Tuesday 6 October 2015

Painting Challenge 2015 Part III - Reaper miniatures

At the start of this year I set myself the target of getting 200pts of miniatures painted. Part I of the painting challenge detailed how I would score this and Part II talked more about how I was managing to get so many miniatures painted in one go. The wonder of Quickshade! So far this year I've managed to get 130pts worth of miniatures finished. That's probably more than I've painted in the last 3-4 years combined and has been great as motivation. I find you go ages without painting a single model and then all of a sudden you get into that painting groove and can't seem to stop! My only problem is sticking with painting a single system to completion, rather than bouncing from one army to the next. I'm too easily distracted!

In the last month I got the Dwarf battle standard bearer, two slayers, four miners, ten longbeards, ten wild west cowgirls & eight civilians and the Norman church finished. Yesterday I finished my Runelord. Today I thought I'd talk about something slightly different, Reaper Miniatures. Their dwarf range has some brilliant models in it. Earlier in the year I got the mounted dwarf lord from there painted up and I have a small number of their other miniatures for other dwarf character types.

The models in general are more dynamically posed than GW characters. That's not to say I don't like GW dwarfs. The 1990s and early 2000s metal models are some of my favourite miniatures. It's just that adding a few Reaper models adds flavour to the army and brings models to the table that few seem to buy. They are slightly bigger than GW miniatures, but that just makes your heroes stand out even more!

As a bonus the Reaper miniatures are cheap in comparison, usually coming in at about $6. They have a huge range of other models and while some are a bit meh its easy to pick and choose from their nicer ones. Many of them can also be found on the UK and Irish eBay site.

Unfortunately not my work....


Reaper also do a large number of cheap monsters. Recently a lot of these have been changed to plastic, making them ridiculously cheap. I bought a few of their cave trolls for something like $2 and they scale well with their GW counterparts. Once undercoated the only thing drastically different about them is their weight. I'm currently looking at this earth elemental as a filler model for the dwarfs and for $6.99 you can't really go wrong. Then you see things like this dragon (see above) for a measly $14.99. I'm sold. I'll order one in the next week or so and post up its quality and size comparison when it arrives. Below is a collection of the Reaper dwarf character miniatures I've painted up so far. The rune spelunker at the top (Runelord to you and me) isn't varnished yet but is finished. The rest just need basing properly. The same as all my dwarfs!

















2 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Thanks. As an added bonus the Reaper minis seem ridiculously easy to paint! Big exaggerated features, especially the eyeballs!

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