Hello there! I hope you are enjoying your Saturday. I know I am looking forward to a little R&R after a very busy week. In case you missed it, we announced an entirely new stand-alone game, Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs, on Wednesday, and then yesterday we announced upcoming digital tools for the Gloomhaven RPG, both a VTT through Roll20, and digital character management through Hero Lab.

So while we're at it, I've got one more smaller, but still exciting announcement: we have lined up Rolling Solo to produce a how to play video for Buttons & Bugs upon it's release! Here are some words about the channel from creator Adam Smith:

"My passion and focus is providing you with the highest quality and most in-depth video showcases of solo board games! I create authentic playthroughs, providing you with everything you need to come to your own informed decision on whether a game works for you. No clickbait, shotgun reviews or generic high-level content here. You decide what you like based on what you see in action!"

Also in case you missed it, we had some great streams yesterday. Joe and I tag-teamed a couple of scenarios of Buttons & Bugs, and we got through scenarios 1 and 2 in about 45 minutes. Joe played the Tinkerer for scenario 1, then I played the Mindthief for scenario 2, so you can check out that video to get a look at how those two play.

Then Alice from Rage Badger was joined by some Gloomhaven: Second Edition play testers to run through a scenario of that. They got through an entire 4-player scenario in about an hour and a half, while still being entertaining, which I thought was quite impressive.

And then the fireside chat, where I talked to my friend Jon about his experiences with the Gloomhaven RPG, but more about his experiences with RPGs in general. We talked about playing D&D together back in high school, what he's playing now, and how he's gotten his kids into RPGs as well. It was a lot of fun, and you can watch that here.

We unfortunately don't have any streams going live today. We had some scheduling conflicts with both the Old School RPG campaign, which will be airing tomorrow at 9am PST instead, and Price's talk with miniature painter Chris Woodgate, which is still TBD. What I have instead, though, is a write-up from Chris about his process and tips for painting miniatures, so let's move on to that!

                                 

Hi everyone, so Ross asked me to take a swing at talking about some of the miniatures I’ve painted up for this campaign.

A lot of you may be new to the world of mini-painting and indeed Gloomhaven so I thought I’d go over some of the basics and discuss my process a bit focussing on one of my favourites from the campaign. 

First up, prep! 

Never skip the preparation stage, it will help your finished minis look so much better. A simple wash in warm, soapy water, followed by some mould line removal and sanding before a prime with your favourite primer will really help get you off to a good start. I’m a big fan of zenithal priming as you can see, it allows me to easily visualise the different light values on the figure.

The minis themselves have a lot of detail sculpted into them, right down to the moulded bases, these are a big improvement on the original Gloomhaven figures. When it came to painting them, I couldn’t help but be inspired by the fantastic artwork from the standees. Features such as the tabard design and scale under-skirt here were really going to help this figure pop as they say.

For these miniatures I used a traditional layering approach to painting. Building up from a darker base and adding incrementally brighter colours, keeping the saturation down to maintain the moody feel of the game. 

We’d discussed varying styles and had settled on using True Metallic Metals or TMM for the armour. To help sell the effect I decided to create a simple, shadowed design on the shield to boost the feeling of depth and draw the eye up to the sword and head.

You can see that these new minis really do have a lot of detail sculpted into them, it can almost be a bit daunting when you get started. I tend to spend time on those focal areas that match the art and keep things simple elsewhere. The scale underskirt here is a prime example. Although not sculpted into the figure it added an interesting sense of texture to the bold, plain tabard design and was a relatively straight forward feature to paint on freehand.

Finally, when working with big batches of figures like this I think a cohesive basing scheme, per model, can really help bring together that sense of unity. With the guardsman here it was going to be simple to paint that moulded base like a cobbled street, so to add a little interest I cut up some grass tufts to act as weeds in the cracks. Perhaps for multiples I’d add other debris, leaf litter, rubbish etc. to really sell the ‘dirty city streets’ feel. 

I hope this little insight into the figures and my process has helped any aspiring new mini painters out there. My final parting piece of advice is don’t let anyone judge you on your work! Everyone starts somewhere & anything looks better than grey plastic. Above all else have fun, play around, enjoy the experience and as a good friend always says, happy painting.

                                 

Thanks to everyone for stopping by and reading! I'll catch you tomorrow with another update and the next episode of the Old School RPG!