Tuesday 19 November 2013

Reaper Bones Bat Swarm



This is my first ever Reaper Bones sculpt. I bought it from e-bay last month as I thought I could use it as a marker with my Undead Flintloque figures.

I should start by saying that ALL of the work-in-progress images were lost when my computer decided to play up and so these photos are of the finished miniature or the official image taken from the Reaper Bones site.

I had heard that the new Polymer Bones did not take paint too well and after reading a number of reports on the Internet, I washed the piece in warm soapy water before trimming the base and mounting it on to a 2p coin. This was my first and only problem - Superglue (at least the superglue I use) does not want to stick the plastic material to the metal coin. I persevered and built up the base with Milliput, which helped.


Painting was built-up over a Black acrylic undercoat. I used undiluted Chaos Black from Games Workshop as most comments say that the plastic does not like diluted acrylic paint. The painting is a simple base coat with at least one drybrushing and loads of washes; Brown, Blue, Green, Black and even Purple.

There have been some reports of warping of the plastic material - I did not experience this, in fact the whole miniature was very firm with little flex or 'give'.

I painted the groundwork with my usual Snakebite Leather from GW and then varnished the model with fast drying (water-based) Matt Varnish from Wilkinsons (two coats). The flocking was simple static grass applied over uPVA glue.

The final image shows the Reaper Bones Bat Swarm alongside my Metal Reaper Miniatures Bat Swarm, also mounted on to a 2p coin. There is a huge difference in both scale and size, but I'm OK with it as these miniatures rarely get used on the gaming table.


The lessons I have learnt are;
Wash the miniature with soapy water.
Superglue does not work.
Use un-diluted paint - at least for the undercoat or base colour.

Tony

2 comments:

Michael Awdry said...

Thank you for the tips and great timing as I've just ordered some Reaper Bones, I hope they come out as well as yours did.

Squirmydad said...

Superglue works really well with glueing the bones pvc to more bones pvc. Really strong bond in that regard. I've been glueing my bigger bones pieces to 40mm and 50mm round plastic bases for added stability and the superglue gave me no problems with those either.