Hey all, my friends got me interested in SDE again with a couple games over New Years. With talk of the incoming kickstarter new stuff and my backlog of the box game and the 2 main expansions plus the extra characters I got prodded enough to make a move on trying to paint some stuff. My initial go at SDE suffered from fatigue after going through all the effort to clean, assemble, putty and prime the main set. Now I'm having a more fresh go at them.



started with airbrushing the skin on the heroes so it'd be nice and smooth and the shading nice and subtle.





lots of preshading on the dragonlings, dragon and kobalds







bit of bling for Starfire's base. I rolled some green stuff into a roll, let it set overnight and then cut it into slices for coins then after painting the base and coins I added some plastic shiny gems for some extra sparkle.

I got Kasaro-To done a couple months ago while I was waiting on my Relic Knights Noh to restock at my local store. Was a good way to work out the colours to use.











I can't be the only person that got annoyed with his back banner. No matter how many times I heated it up to straighten it kept bending again so I gave up in the end and cut it off and puttied over where it came out.

My friend wanted a display for his shop at Cancon coming up next weekend so designed and lasercut this diorama from various thicknesses of MDF and a couple clear flames I drew up. I got the rush job of painting it.







The airbrushing was nice and easy but the texture wasn't deep enough to drybrush so I had to do the stone edging the hard and time consuming way by lining it by hand

While my friend was painting Nyan Nyan he asked for a guide on how to do the eyes to match the way I'd done Candy which I'd basically used a Haruhi Nendoroid as a guide long ago. I drew him up a quick version on paper of how I recommend painting them.



I figured I'd improve on the drawing and take some pics while I was doing the eyes on the next hero. If you are wondering about that emphatic DO NOT OUTLINE bit, it's in regard to outlining the whole eye. Most people painting SDE do them like Western Cartoon characters with an outline all the way around and a small pupil. Anime eyes only have an outline at the top and the pupil is oval shaped and fills the eye top to bottom.

Looks really really good!

Can you elaborate a bit on how you did the floor? I have absolutely no idea how laser cutting is done. Like absolute ZERO idea!
What are the steps from start till end?

Step 1 buy a $25,000 laser cutter my friend's company owns it
Step 2 do the design in a vector software like Adobe Illustrator, Coral Draw or Sketchup
Step 3 you basically print to the laser cutter. Blue lines are vector engrave lines, Red is cut, Black is a raster etch.

In more normal terms do a design and go to a place that does laser engraving like a trophy place or somewhere that does tokens and things and ask if they will cut custom stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4n6qz7BBgQ
here's a vid of a laser cutting and engraving

Got the Royal Paladin and a little dragon finished and just need to finish the base on my 1st kobold. I'm afraid I have to do the rest to this level now

Very nice and good work for the tuto

Those are some really nice minis you got there. Crisp and clean paintjobs, love your eye for small details (e.g. the spots on the Kobolds). Very nice work on the eyes, the big reflection spots look really good.

Thanks Grey, really like the stuff on your blog. I want a Harley.

i would love to see a video how you paint a figure

Really cool paint jobs alround - the eyes look fantastic! And the laser cut boards look great too, the OSL effect from the fire is spot on:)

Been working on lots of SDE and RK at the same time.



Everything purple got sprayed at once.



Bit of work on the kobold spawns. Sprayed white in their eye sockets then flooded them with yellow ink which gave a nice yellow to red glow.





White sprayed on the big crystal dragon spawn then lots of edging with white paint. This was super fiddly to do and I had no idea if it'd look right in the end but I think it did.









After painting the bones and shading them I'm pretty happy with the final result.





bit of work on the bear



the rogue and the dark elf



and some chests. Need to paint the bands.

How did you go about getting that metallic red color on the leg armor? I can't find a mixture or tutorials on that particular color. I'd like to be able to paint it up this way once I get my Ser Snapjaw in with the rest of the kickstarter stuff.

Oh that was easy Tamiya Clear Red over the chainmail metal colour. Tamiya paints are a bit weird to brush paint but for clear colours there are no better.

Fantastic job on all of these!

Finished the chests

Very good paint jobs all round, clean and colourful. Looking forward to your next update.

Wow, fantastic work!

What airbrush are you using?

I've wondered about using one myself but not sure where to start.