Paintedfigs.com - What you get for the lowest miniature painting rates on Earth

The Goods

The Crew, L-R: Amila, Nishantha,
Shanika

Assembly, Work in Progress

Paintedfigs.com - High Quality Miniature Painting at the Lowest Rates on Earth

Assembly

Assembly, Work in Progress

Assembly

Assembling 300 miniatures is not very different from
assembling 3, or 30.

Teams work. Several chaps working on a job at the same time
will get more done, and with less variance in the quality. our
builders are Shanika (lead builder, short hair in the pics),
Nishantha (longer, floppy, hair) and Amila (guilty look). Shanika
and Nishantha are older staff and have a lot of experience
working with different sorts of minis and kits, Amila is a junior
staffer still under their wing (or perhaps fist).

First the miniatures are cleaned of flash, a boring but essential
step that I think does the most to make gamers throw their
hands up in the air and start googling painting services.
Because these were three part minis (body, spear, and shield)
cleaning was much less of an obstacle than it would have been
if these were multi-part plastics.

Next, all the minis were washed in a soapy solution. This was to
get rid of the mold-release chemical that clings to all metal
minis, and must be removed before priming. Failure to do so
will lead to paint flaking and glued parts not sticking to each
other.

The 300 took longer to dry than they did to clean, which
surprised me.

Next they were all glued together, there were six hoplites who
were missing spears. To order 300 figures and be missing just
six spears is just a 2% error rate - quite excellent. I can think of
one other up and coming company that deals exclusively in
metal minis that should maybe ask Croc Games how they do
it... To be fair, they who-shall-not-be-named have got much
better over the last year.

Flocking came next. We like to paint our flock (basecoat, wash,
drybrush, painted base trim, and static grass effects and such
after) so we do our flocking before priming. Normal looks the
most realistic. We used super glue instead of PVA glue - while
PVA is cheaper, it takes too long to dry and needs more than
one coat, and that's just too much hassle when time costs
more than materials. We use almost a liter of superglue each
month, and Suranga, my wingman, has recently just arranged
to buy it in bulk from the distributor at wholesale rates.

This is one of those danger areas where people can get
careless and get flock over feet and such, which is part of the
reason we have a set builder team -- accountability improves
quality. The basing was clean and well done, and the chaps
were quite proud of their handiwork.

The minis were then primed in matte black.