BurnyBurns
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Posts posted by BurnyBurns
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1 hour ago, Watercolour Dragon said:That app screen as in BurnyBurns' post isn't too great graphically either- very saturated colours- feels too red / too blue like there's some high power floodlights in the scene leaving you wishing it were subtler, but the other app visuals look better (with what they did with Gloomhaven digitally the app should be really good- if not they'll have fallen rather short....)
Personally, I love the style and color choice in the screen. Highly stylized, very expressive night scene, realized with a very limited color palette that I find very pleasing to look at. Conveys the impression of a group huddled around a warm campfire in a cold night perfectly for me.
Unlike the board elements, which imo carry very little mood at all. 😛
Edit:
1 hour ago, maul said:The only bad thing I see are the terrain tiles and the price the rest great
Generally, I agree. Except for the term "only". The terrain, which is responsible for the first impression the game gives on the table, looks poor and the price is too high? That is, higher than Gloomhaven, higher than mini blender Kickstarter with more miniatures and better designed terrain? If "only" those two aspects are poor, that makes the whole thing a difficult sell.
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Printed 3D cardboard game board, app-driven... I see the an absolute ton of potential in those bullet points. I even like the stylized character best out of all the Descent artwork I've seen so far.
But what they've shown of the board so far looks so unbelievably bland. Sure, the miniatures seem to be more than just a step above all the previous Descent stuff, but they also lack variety between smaller and larger miniatures compared Ed 1 + 2. About the same amount of minis (39 vs 40), albeit larger, as the second edition, terribly bland looking game board elements and the app beeing a great unknown without a full demo, is making this look reaaaally unattractive at 175$.
I'm no stranger to throwing 200$+ after a miniature blender kickstarter, or 700€+ at the complete Descent 2nd edition collection. But I need to see something that compels me to spend the money and a monotonous game board with a handful of alibi 3D staircases does not.
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There's tons of complaining about everything atm, but I get why the app-driven route might be a compelling one to take, due to the space not being as crowded at this point. I get that 3D cardboard terrain is a cool idea if executed right (think of how awesome a Core Space game board looks!). Unlike some of the comments I've seen, I also like the character artwork most among all of the Descent games so far. The stylized look with its flat, earthy tones is simply the most characterful to me between those games. But... What happened to the design of the board components? Describing my impressions, bland, monotonous and generic would be the terms that come to mind.
How comes that cobblestone is made up of middle-to light gray, regular rectangular pattern all over with nearly no detail to break up the monotony and to add some character? No shadowed edges (might be a problem with tiling, bit still!), no different colored hues, nearly all rectangular shapes. It doesn't get better with the water. A homogenous, light blue mass with indistinct lines drawn across as water - seriously?
It doesn't get much better either, if you add grassy elements, lava and wooden planks to the mix:
That game board to me is the definition of generic and indistinct. That's outright a regression more towards the generic and indistinct tiles of the 1st edition. And it absolutely doesn't fit in with the highly stylized, characterful character artwork. Those characters seem to come from a world, where there is more variety to cobblestone than light grey rectangular smallish plates everywhere. 😛 Where's moss`? Where's rubble? Where are different shapes, hues, broken stones, different patterns (other than that one circular shape, that doesn't really change the impressoin at all)?
Or this menu sceen for that matter. Behold, there's moody lightning coloring the environment - not just light grey stone, medium green grass, light blueish, solid looking water and reddish lava...
Also, if those handful of staircase elements, the couple of dead trees, two or three archways and some doodads are all of the 3D elements in the game... There's an underwhelmingly executed idea - the terribly bland board artwork notwithstanding. For 175$, that is... Of course, the game may - perhaps - end up being pure genius and bliss in app-driven, dungeon-crawlery form, but if it does, it's despite the board artwork, not because of it.
