Back in mid February Cool Mini or Not announced a new contest called All the Shades of Grey. The criteria for the contest is to paint a figure using a very limited palette. I didn’t have any good ideas for it, so I wasn’t planning on entering. But then as I was looking through some of the new Bones 2 figures a couple of days ago, I had an idea. The figure is a female spy, and I was thinking it would work well in some sort of film noir setting with one highlight color.

I only wish I had thought of it earlier, so I had more than one day to work on it.

I was going to build the scenery from scratch, but then I remembered I had a box of ‘Urban Accessories’ by Italieri. It’s 1/72 scale so it really is a bit too small, but the figure is on the small side, so I though it would work ok. The kit had street lamps benches and a few other small things.

I did some things friday night – cut a piece of wood to size, primed the figures etc.

Figure and accessories prepped and primed:

The figure is “Agatha Fox, Female Spy” and it was part of the core set of the Reaper Bones 2 kickstarter.

Dry-fitting everything on the base:

Started added some putty on the base, working on the road:

Adding the sidewalk. I did a small piece at the end first, to work out a good way to do it:

Finishing up the base:

Primed base, painted it black, and added the light, using different shades of grey:

The final vignette:

It didn’t turn out quite the way I had envisioned it in my head before I started. I guess it never does. I wanted some mist in the scene as well, but I found it hard to make realistic mist in this scale. I tried some cotton and acrylic stuffing, as well as dog fur and some raw wool. None of it really looked good. In the end, I sprayed some black and grey color on some wool, and put that in the background.

Now that I look at it, I think I need to make the collar pink as well on the figure, and I probably ought to lighten up the face quite a bit. All-in-all I only worked for this a few hours,  so spending some more time of the details might help. I was also thinking of adding some sort of chains in between the metal columns in the back, to make it feel more like a sidewalk by the water.

The picture I submitted to Cool Mini or Not: