First real venture into painting minis and ironically with ones that have their share of horror stories. Apparently the plastic molding on the Last Night on Earth minis reacted strangely with certain primers and paints causing them to become sticky for many. I didn’t have these problems although that’s probably thanks to following someone else’s successful tutorial on how they did it beforehand.
The tutorial can be seen here off BGG and the results in my opinion are quite good given the relative lack of skill required. Priming is straightforward and not even sure if its a necessary step. My spray coverage wasn’t complete on some of the minis and the paint seem to adhere fine to parts that were bare of primer.
Like in the tutorial, the acrylic paints were applied extremely rough with no details or shading of any kind, just block colors for individual sections. The Minwax Polyshades did wonders for taking these ugly paint jobs and turning them into something quite appealing.
I’ve used polyurethane plenty for wood projects but never with the way this tutorial called for. I’ve actually avoided products such as these in the past that mix poly and stain claiming convenience with no reduction in final quality. I actually did try the Polyshades on “another” wood project out of curiosity and wasn’t too happy with it. Not terrible but not a replacement for doing wood stain and poly in separate stages.
For minis its a different story. The poly dries nice and hard giving a durable coating that isn’t too glossy. The stain part of the equation actually seeps into the cracks and crevices literally filling in the details of the molding. For zombies, it has the added benefit of giving them a nice grungy texturing. For the most part, worked great on the heroes as well.
I planned to try some sort of nice grass/flock for the basing but didn’t want to wait for an online order to ship out. Thus I hit the local craft stores to see what I could find. All that was available was a less-then-impressive greenery that was meant for making dioramas of California Missions. Its basically green styrofoam ripped up into a semi-fine powder. Applied and sealed in with a mixture of PVA glue and green paint to give it a better color to varying degrees of success.
In the near future, will probably finish up the rest of the minis from the expansions and also do a custom box/es for better storage as well.
Tags: boardgame, flying frog, last night on earth, miniatures, painting, polyshades