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I wish you the best of luck and a lot of fun with painting your collection! 🙂
Painting only minis used in current or upcoming games will probably never work for me. The painting simply takes me to long, so I have to deal with the fact that I may not have all or any minis painted, when we manage to play something for the first time. 8-10h for a hero, 8-12h for a big mini. I only managed to get "ahead" of the current Shadow Rune campaign, because it's been paused for quite some time now. But I really should work on getting results for some of the monsters faster. Some of them however are pieces for painting practice of certain techniques. Descent's minis aren't exactly showcase pieces, but they are terrific practice pieces. Small enough to not take dozens of hours, even if you experiment a lot with new techniques, diverse enough to be able to try a ton of different things.
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The acrylic colors from Vallejo and Games Workshop are water-soluble. Basically hacking and mashing the dried pulp of GW color down to the pigment and stirring it with water helped revive the color. But it took a lot of effort. I also later used Lahmian Medium/Vallejo Thinner to thin the color down. Both could replace the water. The color was more than ten years old, no less. My best tip for preserving colors is: Use dropper bottles and not Games Workshop style pots. The latter seem to let colors dry up rather quickly even while closed. Edit: Mostly if you open and use them regularly, however. Probably something to do with the bottle's large opening, exposing a large surface area leading to increased evaporation. Yet, other GW colors of mine remained mostly liquid for ten years without use. The Vallejo dropper bottles i had from ten years ago still had usable color in them from the get go. A lot of shaking was required though. I didn't have any at hand, but adding some rust free metal balls/small nuts to the bottle would have helped to stir the color back to life more easily in the dropper bottles. If you're concerned for the colors' life and if you must use Games Workshop colors or other acrylic colors from pots, I'd recommend also getting some empty dropper bottles and transferring the colors with a funnel (e.g. from Greenstuff World).
So far I've used Army Painter and recently Vallejo mat spray varnish to protect the minis. Can't say I'm seeing any color shift of the coat of (Army Painter) varnish on my 10+ years old minis. Any glossy varnish is a no go, since the gloss will make any details of the paintjob hard to discern. Other people are using the "Dullcoat" varnish from Testors to good effect (e.g. Sorastro mentions it in his videos). Just make sure to spray an even, thin coat in short bursts and avoid pooling of the varnish. Pools of the varnish may become opaque when drying. Both spray varnishes I use are well suited to being painted over as well.
Whatever effects the varnish will have on the mini, they beat out color pealing off from your minis due to the handling by grimy players' hands any day. 😉
Edit: Also, if you've got the time and generally enjoy painting, I'd recommend to start yesterday, rather than now or tomorrow. You seem also to be a bit of a compulsive collector, so your chances of ever having a fully painted collection are slim to none, simply because collections are more easy to amass than miniatures are to paint. 😜 See it this way: every single mini you painted looks better than an unpainted one on the table.
If you need to build confidence in your painting abilities, start with minis to which you have little attachment. Less nice sculpts, like goblins or zombies. From there you can progress to the bigger monsters. That's the reason I started with the goblins and zombies - to relearn painting and become more confident - only to work on the major sculpts like the shadow dragons and most heroes at the very end. It helped me a lot.
If you need a beginner friendly, near fool prove step by step tutorial, watch Sorastro's Descent painting series! I really, really cannot recommend it enough for people trying to get into painting Descent.
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14 hours ago, kris40k said:I was watching Guerrilla Miniature Games yesterday and he showed his work painting up 80+ figures for Warhammer Quest in the last week. I was lucky to get 6 in a state I would call "playable, but not detailed".
80 in three days? 😅 That's impressive, no matter which technique you use. But with "classical" techniques and without using an airbrush that's night on impossible if you like to eat and sleep. The magic word there seems to be "contrast paints". With one coat you get a "play ready" mini with shadows in the recesses, highlights and all. He did still highlight on top of them however, so there was quite a bit manual work involved on top.
I might be trying to use a similar technique on some monster groups of smaller models with many minis later on, but I wont be doing it for bigger monsters or characters. It does save you a **** of a lot of time however.
