(Painting) Stormwing, Corrupted

 My God, has it really been a decade since Bones 3?   I didn't start pledging to the Reaper Kickstarters until 2 and I have never done the base $100 pledge for an exponentially exploding piles of figures.  I simply used the a la carte option.  

The biggest one I invested in was Bones 3, mostly for a bunch of giants I have NEVER painted.

And one dragon.  

Stormwing came out really nice.  It had a use in a mousling/giant Ragnarök concept game that never came to fruition (only it's still hiding in my drafts here on the blog).  

Of course, with a mini that size, there was no good place to store it.  When I was still at the house, it sat on the top shelf in basement.  It suffered the slings and arrows of curious cats, although never getting knocked over, plus a few overhumid basement floods thanks to some hurricanes, and, of course, the move to the apartment.  

But even before most of that, the "dragon rampant" pose began to sag, to the point now that it looks like Stormwing is looking for a lost contact lens in a shag carpet.  

Worst yet, despite three or four heavy layers of lacquer, the paint has chipped and peeled off in numerous locations.  

For the sake of repairing it, I removed the surrounding areas, did a coat of primer and two standard coats of paint with a little detail.  Stormwing has changed a bit, corrupted by something.   

The goal was to cover up the damaged parts, throw some lining on it, and get it a spot on a shelf.

But the second I hit it with sealer, despite all the layers of paint, despite no reactivity before, the old paint on other parts of the figure began to curl.  

In hindsight, I would completely avoid the Reaper Kickstarters, and my investment in all of them were minimal.  From the stock skeletons to Stormwing, they don't handle general use, heck, the skeletons in Bones aren't handling individual spots in a Chessex case in a dry, room temperature area, where I've only needed to touch up one metal Reaper skeleton after heavy play... and I've owned them for over 25 years.  And while my "Blue Martian" goblins have mostly held up.  There's stress marks on bows and other flexible parts.  

I went to my FLGS this past week, and they have a full line of Bones dominating a wall.  I had a crazy concept of starting with #77001 and just painting stuff for fun, but the costs have now gone up enough that I can still find appropriate figures in metal through a different manufacturer at a similar, if not cheaper, price.  

I will say that off the three recent Reapers I painted, I assume the Ghost (old  white Bones) is going to degrade, and the Rand figure (black) lost considerable detail from the metal version, but I have hope to the two Androids (black) will hold up.  Compound everything else going on with my personal life and family, and most of the unopened blisters will now go on a shelf.... of items ready to go to the flea market at the next con

And if true hindsight could be acted upon?  I would have invested in the Grenadier dragons back in the day, they were affordable and I appreciated the economy of scale now more than ever.