HeroQuest Hellion

HeroQuest Necromancer ("Skeletor")
28 mm



Finally done. I wasn't sure what that sphere on his helmet is supposed to be, so I painted it as a Palantir-type black orb with point reflections.

I suppose an alternate name for him could be Lord Zuthulu ;D

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Some Christmas swag from my brother:



A Reaper "Reptus Sergeant" and Confrontation "Orhain the Erudite". I believe I asked him not to buy me minis... so he compromised and dug these out of the FLGS's bargain bin for a few bucks each. I especially like the turtle guy.

And i just picked up some RAFM Call of Cthulhu Deep Ones. ♫ ♫ It's beginning to look a lot like fish men ♫ ♫...

Happy Holidays

Well I didn't manage to get any more painting done before the holiday descended on us... so Merry Christmas everyone!

And I hereby resolve to paint more in the new year, no matter what happens. Let's see how that works.

Gingerbread 2010

A yearly tradition of mine. Yes, it takes away painting time, but it's a lot tastier in the end! These were all made as gifts for friends.

Toronto, Ontario
350 mm



Christmas trees
250 mm

Screaming, screaming for vengeance

Some work on the Necromancer, much-delayed by Christmas stuff. It turns out that if my wife goes out for a few hours and I can blare 80's metal through the house, I actually don't mind fussy layering on smooth surfaces:



OK, so the music didn't improve my ability any. I think the Skeletor look will actually turn out okay, maybe a bit cartoony but I don't mind that. His green skull face actually looks genuinely sinister.

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Also, a very geeky paper Xmas ornament I came up with, using some internet papercraft and clipart designs printed off and hand-coloured:



Yeah, that's a Stargate :D

Basing, with candles

Some basework for my Necromancer:



Cork isn't very imaginative, but it is pretty easy, and I like the way it looks.

And... Bonus content! NSA's totally amazing simple method for sculpting candles!

Now, I'm neither skilled at nor enthusiastic about sculpting, but we often have to do it to get the miniatures we want. In this case, I wanted a skull with a drippy wax candle on it; something that says "sinister ritual" without taking up too much space. Anyway, this method isn't Golden Demon quality, but it does produce credible-looking drippy candles in only a couple of minutes.



Obviously, before you start this process, you can just fix the wire into the surface on the mini that the candle will be sitting on, or you can hold it in a pin vice or forceps.

Hell hath no fury like...

...a small pewter woman, well-painted. The Chick Challenge 2010 entries have finally all been posted, and they are an interesting bunch! My "Victoria" is in the Open category, where the competition includes things like this... and this... and this.

Yeah, this is why I don't play to win :P Fortunately, seeing such amazing work by others is a pleasure in itself.

End Zone Interception!

HeroQuest Necromancer
32 mm



I've wanted to paint one of these for a long time... I never figured I'd get my hands on one. (And yeah, he does look like he's waiting for a football to fly out of the sky)



I'm not sure what to do with the base now that I've extracted his feet from it... Pentagram? Some Chaos-y torn cork rocks? Skulls and bones? I'm a little short on ideas.

Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India

Queen Victoria
25mm




So here is my Chick Challenge entry, presumably okay to reveal since today is the contest deadline. The miniature is a Victoria Lamb sculpt, which I bought from Eureka, though VL also sells them through her own website. I really enjoyed a lot of aspects of painting this figure - figuring out what all her medals and things were, rendering the rich purple, and just generally doing something a little different. As mentioned before I don't think I really have a chance of winning anything, but that's not the point... I think painting for contests, as rarely as I do it, really does bring out my best work.

(The plinth is a wooden toy makers' train wheel, stained with GW Chestnut ink. Worked perfectly!)

Sick Day(s) Project

HeroQuest Mummy
28 mm



I did most of the work on this guy while laid up with a cold, and then (unrelatedly) recovering from having a long skinny medical instrument jammed through my body via some of my larger blood vessels. Not optimal painting conditions, but this wasn't exactly a groundbreaking paint job either. Still, I like the results.

Size comparison with an old Citadel mummy from "Curse of the Mummy's Tomb". HeroQuest figures are a lot closer to modern "heroic 25/28mm":

I'm very strange, I know it.

I'm working on a new 15 mm project... and it's a weird one. Here's some rough concept art:


What the? OK, some explanation: As we all know from watching "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the Third Reich were interested in some pretty fringe stuff - occultism and black magic and so on. This is the product of some kind of Nazi occult ritual gone horribly awry on the battlefield, resulting in the tank being "possessed" by some kind of demon or entity :O Kind of like the Chaos vehicles in Warhammer 40,000.

I'm basing this on a 15 mm Flames of War tank, and probably some GW Chaos or Genestealer bitz for the legs, since I'm not such a hot sculptor... I might have some mixed troops (Allied AND German) trying to destroy the thing, to emphasize what a universal menace it is. Should be fun :)

Motley Things

Chick Challenge* Entry
28 mm



OK, I can't actually show this, at least not before the Dec. 5 closing date for contest entries. But I will say it's a lovely sculpt by Victoria Lamb, and it's not at all like a lot of the things I have painted lately. Also, it's very purple.

* The Chick Challenge, in brief, is a female miniature painting contest. It was run for years by Jason Moses, but is now ably managed by Legio Pictorum, a group of Italian painters.