Edit: That's the best I could make of the base game collection and its six lieutenant addons with my phone, two lamps and some sheets of paper:
Will try to take a better foto at some point.
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On 5/7/2020 at 10:35 PM, Watercolour Dragon said:The time factor also helps spread the cost- all that paint in one go would be quite ouchy.
To make you feel good I have nothing painted yet- so you'll most likely always be ahead of the curve on my painting.
Great work again on Tomble, a great fantasy character- fits the genre well so deserving of a good paint.
Thanks for the kind words. If I consider the Descent collection a ten year project, painting all of the minis might be more realistic. I hope that I'll have as much interest in 10 years in playing the game as I have now. 😉 For such an elaborate painting project, interest in playing the game is somewhat a driving factor for me. That being said, I can well see me finding some group interested in running a campaign many years from now. It's not that good board games age poorly and Descent 2nd Ed., despite its flaws, is pretty good at what it does.
As for colors, if you do actually intend on painting up a complete collection as diverse as the Descent one and start from square one in terms of painting equipment, I'd honestly recommend going for a full set of Vallejo Game colors. Specifically the linked case, if you can get your hands on one and if money isn't the limiting factor, that is. Bonus: you get a rather space efficient and elegant storage solution on top of the paints. You're really trading time for money here. The Descent collection is varied enough that you'll find a use for nearly all of those colors before long. A (near) complete set saves you from hunting them down one by one. While I'm fan of the Vallejo colors, a cheaper option would be the Army Painter set. But my impression is that Vallejo Colors provide much better coverage with less layers, so I prefer them where possible. You just need to know for sure that painting minis is "your thing" before spending near 200$ on colors. 😅 At least there are some brushes in there, but I doubt that they'll last for the whole collection and a really good brush is around 10$ in itself. You don't even have primer sprays by then, although the grey Vallejo brush on primer is really good as well.
A cheaper route to getting started is a color set (very much recommend the base set from Vallejo Game Color here, comes with 16 tones, but not a single good skin tone 😛), then get two good brushes (one size 0 and one size 2) and a grey primer spray.
When I took up painting again around April last year, I still had some old Games Workshop colors (some dried to a pulp), a black and a white can of spray primer and a couple of Vallejo colors. Got the Vallejo starter set, some new brushes, liquidified some of the GW colors by literally hacking them apart with a modeling tool and adding some water and went from there. This is where I am now (old wine box with a bit of cut up cardboard for organizing the dropper bottles):
If I didn't have some colors to start out, I'd have been cheaper off buying the whole set. 😉
As for how fast you can finish a collection - that entirely depends on your pace and technique. I'm generally slow and tend to experiment quite a bit or fail at some details until I feel I got a mini right. On the other hand, I'm watching some Instagram painters (https://www.instagram.com/bossepainter/) paint up half of the complete Descent 2nd Ed. collection within a year (really excellently, I should add!), whereas it takes me just above a year alone to finish the base set. 😛Edit: On that note - the last base game minis are finally finished.
Captain Glittersparkles (Avric Albright)
Leoric of the Book
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Tom Burrowell:
I have no idea what the dwarf from Drakon is or what Drakon is, @Watercolour Dragon, but Lord of the Rings might've been quite formative for our image of fantasy dwarves. No idea if before LotR dwarves were considered Beer gobbling cave dwellers, but I never got that particular impression from fairytales.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the day that I've painted all the 28mm scale heroes from Descent*. As charming as all the sculpts are, 28mm with rather realistic proportions and a lot of often poorly defined details due to the soft-ish plastic and production artifacts isn't very fun. At least there are only two more base game heroes to go now. Will take a bit of a break from Descent minis after those. May still start on the Manor of Ravens in the meantime... And then I'll treat myself to some of the ~32mm scale Heroes and Monsters hero sculpts. They are so much better in terms of details due to the slightly larger scale and cartoony "heroic" proportions, it's not even funny.
