Coming up in my D&D campaign for Rise of Tiamat, I needed a couple of Yuan-Ti. In a time before WizKids Nolzur’s Miniatures, Reaper had some nice and cheap snakemen figures. I used the then new Bones Snakemen Warriors from the Kickstarter (77153) and some older models (02498) for my Yuan-Ti tribe

Yuan-Ti are a race of snake-people. Some of them are more humanoid, others are more snake-like. In a game, this makes them diverse for interesting combat encounters. There were not too many miniature options at that time in 2015. But as always, Reaper had something in their catalog.

I had four Snakemen Warriors (77153) from the Bones Kickstarter. Unfortunately, it’s the same miniature four times. There are other variations of Snakemen in the Bones series now, but they were not available when I was painting these six years ago. So I found a set of older Snakemen models (02498) I really liked to use to mix things up a little.

Basing and Priming

I based and then airbrushed all the Snakemen except one. I wanted to test whether it would make a difference if I just painted the white Reaper Bones miniature without priming first. They were supposed to be ready to paint and were advertised as not needing any primer. So far, I haven’t done that.

Painting

As I had the four minis of the same basic Snakemen Warrior, I tried different color schemes for them with varying shades of green. As you can see in the picture below, the bright green one was the figure I painted without priming it first.

I had to apply three instead of two layers of basecoat to the non-primed miniature. Also, I found it more difficult to not miss any white spots in deeper recesses, compared to the primed miniatures where these areas are naturally black. So while I found no difference between the primed and non-primed minis after painting them, I still prefer to airbrush them in black/white. Sure, it takes an extra step. But I usually prime a lot of miniatures at once, so I don’t find this to be an issue for me.

Overall, these were quite easy to paint. The scales are ideal for drybrushing, and the figures did not have much equipment or armor details. Even for six miniatures in total, this only took me about 5 hours total or so. Nonetheless, I am quite happy with the result.