Recently, I went through my old collection of D&D plastic miniatures. I was looking for some generic monsters and NPCs to use in my D&D game and realized that the minis themselves are quite nice, but rather poorly painted. Time to change that!

The factory paint jobs are not bad, but they completely lack shading or highlighting. I bought a bunch of booster packs back in the day, so I have about a hundred of these D&D minis (produced by Paizo) at home. The sculpts are okay for the most part, just some miniatures have bent swords or legs.

The new lines (starting with Tyranny of Dragons and also the new Elemental Evil Boosters) are produced by WizKids and were criticized for a rather poor quality by some folks. I guess I’ll find out once I need a special NPC or monster from these lines.

I really hated the concept of the boosters, having to spend about 30 euros for a bunch of random figures. The boosters are smaller now (just 17 euros, but fewer minis), but the concept is the same. Fortunately, there are retailers selling individual minis nowadays, e.g. on eBay. The rare minis are more expensive, but overall, the normal minis range from 1.50 to 8.00 euros, with which I’m okay with.

So one evening before christmas, I decided: What the heck, I’ll just repaint them all. I must confess that I was a little too euphoric that day. The next day, I prepared a huge bunch of figures for priming and decided to just repaint the real cool ones or the figures that could be used most often on the gaming table. There are lots of weird monsters that would not be needed too soon, so I skipped them.

The picture below shows a group shot of the minis to be repainted. They are mostly NPCs and medium/small humanoid monsters. I cleaned all of them with soap water and then used white glue to add sand and small rocks to their bases.

A Few Examples after Priming

After almost two hours worth of airbrushing, they were done. Here are a couple of examples. I’ll start to paint some of them right away, so stay tuned to see how they turn out in the end.