Reaper Bones

Quite a while ago, somewhere around July 2012, the one friend I always paint miniatures with pointed me out to the Reaper Bones Kickstarter, which was basically a ‘we sell existing miniatures dirt cheap so we can get funds to design new miniatures’ drive. Some other friends and the two of us decided that it was well worth the money and, if we all chipped in, the costs could probably be overseen. We put our heads together, made our decisions, and pledged for the Bones.
The Kickstarter turned out to be a huge success, gathering 3,4 million dollars worth of pledges, and it was pretty clear that everyone was going to get a huge load of awesome miniatures. The estimated delivery time would be somewhere around march 2013, but with all of the add-ons and stretch goals that were met, we were pretty sure they were never going to make it in time for that date.
March came and went. April, May and June also passed, and we started joking about the time we had to wait. July and August also passed…
And then I received the confirmation mail. Our order had been processed and sent by airmail to my house. On the third of September, the mailman rang our doorbell, demanded we paid him for import tax (damn you, tax system!) and then handed me a box that was actually a little smaller than I had expected it to be. Giddy with excitement, I set up a camera on a tripod and started to record my very first unboxing video.

 

 

It was pretty bad, considering the fact that the camera’s battery died about halfway through the unboxing and missed about all the important things, but it was fun, so I uploaded it anyway. After sorting everything out so my friends and I could get all the miniatures we had called dibbs on, I decided that it was a great idea to immediately start painting one of the mini’s the first chance I got.
I planned to wait with this blog post until I had finished that mini, so I could get a good comparison picture of what an unpainted miniature looks like, next to a (rather poorly, knowing me) painted miniature. The Bones material was specially designed for painting, after all. Unfortunately, the friend I paint with, and the friend whose paint I use, is currently moving and isn’t really able to paint with me. So I can’t paint. Life’s hard like that.
What I can say is that, quite frankly, the promotional pictures didn’t prepare me for the actual quality of the Bones miniatures. The first image of the material I had seen was this one:

 

As you might see, there are a couple of places where the detail appears to suffer because of the material. However, when you place it next to a miniature that was photographed slightly better (maybe without the use of flash photography…), you can see that the details are actually nicely preserved by the material:

 

It’s actually pretty fun to work with the material. As it’s got some limited ability to bend, it’s suddenly very possible to reach points on the miniature that would otherwise be covered by different parts. Though this same attribute means that some of the more spiky things, like spears and staves, can be stuck in a bent position thanks to the moulding process, it is more of a boon than a curse. The bent pieces can be fixed with some boiling water, and there will be no more axes breaking because the rigid resin decided it didn’t like the minimal pressure that was placed on it! (yes, there’s a story behind that one, too…)

With all of the Bones miniatures I’ve got lined up now, it’s quite probable that I’ll be set for quite some time. One of them is planned for my Declipse Savage Worlds game, if that ever gets started, and several others are planned characters or little surprises for my friends…

I really look forward to painting these things…