Warrior Woman

Reaper's 'Lorna the Huntress'

I've posted a bunch of figs here, but this one might be my favorite to date. My six year old painted this 'warrior woman' the same time I worked on the Eco Team.


It was a great morning, we laid out all the paints on the kitchen table (where I do a lot of my painting), got a couple of cups of water for our brushes, and set out to do some painting! She's done a handful of figs before, but this was the first time she was focused from start to finish. I coached her through the process, but the rest was up to her; color selection, when to take breaks, what parts to paint, the whole nine yards.


This fig was also another first because unlike the hand-me-down figs out of the bits box my girl's been painting, this one she picked out on her own off the rack at the local shop. Ole Lorna here was part of Reaper's P65 range, and was a steal at two bucks and change, plus, it's a good sculpt to boot, if a tad skimpy in the attire department, haha. My daughter picked her because she wanted a "warrior woman", it wasn't until she started putting brush to fig that she realized that warrior woman didn't wear any underwear!


I coached her through the whole process, and in the couple of days leading up to 'paint day', we talked about things you do while painting too. Introducing techniques to her I phrased them as "tricks", and the two we talked about in terms of warrior woman here were highlighting and washes. Well, the highlighting didn't take too well, but she embraced the wash technique, err, trick, quite a bit. Mainly blue on the boots and some brown on the fur loincloth. Since we painted side-by-side, I was able to show her these techniques on the guys I was working on, and then she'd repeat the process on her own fig.


She was very deliberate in her color scheme, knowing exactly what she wanted, down to the blood on the sword, which she described as wanting "to look like she won a battle". To round it all out, we did some basing too, which was the exact same I did on my guys; a little white glue brushed on, followed up by a swish around in the bag of flock. Her fig was now completely finished! Like I said, it's not her first, but definitely her best, so far!



Closeup of painting the eyes...and the results

To reiterate, I didn't touch her mini once, this was all her, I did, however, talk her through a lot of it. If she got a big dab of blue on the arm, I'd ask her how she would fix it, then she'd go back and repaint the spot with flesh. The last "trick" we covered was going back and doing these little touch-ups. We also talked a lot about using our 'painting eye' to see what parts we needed to paint first and where we should go back to touch up, also, it was good to look for little details you normally miss, like bracelets and buckles. Enjoy!