Painters... bah!

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was waiting on some figures that had been sent off to a guy in the states for painting.

As a bit of background for the non-nerdy, I play a board game called Blood Bowl, a kind of strategy game based loosely on american football. You have two teams on the pitch, from a number of race choices, and you basically fight it out for 16 turns.

One component of the game are the team figures, which are cast out of lead and then painted. You're supposed to do it yourself I guess, but screw that. I couldn't do a decent job if my life depended on it, and I don't mind paying someone to do it for me. We aren't talking about hard-core professionals here, just some normal guys out to earn a bit of cash.

So anyway, I send three teams over to this guy in the states, two for me and one for a friend. The problem? I sent them half way through 2005, and they only came back last week! The guy had some problems at home, and combined with the fact that he is clearly a bit of a slacker, I was left waiting... and waiting...

So given how long they took, you would think he had time to do a good job, right? Wrong. The first two teams he did, Chaos Dwarves for me and the Nuns for Geoff. He had them done around October, and put the pictures up on his website. All good, they look great and it hadn't taken too long all things considered.

But since then, he kept dropping out of sight, I wouldn't hear from him for months at a time, and everytime I did he would promise them "next week". I was beginning to wonder if they would ever actually arrive, or if this guy had just stiffed me.

So I was pretty stoked when I find the package ready for collection. I take it all apart and get everything out. This is when I am very unpleasantly surprised by whats inside. As I said, the Chaos Dwarves and the Nuns look great, but I get the other team out (Elves) and they look like a 5 year old painted them... in a hurry. I have no idea what was going on in this guys head, but he clearly did a rushed job and botched them badly. It would almost be understandable, if they hadn't taken FOUR MONTHS TO PAINT THEM.

I sent him an email to express my profound disappointment, but of course I haven't received any reply from him. It has been a real disappointment for me, but there is basically sod all I can do about it beyond let others in the community know to steer clear of him.

Meanwhile, I had sent another team (Necromantic) to a guy in NSW called Phil McFayden. I can't tell you how much better an experience it was dealing with Phil than this guy from the states. He was friendly and professional, kept me up to date on the progress of the job and above all did a fantastic job on the team itself. I couldn't be happier, and I will definitely be going back to him if I decide to have any more teams painted (probably won't be that soon, I have enough guys for quite a few different teams now, so it would be a while before I would think about trying a new team). Anyway, if you are in Australia and need to get some miniatures painted, I can't rate this guy highly enough. Check out his website here (not exactly high tech, but it does the job).