickiness).

The final result:

And a size comparison with a 28mm archer (and a sloppy paint job!):

And shown in a dungeon:

I looked on the manufacturer's website, but didn't see these listed. Might be out of production.