Painting Bardsung – part 1

Recently a humongous box arrived from Kickstarter: Bardsung! We played the first missions with the kids and were immediately hooked. In summary, it’s a modern interpretation of HeroQuest with a dash of Dungeons&Dragons sprinkled over it. I’m sure this box will be opened a lot in the following years.

The level of detail of the more than 30 minis (I also received a second hefty box, ‘Fables’, that contains a lot of extra minis as part of the Kickstarter rewards) is very high, and so I was stoked to start painting them.

In this post, I will showcase the first batch of minis I painted. The order is based on a) the heroes the kids chose to play and b) the monsters that were needed in the early missions.

My main painting ‘formula’ is based on Citadel paints in the following order:

1. Prime with wraithbone white using a spray can.
2. Apply wraithbone white base paint with a brush on those places where the spray can didn’t reach.
3. Paint 90% of the figure using Contrast paints and my trusty Winsor&Newton Series 7 Kolinsky brush.
4. Fix any mistakes with wraithbone and reapply the correct contrast color.
5. Use base or contrast paints for the tiny details (eyes, belts, daggers, etc)
6. Drybrush if I feel the mini might benefit from it
7. Learning to highlight here and there, but this is still very experimental
8. Add ‘ground’ to the base.

Without further ado, let’s dive into what I’ve painted so far.

The heroes

Ok, first things first: my kids could choose any hero they liked, including those from the Fables box. As a result, I only painted those and not all the basic heroes.

The Goblins & friends

The first encounters are fun battles with these little green critters.

In conclusion

That’s it for now. I’m really happy with how this is progressing. I’m learning a lot while painting these minis and really like how detailed some of them are. Thanks to the contrast paint I have a rather good speed, on average it takes about 2 to 3 hours to paint a hero or 4 to 5 monsters of the same type.