From SamuliS: Pulp Heroine ready to fly Sarah's Balloon (35 points)

Time for my first balloon ride of the challenge and what a better way to kick it off than by painting a heroic pulp pilot to fly me from Reidy's Reef to Sander's Sand Dunes! The miniature is from the newish Cool Mini or Not Cthulhu board game Death May Die. Olivia is a veteran pilot that racked up an impressive kill count in the Great War as well as racking up a slightly less impressive amount of crash landings having been shot down more than any other pilot on the Allied side, but miraculously not suffering a single injury in all the crashes. In the game her incredible (un)luck allows you to gain successes from throws where you completely failed as well as changing some die results.

This mini was bit of an experiment with the Citadel Contrast paints that came out last year. Originally I was very skeptical of them, but have been testing these out with different minis every now and then. As this is a boardgame mini I wasn't too interested in spending too much time painting it (and all the other minis from the box) so Contrasts seemed the perfect solution. The mini was basecoated with a zenithal basecoat of grey and white and then painted with four different contrast paints as well as normal paints for skin colours and the goggles. This mini was really well suited for the contrasts with large clear areas of different colours and I had the skintones ready on a palette from painting other minis so it was super fast to do the brushwork with the whole mini being painted in maybe 5-6 minutes maximum and even with the preparation, basecoat and clean up I think it was finished in under 10 minutes.

I've definitely started to warm up to the Contrasts and especially on smaller and more textured areas they work amazing. Stuff like shoes, gloves, fur etc. is super fast to do with them and especially when combined with a zenithal basecoat it really brings out detail very well. The flight suit was a bit too flat for the contrast stuff, but with a bit more careful application it still turned out good enough for tabletop. The skintones aren't that great so those work better with regular paints in my opinion and it can be a pretty easy way to make the rest of the painting look better if you just use a couple of minutes on faces when everything else is speed painted. I've now experimented with zenithal basecoats that utilize some other colours like brown for shadows to bring out some of the tones even more. Black doesn't really work, but especially for some of the more brownish-yellow tinted contrasts seem to come out really nicely with brown shadows, grey main colours and white top highlight applied by airbrush. Couple of minutes extra per miniature in preparation really makes the contrasts pop so much better.

One 28mm miniature and my first balloon ride should add another 35 points to my tally

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Oh, what a fabulous pilot Samuli! 

I have to say I'm a little gutted as I just picked up this game after playing it with Byron a few months ago (love the game btw) and I wanted to be the first to get some minis for it up on the blog - you've stolen a march on me, curse your eyes sir!

Anyway, winging aside, this is a great mini. Even though it was a shockingly quick paintjob it really turned out quite well. I particularly like her flesh tone, the leather accents and the light tan flightsuit.  As you say, with the Contrast paints, if you spend a bit of time cleaning up the blending and popping the highlights they can give great effects.

Have a safe flight!

-Curt