A journal about a character’s creation and career. Ryan Costello starts at the ground floor of his latest character, Daitora, the sumo brawler.

Part 1
Part 2

Part 3 – Mini Big Tiger

Generally my rule is that each PC deserves their own hand-painted Reaper mini. My old rule was that each PC deserves a hand-painted metal mini, but Bones happened. I don’t have a set time in the character creation process that I paint my mini –Jaymon didn’t have a mini until he was 6^th level, and Joey was a plastic dinosaur until after GenCon- but the sooner I do, the better I feel fielding the character. Because my brawler was largely inspired by the mini I would use for him, I got right to painting him.

Tools:

·Paint;

·Brushes;

·Palette;

·Flyer;

·Shot glass;

·Paper towel;

·Netbook;

·Weighted clamp.

The paint and brushes are self-explanatory. The palette I got at a dollar store and is great for tube paints like Reaper’s HD paint line. The flyer is to keep the paint off the table, the shot glass is for my dipping water, and the paper towel is to dry my brushes. I like painting with a netbook (or any net-capable devise with a screen). It lets me reference pictures, rules, and lore. Finally, the weighted clamp keeps my fingers off the miniature while I paint. A slot-base figure like the sumo is that much easier because I can clip the base and paint the entire figure.

I went with a base coat of flat brown, a shade I usually use for an African skin tone. I learned to paint miniatures reading Games Workshop’s hobby magazine White Dwarf, which says skin should be layers, from darkest to lightest. I fail at skin more often than I’m happy with it, but with the amount of skin on this mini, I thought going the extra mile was important.

After the base coat, I mixed flat brown with flat flesh (with apologies to everyone who has flesh that isn’t this shade of almond) and dry brushed a coat. Then another coat of unmixed flat flesh, and a highlight of flat flesh mixed with white.

And that left a pretty dull miniature. The problem was, where do I go from there? No matter how elaborate I made his mawashi, it’s a thin detail on a bulky figure. If he had spandex shorts under his mawashi like Yokozuna, there would be more colour to contrast and more area to work with. But not, not even a bracelet or shoes. In the past I’ve molded armour out of green stuff, but it never turns out well, never taking the shape I want and with my finger prints all over. Even adding a cuff to imply a skin-tight shirt is difficult. Instead, I had his torso as my giant flesh canvas. Which meant body paint or tattoos.

I kind of like both. There was a Ninja turtle support character (who I have no particular fondness for, I admit) named Tattoo who was a sumo, and he had numerous small, unrelated tattoos all over his torso. That’s not what I wanted. I considered going with an abstract, geometric pattern, maybe based on Khal Drego as represented in HBO’s A Game of thrones (I have no idea if the book describes his war paint in the same way). At some point, my mind wandered to a tiger. It clicked. Beyond fond memories of Tiger Force, there was a specific, obscure Tiger Force figure I knew I could base my sumo’s look off: The UK-exclusive Tiger Force Outback. Unlike most Tiger Force figures, who were tiger-themed by way of having stripes on their uniform (sometimes black stripes against a yellow background, but not always), Tiger Force Outback had a tiger face imprinted on his t-shirt. It was an easy design to recreate with a paint brush that would go a long way to bringing a tiger theme to my brawler. I added a yellow stripe down each arm that met at the shoulder, then met again at his belly button, creating a V-shape that made the tiger’s face.

You may notice that his face is similarly tigered up. Before settling on Tiger Force Outback, I tried to base face paint on Japanese professional wrestling character Tiger Mask.

I’m not happy with the face. The colours look less like a tiger and more of a mess of yellow and black, and the yellow mask and chest accentuates a roll of neck flesh in a most unfortunate way. However, repainting the face would be time consuming because of the layers of paints that went into my brawler’s flesh colour. It would be difficult to match the exact mix, too. I am considering repainting his face, but I am also considering repainting all of his skin to a colour that the yellow pops against better. For now, I am satisfied.

Not my favourite miniature I ever painted, but I am proud of the tiger face, which I succeeded at better than I expected. Overall I think the tiger sumo idea comes across nicely, and I am ready to roll up a character to match my figure.

Part 4