is not a real big fan of pre-painted minis, and he positively despises randomly-packed "collectable" ones - so why is he writing this article?
Today's discussion about painting services seems perfectly timed, since I'm sending a box of orcs down to Sri Lanka today.
Fernando Enterprises (AKA miniaturelovers.com) has been a TMP advertiser for quite a while, and during all of that time I've been trying to come up with the "perfect" painting project for them to do for our Workbench.
Then it finally struck me what the guidelines would be for a great project that would be a typical wargamer's situation:
- a set of figures that for whatever reason - procrastination, painting anxiety, forgotten projects - are gathering dust in the corner of your gaming area, and...
- figures for which clear painting instructions exist, preferably in the form of photos available online somewhere!
- something that you really want to game with
I figured that was a "perfect" project - something I wasn't getting around to anyway, but that wouldn't be hard to "spec out" for someone else to paint.
In this specific case, the answer was literally right at my feet (my latest pledge is to put "Procrastination Projects" where I trip over them daily, so I can't forget about them!). A few years ago as part of a trade, I received a complete set of Foundry's Great Orc Mercenary Collection. There are sixteen orcs in the set - dressed in vaguely Renaissance-style clothing - along with a mix of orclings and accoutrements. I've been wanting to use these for a fantasy naval campaign, but I was a bit intimidated by the idea of painting all the costumes...
So I had the dusty figures, and the motivation to have them painted - but could I find pictures? Fortunately, a check of Foundry's website revealed that the collection - now renamed the Mercenary Ogre Characters Collection - was indeed illustrated online. (Except for one of the figures which isn't in the new set, but close enough...)
So I wrote to Sanath at Fernando Enterprises to confirm that they could use those photos for reference (yes, they could!), and I was on my way to gaming with my mercenary orcs/ogres!
The only change I made in my painting instructions was to specify lime green as the orc skintone, rather than the darker shade in the catalogue photos.
I was going to have the painting service handle basing and flocking - but then I realized that due to the orclings and other items in the set, I couldn't specify the basing without opening all the packs and sorting through them. So in the spirit of keeping things simple, I'll base the figures myself when they return.
So, with shipping instructions received from Sanath, I'm on my way to the post office to ship these minis to the other side of the world!