2 New Heroes and a New Tile?

Been working on some "traditional" figures of late so I haven't been painting as much of my wooden guys, but it's so cold outside here I stayed home today and painted, so I got a couple of heroes and possibly a new way of doing a room/hallway tile done.

First the heroes ...

I was wanting to see if I could do a heavily armored hero that wasn't so large like the knights are.  The parts that make the knight so large are the shoulder armor plates and the split spool forearm pieces.  So I decided to try and split a smaller spool on my own (which turned out to be easy) because I still think the split spools make great forearm pieces.  The shoulder and other pieces of the armor I just used tile spacers for, cutting them into a shape I liked.  Other than that, he's just a standard milk bottle figure.

The second guy is a thief I have been thinking about for some time but finally got around to doing.  Nothing special here, I just wanted a thief in heavier leather armor throwing a dagger.  He is a shaker peg guy.

I don't have any of these tiles that I make for my "standard" D&D game, but they are made out of thick craft foam that I cut to shape and then use a stiff stipple (I think it is called) brush to paint on the tile colors.  I just push directly down with paint on the brush and it makes a textured finish.  But the really cool thing is that I can use a darker color on the outside, a medium shade of the same color in the middle, and then a light shade of the same color in the very center.  It gives the impression of there being a torch in the middle of the room casting out light that gets less intense as you get farther from the torch, with the corners of the room being very dark.  I'll have to get one of them and take a picture.  They are currently "living" at the guy's house that my group plays D&D at and I just got tired of transporting them and left them there.

Anyway, one of the things that I do not like about the way I paint the wooden pieces to make the room tiles is that there is no change in shade.  In other words, it doesn't produce that effect of light getting dimmer as you get to the outer parts of the room (which really does look cool ... I stole the idea from the old Warhammer Quest game as their tiles are done that way).  So I decided to give it a go with my tiles, but I wanted to use solid colors so that it would match the rest of the style of my figures.  Then I just painted lines on the tile so that people can see the "spaces" and know how to move their heroes.

Below is this new "graduated color" tile with my traditional one.  I see the benefit of both, I'm not sure which one I like better.  Then after this picture is a pic with the new tile and some heroes on it just so you can get a sense for what it would look like in actual play.  Again, not sure which one I like better.