* Real talk: That day may never come. If my last count was not mistaken, there are 60 heroes overall in the whole Descent 2nd Ed. mini range and many more monsters on top. 60. Six are finished. I honestly don't know if I can realistically finish the whole set at my painting pace. Ever, that is. Had three days of vacation and spend a not insignificant amount of time of those as well as the preceding weekend's evenings painting the two heroes above and those two doors. Once the base game heroes are done, there'll be significantly less drive to paint additional heroes other than a couple of sculpts, since I'll have a small selection of painted heroes for all classes. I may start only picking up minis I'd like to paint from there on and see how far I'll get. Or I'll have to try to get much, much quicker results at some point. That however would mean moving away from my self-imposed target level of painting characters or bigger minis to a standard, which wouldn't look too much out of place on a box art of the mini, if there was such a thing. Even then however, chances of me actually finishing the Descent set are slim to none. Not factoring in the other mini games that'll arrive eventually, I'd still be looking at a painting project for the next three to four years. Once I'm "in the groove", the painting is quite addicting, but I still need to focus on other things in life. Including playing the game at some point. 😅
So... Milestone for this month (and the rest of the year): Finishing the base game! Wish me luck. 😛
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🍺 Grisban the Thirsty is done - tiny bugger.
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While I mention toke upgrades... An excellent Instagram post by Angel Giraldez (FFG should seriously hire these types of professional miniature masters to create both, their mini sculpts and painted reference miniatures) gave me the impulse to try my hand at the Mantic Games Dungeoncrate Doors, which have been sitting in my painting queue for a while.
A quick test paint later, I'm pretty happy what can be done with them:
It's not quite finished, yet and there are 14 more to go. 😅 But they'll look very nice and moody, when they eventually make it to the game board.
Edit procrastinating painting the last base game heroes some more. The doors are just more fun than tiny 28mm people with sometimes poorly defined detail:
13 to go...
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On 4/27/2020 at 1:33 PM, Watercolour Dragon said:Merick's got more detail than I thought then-
...Was he tricky to do as it's always seemed one of the weaker minis in the range
To be honest, the mini is not that bad compared to other Descent minis. Neither is it good. It simply suffers from the usual issue most Descent miniatures have, before the later Heroes & Monsters addons and the last two boxed addons (Mists and Chains). A pretty small scale (~25mm? Edit: it's 28mm, later human minis from the H&M packs are 32mm), combined with rather "realistic" proportions, a surprising amount of minuscule detail and sometimes mediocre production quality due to the soft-ish materials, mold lines etc.. All of which combined can lead to pretty poorly reproduced details. Nothing a decent paintjob cannot fix, but you have to sometimes interpret what the individual details are and give definition to that small nub of plastic using paint rather than just coloring a detail already defined by the sculpt. Merick's sculpt also diverges a bit from the artwork, especially in details around his shoulders. The eyes are barely present, so you have to paint them on.
As for...
On 4/27/2020 at 1:33 PM, Watercolour Dragon said:Not a completeness freak, honest 🙂
Since I bought my Descent 2nd Ed. in 2013 (first print) on impulse at a local boardgame con (and never touched it for another 6 years, other than priming the minis in 2014...), I also have the Shadow Rune campaign booklet here. It's the campaign we were playing, which is currently on hold for a bit longer, due to the unfortunate Covid-19 situation. But I just had to get the Heirs of Blood hardcover book, too... 😅 Did I mention I also managed to hunt down all Descent 2nd Edition content that has miniatures by now? Not too soon, as a lot of the Descent boxes start to sell out now and there seems to be no info whatsoever on when or if there will be a reprint at all. Unfortunately had to get the last two boxes (Labyrinth and Trollfens) in English, while all my other campaigns are in German. That fulfills my slight plastic addiction for Descent however, since I have no desire whatsoever to hunt down 1st edition content. A single play of the 1st edition around 2007/8 sold me on the concept of Dungeon Crawler boardgames, but also convinced me after around 6h and not having finished a single mission, that I'd never want to touch the 1st Descent edition again. Doesn't help that, although not super great, I find the 2nd edition miniatures in general quite superior to the 1st edition ones. I can also live without the 12 heroes from the 1st edition, that were never released in a Heroes & Monsters pack for the second edition and am happy that after a nearly 800€ spending spree, not even counting painting materials, storage solutions and token proxies (doors, chests etc.) - my Descent 2nd edition collection is "complete". Might still get the print on demand coop adventures, if I can find them anywhere at reasonable price. There's a charm in having so much content for a single, by now thankfully "completed" and self-contained game system like Descent 2nd edition. Looking back though, that was an awful lot of stuff FFG kept releasing for Descent for some years and I'm not willing to collect a second game of that magnitude again. Enough to paint as it is... Not to mention playing! Which I do notoriously less often than painting.