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I recently managed to acquire ($2, church bazaar) a battered copy of Heroquest! This was a Milton Bradley fantasy board game from the 80's, with game pieces produced by Citadel/Games Workshop. Essentially a canned version of a RPG dungeon crawl, complete with treasure to collect and orcs and other nasties to fight.

It came with a large number of "game pieces":




Hmm, yeah. They remind me of the figures from Battlemasters, or the old Bloodbowl box set. While they're not exactly high-quality even by the standards of modern plastic figures, I have done decent paint jobs on such things in the past.

I feel like these have... potential. We'll see.

DUEL!

Alien vs. Predator: The White Queen
15 mm



The base inscription reads:
"To the last I grapple with thee;
from hell's heart I stab at thee;
for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

Captain Ahab was hunting a white whale, but this Predator seems to be facing something quite a bit more exotic and deadly.





I wish I could say the idea of relating this duel to Moby-Dick was some clever and oh-so-literate impulse, but it's probably influenced by watching "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"... I was trying for a de-pigmented "facehugger" type colour on the "white" Queen, but she ended up looking quite green.

Here are some shots I took before I put the whole thing together:

Squishy!

Ta da! Alien nesting... stuff.



One can only hope the aliens would produce it in a process resembling this:



...and not by pooping it out of some specialized orifice and then lovingly sculpting it with their bare hands. But I wouldn't count on it.

"Whoever wins... we lose"

Alien versus Predator
15 mm scale

I never thought that tagline made sense - Predators supposedly kill a few armed people at a time, whereas Xenomorphs kill everyone indiscriminately. Not really equivalent.

Figures are "Vacation Alien" and "Space Demon" from Khurasan Miniatures. I don't see the Hunters on the site any more, I wonder if someone's lawyer gave him a call? (ed. - they're under "cinematic aliens", along with the classic B-movie Martians)







For basing, I'm going to sculpt some of that chitinous crap that Xenomorphs secrete all over their nesting areas in the movies, and maybe some techy floor remnants to fill out the base area for an infested colony effect.

Uber Villain

The Red Skull
15 mm



This is a quick conversion and paint job I did for my brother over the Thanksgiving weekend... a new commander for his Flames of War German army.

Red Skull was Captain America's wartime nemesis: a ruthlessly evil supervillain allied with the Nazis (but always pursuing his own agenda).



The original Red Skull as he appeared in comic books:

Mini Exchange #24 (that's a lot of exchanges!)

Well I participated in another Miniature Exchange this month, through Cool Mini or Not. I received some interesting stuff from leopardpixie, and I think this is the quickest I've ever painted what I received.

"Waggamaeph"
20 mm



African Shaman
20 mm



The first one is cute, the second is of... well, questionable cultural sensitivity. Also he's really thin and his legs broke off at the knees! That must be why he holds the spear. Fortunately, epoxy glue to the rescue.

Long departure

Months and months of no posts... the death of a blog. But I have an excuse, I got married and honeymooned and all that.

But hopefully, back to painting now!

German Valkyrie walker
15 mm scale





So this didn't turn out looking quite as good as I'd hoped, but it's good enough. I think it's a very wintery, chilly model, which at least is what I was aiming for.

Little Hunter

Predator
15 mm



This great little figure from Khurasan Miniatures was a lot of fun to paint - and fast, of course! Despite its size, it's a great sculpt, which really evokes the movie character:

Winterkrieg

I decided on a winter camo paint job on this model. Soldiers in WW2 tended to use whitewash (lime) often applied hastily over the factory paint with mops, brooms and rags. So I tried for a "messy" look, without making it just look like I was being messy... I'm not sure it's convincing.

Another Weird War Project

Valkyrie Walker
15 mm scale



More German WW2 stuff that never happened. I really enjoy these little models, I don't feel nearly as much self-pressure to strive for technical perfection in my paint job, and I can have fun meddling with them without risking mangling a large and costly kit. In this case, I built a turret, added a tank commander from the bits box, and sculpted a rolled camo net to hide the ugly casting flaws on the rear end (that's what $16 gets you, apparently).

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Star Wars Cake Toppers
Approx 50 mm

Speaking of alternate reality, since when was Princess Leia Bengali? Since my charming friends Siham and Sean decided to get married, that's when!



This was pretty easy, since I didn't have to repaint the whole figure, and Han was perfect the way he was. But they turned out looking so cute, and it's always nice to make myself useful...

AWOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The Wolfman
28 mm

I just started Reaper's nifty retro-horror miniature of the original "Wolfman" (played in 1941 by Lon Chaney Jr.):



I'm going to try for this effect:



Very dramatic, n'est ce pas?

"Let's go steal wine from that farmhouse... uh, I mean... attack! For the Fatherland!"

Loki Scout Walker
15 mm scale



Another Weird War 2 model from Gear Krieg. There are a bunch of conversions on this one. The awning-looking thing is a hi-freq radio antenna, WW2-style. Also, a spare tire, some stowed gear, better gripper claws, and a half-track commander from Flames of War.

That doesn't suck either...

Chrysaora fuscescens
20"x10"



The Pacific sea nettle. Nice and colourful, just what I needed after painting sand and concrete.

The fascinating process revealed: composition of this painting consisted of about half an hour moving cut-out paper jellyfish around on the canvas... truly high art.