Impact! Miniatures - Chibi Asian Adventurers Limited Edition Inugami

 

So it's been awhile since I last posted anything.  Life's been a little hectic lately.  Between work, winterizing the apartment, and having to deal with a minor medical issue I've not had any time to devote to painting.  But now that I've fully recovered I'm back at it.

 

So about two months ago I got into Impact Miniatures' Chibi Asian Adventurers Kickstarter and pledged for the limited edition pewter set.  This is one of those figures which arrived in the mail not too long ago.  This will be both a walkthrough of my technique as well as a bit of a review of the figures themselves.

 

So to start off after much work was done sanding and polishing the surface of the model, I decided to prime with a brush-on primer since it was too cold outside to use a spray primer.  All paints were Reaper Master Series (RMS).  Most of my work was on the hair and I used various shades of RMS reds for this.  One thing that I noted was that the RMS reds are EXTREMELY transparent and once a darker shade is down it's next to impossible to override it with a lighter shade.  I remedied this by highlighting using Fire Orange and then going back over with Brilliant Red as a glaze.  The blade on the sword was painted with Show Shadow, Ashen Blue, Ghost White, and Linen White.  The hilt was done with Tanned Leather highlighted up with Buckskin Pale and Linen White.  For her clothing I chose to go with a bit of an aquamarine color to complement her red hair. Skin tones were primarily just Rosy Shadow layered up to Caucasian Flesh.  The ears were painted with Chestnut Brown with Rosy Shadow on the inside of the ears.  The shoes/socks were just black and white.

 

Chibi eyes seem intimidating but really they are quite simple once you understand the basics.  For this particular model I chose to start by outlining the eyes with Muddy Soil (all outlines are done with Muddy Soil, by the way) and then use Pure White for the white of the eye.  This goes against normal convention of using an off-white for the eyes but for this style I am going for maximum contrast over realism.  I've tried off-whites on other chibi type projects and it looks too muted for my tastes.  I rendered the iris by first painting a red circle on both eyes and then outlining that with the Muddy Soil.  Then I painted Muddy Soil over a little more than half of the upper iris leaving color on the bottom.  Two white light catches were placed on the dark portion of the iris.  The pupil is more or less implied at this point (it was never really rendered explicitly).  As a finishing touch I highlighted the color of the iris with a little bit of Fire Orange.

 

Once I was satisfied with the paint job, I coated it lightly with dullcoat, flocked the base with some Scene-A-Rama (Woodland Scenics) Earth, and added a couple of Army Painter swamp tufts.  For the remainder of the figures in the set, I will likely use the same terrain on the bases to maintain a sense of unity.

 

Now onto the review section of my post.  Artistically, these are great figures.  I love the concept and the design of just about every single one of them.  I started with this one because she's my favorite of the bunch.  There isn't a single figure out of the bunch that I don't like and I do believe my money was well spent in that regard.  I have to be honest about the overall quality of the figures themselves, however.  Earlier I had hinted I had to do a lot of sanding and polishing.  That's actually standard for just about any metal figure I get my hands on but this seemed more so than most.  All of the figures seem to have a lot of bumps and ridges that I simply have not seen from other manufactures.  If you look closely at the rear view bellow you can still see some of these ridges showing through the paint.  I could have covered that up with some putty but that would have taken a bit more work than I was willing to put forth on this particular project.  So in terms of artistic design and concept I give Impact an A- but in terms of quality I can't say it should be any higher than a C.  I don't believe that metal is their strong suit, however.  It will be interesting to see what quality level they can produce in resin once they fulfill the bulk of the Kickstarter pledges next year.

 

So the "finished" product is shown below (I am still doing some tweaking) in my makeshift light box.  I'm hoping to get a better light box put together shortly, however that will be easier to deal with:

 



 



That's all for now.  I will probably post another one in the next week or so depending on how my schedule works out.