This miniature of a blacksmith from the Reaper Bones Kickstarter has nothing to do with my Tyranny of Dragons campaign. I started it several years ago and paused for years after painting the skin. Some time ago, I pulled it back from my shelf of shame and decided to finish it. I don’t think I’ll soon need a blacksmith NPC as a miniature, but hey – at least it is finished now.

The Blacksmith (77142) is part of the townsfolk series of Reaper’s original Dark Heaven Legends miniatures. The redid these as Reaper Bones with the first Kickstarter. It’s always nice to have some NPCs if you are playing with miniatures and involve them in a fight somehow. Honestly, I am always happy to have as few moving pieces on the battlefield as possible, so I usually have my NPCs flee or take cover to avoid having to keep track of them. This is different when you play virtual only and use tokens instead of miniatures, though.

Basing and Priming

I glued the miniature on a standard 1-inch plastic base, added some sand, and primed it via airbrush in black and white.

Painting

The blacksmith was a miniature where I practiced painting skin tones back in 2014. So I took a lot of time painting the muscles and the face. And after finishing the skin and hair, I only painted the base. Then, I lost interest in the miniature as I did not need it in my ongoing D&D game. So this is how the miniature looked like for several years:

After moving in our new house, I started painting again one winter. I don’t even remember when this was exactly, but it also was a couple of years ago already. Every finished miniature is a good miniature, right? I continued practicing with the blacksmith miniature, this time it was painting white cloth (which I find nontrivial).

So here is the finished blacksmith!