I'm sharing them not because I think they're great, but because the way I painted them might be interesting to some folks, especially those who are feeling the pain of army painting. All 5 models, from black undercoat to what you see here, took me about an hour to do, using the semi-famous-in-some-circles Dip method.
Pictures first (and apologies - my macro-photography fu is still not great):
Sonia Criid
Samael Hopkins, the high-heelingest bounty hunter out there
Witchling Stalkers
So yeah, they're not mind-blowing. I want to go back and dot in Sonia and Samael's eyes, and most importantly I should have used a different color of brown that showed off the shading better, but still. An hour.
Here's how to do it.
Step 1: Go to Daiso. For 200 yen, buy a bottle of wood varnish (labeled Water Varnish and, in Japanese, kousakuyou nisu, written 工作用ニス - nisu is varnish if you need to ask a clerk to help find it). I used the darker Teak color.
Step 2: Paint your minis, just blocking in base colors. I used 6 colors of paint for these guys, which was part of what made them go so quick: green, red, brown, flesh, gunmetal, and a little bit of white to make Sonia look classy. This is the only time-consuming part of the process, really, and it's what took the bulk of my hour or so to get the models done. Obviously, you could go for as much detail as you wanted at this stage - the important thing is that you don't need to worry about shading or highlighting at all, because step 3 takes care of it.
Step 3: Paint the varnish directly onto the minis - you don't need to thin it or anything - being careful to soak up pools as the varnish settles. (The "official" way to do it, and the source of the technique's name, is to dip the minis directly into the bottle of varnish and then shake off the excess to prevent pooling, but I figured my wife would get mad if I got spots of varnish all over the living room, so I used a brush.) The varnish is water-based, so you can wash your brushes the regular way.
Step 4: There is no step 4. You're done. You may want to go back and do eyes, and you probably want to hit the models with some dullcoat, since the varnish is very glossy, but that's basically it. Super-fast and produces rather nice-looking results - solid "tabletop quality," I think - especially on the universally hated faces.
The whole thing has planted unfortunate ideas in the back of my brain about collecting a Fantasy army, just because painting an army up would not be an enormous PITA.
