Dirk Grimstone, Private Eye

Here we have my current D&D character, Dirk Grimstone, Private Eye. He's a Reaper Bones "Dwarf Brewer" model, representing Dirk's noir detective affinity for drinking. It was difficult to figure out what model to go with, as Dwarf Detective miniatures are in limited supply, but this figure turned out very well. I'm happy with pretty much everything about it, except for the hammer resting behind his back. Why they felt the need to throw in a random hammer and a random pauldron on his shoulder (emblazoned with a wheat symbol) I do not know. He's based with fairly dense foliage because I took the time for once.

Unusually, I took progress shots while I was painting him up.

1. First, I primed the model by brush with Apple Barrel "20504 Black." This is quite honestly the best black color I have ever used. It's the darkest, most opaque, and smoothest of any I've tried, despite being cheap craft paint.

2. The skin is usually painted right away because it's the most important, eye-catching part of the model. You can ignore mediocre clothing, but the face needs to look nice or it damages the entire figure.

3. Hair, in this case the beard, finishes off the natural bits. Oh, and he actually has something approaching pupils. The model has large eyes, which is the only reason I even attempted pupils.

4. The clothing. I left the boots black, as I frequently do. I remember years ago reading an article about character design for Team Fortress 2 where they noted that the characters all get darker as they go down, to draw the eye to the face and upper body for easy identification. I took this to mean you could get away with not doing much to boots as long as they were dark.

5. The mug, barrel, ground, and hammer all got their paint. The wood of the barrel turned out well. I'm not sure about the red mug, but the contrast with the green clothes makes it pop nicely.

6. Proper basing. Why he lugged the barrel out into the overgrowth I could not say. Also, looking at the pictures I should point out I attached the model to the top of an unused craft paint container with sticky tack to use as a handle while painting. This is my normal way of doing it and it works really well.

Next time, goblins!