Not that the plastic addiction completely stops there. There might be some Kickstarters that should arrive in the next one or two years. One or two or three... Altar Quest, Trudvang Legends, Zombicide 2nd Ed., Arkeis, maybe (probably...) Ankh. One more (cooperative) Dungeon Crawler, two adventure games, a Zombie mashing game and a board control game should complete my miniature boardgame collection very nicely for the time being.
A larger Ikea Kallax is due as well as selling some things I never use. Anyone interested in buying my Runebound 2nd Edition set I painted in 2009 (German though)? 😜
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The base game lieutenants are done.
Splig
Belthir
Edit: For silly boardgame drama!
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Belthir, the last base game lieutenant is now wip...
There are no proper fotos of Splig, yet. Here are Lord Merrick Farrow and Alric Farrow though.
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Shadow of Nerekhall's rat swarms:
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On 3/2/2020 at 7:03 PM, cal72 said:hello ,
awesome paints . good job .
I want to get Guardians so is it better or worse than the others (the minis i mean) .
Thanks!
The Guardians of Deephall Minis are a bit of a low point in the whole Descent collection for me. I'd say they're more or less on the level of the base game and earlier boxed addons. Starting with "Visions of Dawn", the hero and monster addons and the two last boxed addons "Mists of Bilehall" and "The Chains that rust" are of better sculpt quality imo.
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I finally finished the shadow dragons.
That concludes the base game monster groups. The bloody beasts for some reason nearly took all wind out of my sails in terms of painting. Happy enough with the result, but for various reasons I didn't enjoy painting them. They're comparatively large for starters and nearly completely consist of soft, rounded curves, which I found hard to highlight well. Also had to repaint the wings after realizing I just couldn't make my initial idea for them work and had chosen a poor color combo.
Hopefully the four remaining base game heroes and lieutenants will be more enjoyable!
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Whatever they do, I'd highly appreciate if the second edition content is reusable in some form. Something like the first to second edition conversion kit would be great.
It's fine if they want to re-release all miniatures to sell them all over again - after all, it seems FFG has stepped up their mini game compared to the Descent 2nd Ed. considerably, but that's not going to happen overnight and being able to use the collection of second edition minis has its charm.
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Widow Tarha is completed.
Asharian
Blatantly staged game scenarios 😝
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21 hours ago, tomkat364 said:Back again, this time with the last set of monsters from the Core Box. The Ettins!
As always, more info and pics at my blog: https://darthtomsgaming.wordpress.com/
Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
pics
Next, on to some heroes and lieutenants...
Love your work on these minis and your meticulousness in documenting the paint schemes and discussing the minis! I probably couldn't reproduce the super clean transitions and surfaces, even if I wanted to. 😅 Only the contrast on areas between lit and shadowy parts is a bit "flat" for my taste, but that's a question of chosen style. Cudos for putting quite a bit of effort into painting all these bases as well!
On these Etins there's only one part of the bases I think you could improve: The transitions between earth and snow. It may be just me looking at the fotos on a mobile phone, but to me, the snow doesn't read as a layer on top of the earthy ground immediately. I'm not sure how exactly to fix it either, but I'd probably try to paint a narrow fading out - maybe bluish tinted - drop shadow that's cast on the earth by the snow cover. It might enforce the impression that the snow is actually a cover on the earthy ground.
