Reaper Bones: A Few Years On

Inspirobot will pick the Bones.

I've been painting a lot of Bones in the last weeks, and well I should because I have more than I can count.  Or rather I gave up counting.  Every single Bones Kickstarter is represented in my collection, even though I've been giving a lot of them away because I will literally never have the time.  Bones IV is on the way in a few months as well, so I've been rearranging storage space getting ready.  I think I netted an extra 25 slots just from jangling the shelves...but many cases will have to be relabeled on their side.  I digress.

I thought about making this a gallery of random Bones miniatures, but I'd rather organize the collection a little better than that this time.  So, no pics of Bones here...this time.  Soon though, I promise.

I did want to talk a moment about Bones and how I've grown to be comfortable with them.  I actually had issues like a lot of folks in the beginning, and I've paid for it with many hours dealing with such problems.  I've found one simple trick to avoid most of this crap - paint that first layer on.

Several types of spray paint just doesn't work on them.  Army Painter and Krylon flat primer is now the only thing I'll use if I need to spray them, although I like to avoid that.  Among the other fails in the beginning, I've had an entire clutch of rats shed their entire paint job nearly a year later after remaining tacky for that long.  The entire paint, primer and all, just slid off them by squeezing the mini out like an evil zit.

The good news is they were easy to recover.

Not all recoveries have gone well.  In fact, that's literally the only one.

For example, if the paint DOES bond to the Bones, good luck getting that off.  Don't try to strip them.  I've had a couple given to me that I still don't know if it's going to work out.  Lots of material bonds strongly to the pvc, and can actually cake up on the surface in a bad way.  Just get another one.

I've found that all of that is avoided simply by brush-priming the mini.  Get a good even coat of whatever you'd like to have sprayed it.  It takes longer, yeah...Bones actually take me more time to paint than plastic or metal models, where the paint seems to just fly onto the model from the brush of it's own volition.  Bones are hydrophobic, and painting up from the direct skin of the model can take a long time.  Or at least, what seems to me to be a long time.

All this leaves aside other issues with Bones, but honestly anyone griping about quality can skitch somewhere.  Some casts aren't great on detail, and that's ok.  Honestly, that's not what you get Bones for.  You get Bones by the crate.

Yet I'm only cautioning you on what I like to avoid when painting Bones, not against you collecting them.  Even with another crate of Bones coming in, there are some I'd like to grab up I missed the first time around.  A lot of the bigger ones are really nice on the detail, unlike some of the smaller sculpts.  Some of the IMEF sculpts managed to slip past me somehow..and I almost always need more rifle troopers.