Studio Minidragon - High Quality Painted Miniatures

To start, I want to explain that the repaints I've been doing on these World of Warcraft figures are not intended to be showpieces. They are meant to be much nicer looking playing pieces than the originals. My goal when repainting them is to get them to look pretty good very quickly. To that end, I don't generally clean off mold lines or fix degating marks and similar imperfections. I will fix bent weapons and arms / legs.

The first shot here is my workspace - you (well, I anyway) need to work in a clean space to to maximize efficiency and comfort!

First off, lets hear a word from Blizzard... (these blurbs are from the WoW miniatures game FAQ).

"The figures are dynamic sculpts featuring high-quality paint detailing by industry heavyweight Mike McVey and Studio McVey. World of Warcraft Minis figures have a level of detail that's unmatched by any other product on the market."

"All of our miniatures are designed on a 40mm scale, which is larger than other top collectible miniatures games. That means World of Warcraft miniatures can hold more detail and literally tower over the competition!"

I'm assuming they are saying that McVey sculpted these and painted the masters... Mr. McVey doesn't disappoint with the sculpting but I can't really comment on the painting since I'm not sure I've ever seen a WoW mini with McVey paint work on it.. The figures ARE well sculpted and dynamic as we'd expect from this icon of miniature sculpting. I'm not sure about the detail claim,though, while not plain the figures are certainly not as detailed as many of the figures out there from places like GW, Iron Wind Metals, Reaper, Crocodile Games, or Privateer Press.

The figures are also HUGE!!! They are not going to play well with the rest of your figure collection...but more about that later.

The figure we are looking at is High Priestess Tyrande Whisperwind. This is the flagship figure of the WoW miniatures game core set. The cadillac, she's ultra rare and supposed to look pretty nice.

Here's a look at the Tyrande rider figure. OOF! Not very pretty is she! Look at all that vaunted detail covered sloppily with a few different colors of paint. Look at the terrible quality of the wash that's been applied to her dress! I could give the folks at the painting factory a tip or two about how to make a wash that stays in the recesses and doesn't pool up and leave rings...but I doubt they'd listen.

The fire, at least, looks pretty decent!

Here's an overall shot of the figure. That's some fancy striping work on the tiger eh? Yes Sir! Look at the interesting shading on the tiger....is it 50's two tone? Who knows!

Now, I've poked some fun at what really is an egregious paint job, but it's important to remember that this IS better than an unpainted figure. Not everyone has the time or talent to paint minis so even a lackluster "paint job" like this has its place.

Fast Forward a couple hours and Tyrande has a snappy new set of duds!

I ordinarily would have taken some progress shots but I got all carried away and forgot. I'll talk about what I did and you can look at the photo to see what I mean....

Everything has been completely redone. For the most part I've done 2 or 3 levels of highlights, mostly 2.

The metal parts were simply touched up with silver and then given a wash of black and brown ink. For the hair I started with a dark blue and added white for highlights.

The skin and skirt were worked on together. The skirt color is just a lighter version of the skin. I painted the skin first with a maroon color and once I had lightened the paint a bit for highlights I painted the skirt.

The tiger got a base coat of light blue and then some dry brushes of gray and then white to get the fur looking mostly white. Next I googled up some white tiger photos for reference and went to town with some thinned black paint for the striping. His big fangs got a nice yellowish color and his eyes are a fairly bright green.

Here's the other side of the figure. The stripes are not the same (or even similar really) on opposite sides of the beast. My reference photos showed a lot of variation in the pattering from side to side so I didn't see the need to make things hard on myself by trying to make things symmetrical!

Remember when me and Blizzard said these figures are pretty big earlier in the article? We weren't kidding. Here is a shot showing just how much larger than a reaper 28mm Heroic scale figure this monstrosity is. Did I mention that this thing is big?!?

If the rider were standing on the ground I think she'd be nearly twice as tall as my poor little Reaper gal.

You'd think that Blizzard would have been able to get better factory paint jobs on such (relatively) large figures...but apparently (and sadly) that is not the case.

I'll leave you with a couple Before & After shots. These really give you a sense of what can be achieved with these figures with just a minimal effort.

Thanks for reading!

Oh no! That classic two-tone look is gone! Things will never be the same!!!