Also:
"It is my firm belief that boardgame manufacturers take a perverse pleasure in placing mold lines in the most detail heavy, hard to reach areas possible for the sole purpose of frustrating painters. In the case of the Ettins, this included the aforementioned neck wrinkles, the fur cape along the upper back, the wrapping on the forearm, the helmets, the horns, and all the fingers and toes."
Tell me about it. Removing mold lines on Descent minis is a PITA. It doesn't help that the minis come pre-assembled, making some mold lines very hard to reach on top of everything else. But I get the impression that very few people care enough to spend considerable time on trying to remove them anyway.
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Syndrael is done.
Not happy with the mini's detail definition. Quite a few things are a bit rough, making painting a bit harder.
Started on widow Tarha.
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On 9/20/2019 at 4:32 AM, kris40k said:I was just gifted Descent 2E and the Conversion Kit, to add to my collection of every 1E expansion. So, I am looking at painting all the 1E and 2E base sets, plus all the 1E expansion figures. That's before I start adding more 2E expansions...
Its a very daunting idea. I already have a backlog of like half a Khador army to complete for Warmachine, not to mention various RPG mini's for various games. I just picked a few of the heroes that are commonly played by my group and started there. Maybe I'll be done in ten years.
Yeah, that's the way it usually goes. Which is why I'm done with any sort of "Wargaming". I need a self contained system with a mini range like Descent's to have any hope of finishing painting up the minis. Even there, hope is slim. Atm, it's just Descent, but Altar Quest and Trudvang Legends are going to join. But those two will probably be the last games I add to the mini game collection for the next ten years. For that time frame, it's more than enough painting material at least. 😂
Starting and one by one and finishing the currently played minis is a good idea. As I said, the base game is this year's painting goal.
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On 9/17/2019 at 10:55 PM, Watercolour Dragon said:If there's any you've not got it might be worth getting them just in case D2e is being retired (we know about the new project but not if it means D2e will cease production or stay, I notice that 'Stewards..' doesn't seem to have a reprint planned (it may just be they've not updated the list/scheduled it yet), this may be meaningless though as 'Chains..' is both in stock and on the boat, but nevertheless it might be worth getting them sooner rather than later just in case you can't in future!)
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Another potential improvement seems to be strength- some older games had very breakable, weak, flimsy minis but the new LOTR Journeys game from what I've seen so far looks like they may be more durable, so hopefully any miniatures for the new Descent/Terrinoth project will be both the higher quality that also suits painting them more and also the improved strength. Especially as the very breakable minis may not have done those particular Terrinoth games (now out of print) any favours with player perception of them.
Thanks. Oath of the Outcast and Crown of Destiny are already ordered, but the shop of my choice is currently waiting for a restock, so it'll take a while. For what it's worth, their site says stock was ordered from the manufacturer. That doesn't have to mean anything, but we'll see. With those two, I already have five of the nine, missing the Crusade of the Forgotten, Bonds of the Wild, Treaty of Champions and Shards of Everdark. May potentially get them before the end of the year. For the boxed sets, I'm a lot more relaxed. I don't even know if I'd like to collect them all. The "big box" ones, Labyrinth of Ruin and Shadow of Nerekhall, sure. The others I'll see.
In the Descent mini range, I'm seeing a definite improvement of sculpt and production quality over time. On the other hand, the MoM 2nd edition from 2016 has what looks like some terrible and low production quality minis to me. Admittedly, this is from photos and I've never handlet the minis personally. Also didn't personally handle the JiME minis, but from photos, the sculpts and production quality look rather good. I just really don't like the somewhat cartoonish style they've gone for, at least for this source material.
Huge gulf between quality of card artwork and board artwork - what gives, FFG?
in Descent: Legends of the Dark
Posted · Edited by BurnyBurns
What can I say? Great artstyle ages well. 🤷🏻♂️