Learning to paint Reaper Bones

So, I mentioned last time I'd painted a Reaper Bones Medusa. The material is a bit different to what I'm used to, so I had a quick google and read through some threads on the Reaper forums looking for advice. This is more about confirming what worked for me than trying to supplant the advice there - it's really quite thorough!

(If you want to buy this figure yourself, you can get it here if you're in the US. In the UK, the Dice Bag Lady stocks sensible female figures, but will order in other models on request. Miniature Heroes stock a wide range of Reaper, but I can't for the life of me find this one!)

I cleaned mine up using a scalpel blade because that's what I have. I really should get some better files for clean up...

Anyhow, I was then an idiot.

 

 Not fancying paying a bunch for a different undercoat spray to the one I usually use, and skim reading the advice, I went and bought this medium and tried to use it as an undercoat. Of course, medium's job is to evaporate, so unbeknownst to me at the time, this will have done precisely nothing useful.

Fortunately suspicious, I didn't wash down my base coats - they had a little trouble going on, but it was usually fine on a second pass. Once the first coat of paint is on, the next one does just fine because it's sticking to the paint and not the water repelling plastic...

Anyway, next ones I paint will probably use a different undercoating method that actually works, but this at least covers my somewhat foolish experiences. Good news! It's not that unforgiving! You can mess up and still turn out an OK paint job.

As a note - the details on these are not great, and clean up is a pain. Their merit is in the fact that they are cheap, doubly so with the bigger monsters. However, I don't look down on them for that - they have picked a particular market and they're very good for that. I would definitely recommend them for the gamer on a budget, but advise at least being a little cautious with them and trying out what works and what doesn't.