Hakuna Matata!

Timon and Pumbaa

28mm scale

It means no worries
For the rest of your days
Yeah, sing it, kid!
It's our problem-free philosophy
Hakuna Matata!

 

 

 

Just a fun idea I've been wanting to put together for a while... Pumbaa is a Bears Head Miniature, Timon is from the North Star Africa line.

There has never been a time without unicorns

Unicorn
28 mm scale

A long time ago when the earth was green,
And there was more kinds of animals than you've ever seen,
They'd run around free while the earth was being born,
But the loveliest of them all was the Unicorn.

This lovely unicorn was one of the offerings in Bears Head miniatures' last kickstarter, and I knew I had to have one.  I love its real feeling of bulk and power; it's not a gracile, vulnerable
"The Last Unicorn" style creature but a lot more like a war horse.

To me the unicorn represents hope...  I didn't know how thematic that'd be when I ordered it late last year... sure do now.

I recently picked up a bottle of metallic medium and lightly applied that to the unicorn's back, mane and tail to give it a bit of enchanted sparkle.  It didn't really work that well for photos, but in person it definitely adds something extra :)  I'm also pretty happy with this nature base.  It had some growing pains as I had to scrape off a really bad static grass attempt, but the second try with a mixture of flock, foam foliage, and Italian seasoning along with some Gamers Grass clumps worked a lot better.

(Idyllic setting courtesy of the Oxfam Canada calendar)

The magic of nature

Forest witch and her familiars

28 mm

Colors swirl in spiral skies
The trees stare back with willful eyes
The night doesn't frighten me
Cast a stone cast an eye
Water mirrors never lie
The earth is firm beneath your feet

This Bears Head figure took a while to grow on me once I had it in hand - I liked it, but didn't know exactly what to do with it. Luckily, I'd also bought an assortment of Philip Hynes' amazing animal figures, including this adorable little rabbit and squirrel!

 

I won't lie, I was watching a lot of "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" while painting this, but its vision of witches who by and large behave like Christians and just add "Satanic" in front of everything ("Satanic blessing", "dark baptism"... "evil church camp?") obviously didn't move me so much. So here she is, a crone in touch with nature and the living things of the deep woods. She may have her own morality, but I don't think she's hosting any Dark Baptisms or roasting any babies...

"You're outnumbered, witch!"
"You think death has any power here?  In my world, surrounded by life?

Happy little trees
28 mm scale

I also made my first trees! I used the basic method from this video (including homemade clump foliage), but there are lots of other good foliage and tree tutorials out there.  They're a bit sparse, but I think I achieved a somewhat natural look.

Definitely little.  Perhaps happy.

"I hope that's not releasing some kind of fumes" - my wife

Indigenous spirit of greed

Wendigo

28mm scale

Blood is on the table and the mouths are chokin'...
But I'm goin' hungry

Even if this wendigo figure from Bears Head Miniatures has more in common with recent horror movie depictions than traditional Anishnaabe legends, it's still a terrifying beast. It lurches through the snow, ravenous mouth forever hungry, its distinctly human forelimbs betraying its origins as an utterly corrupted soul.

In addition to reinforcing taboos against cannibalism, it's not hard to understand why a society living on the land, who relied on each other's cooperation every day, would believe that greed and selfishness could literally make you a monster.  The wendigo can also be understood as a symbol for rapacious acquisitiveness that throws an individual out of harmony with their community and environment... probably a metaphor worth paying attention to in our time.

On a technical note, I based this figure on a craft plywood disc covered in Fimo.  It's metal so I was able to sculpt the stump and rocks, and bake it, figure and all, before adding the skull and a stick as a taller tree trunk.  I used Golden acrylic gel medium mixed with bluish-white paint, sprinkled with baking soda when still wet, as the snow. Hopefully this will avoid it yellowing in the future.

A more traditional depiction of the wendigo,

by Ojibwe artist Norval Morrisseau

Nec-romance on the Nile

Mummy Couple

28 mm

My boyfriend's back

and you're gonna be in trouble

I recently picked up this charming pair of mummies from Bears Head Miniatures' latest Kickstarter.  I've enjoyed painting mummies in the past; they're usually a quick job because it's hard to fuss over something that's basically a bundle of leathery skin and brittle rags.  That said, I really like these lurching, malevolent sculpts, so make them a bit special I gave them some hieroglyphic bases:

I'll admit, I don't think these say anything in particular, I just picked some symbols that weren't too hard to make. The one on the right does contain part of the cartouche of Thutmose III, so perhaps that's who the male here is (prior to his final rest in the Cairo Museum)...

Exploring a newly-unearthed tomb, Lord Smedley-Smythe
was sure the rustling he heard was just the wind...

Starry starry night

Vincent Van Gogh
28 mm

Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of China blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand

When I saw that Philip Hynes of Bears Head Miniatures had sculpted a Vincent van Gogh figure, I was so excited. Van Gogh is one of those artists who everybody has heard of, but who can never be overexposed or uninteresting. He was somebody who had a passion and a vast talent for art, but who was sadly so plagued by mental illness that he didn't last. Still, in his short life he painted over 900 canvases!

The particular painting I've depicted here is one of a series of four sunflower still lifes he did while working in Arles, France around 1888. The most famous of these hangs in the National Gallery in London, but there were three others. One is in a Belgian gallery and another was destroyed in Japan during WWII. This one has long been in a private collection and is not publicly displayed.

Something I was not aware of is that probably the only reason Van Gogh didn't slip into obscurity in death was that his brother's widow, Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger, inherited much of his work and devoted herself to raising its profile - and value - through an artful campaign of gallery showings and publicity. Without her, we'd never have enjoyed so many brilliant paintings, or a rather good episode of "Doctor Who".

"You should sign it 'For Amy' or something, just to confuse the art historians."

Harry Cryptid

Bigfoot
28mm scale*

Bigfoot, or the sasquatch, is one of the best-known North American "cryptids" or animals that are claimed but not proven to exist.  Almost everyone has probably seen the classic photo, which is a still from the "Patterson-Gimlin film" supposedly showing a large ape-like bipedal creature walking along a river gorge.

Totally not a guy in a rented gorilla suit.

The creature is an American icon, appearing in countless media and with statues showing up in countless parks, businesses, and tourist attractions. It's even made forays into politics.  As for whether it truly exists or not, according to well-known primatologist Jane Goodall, "maybe they don't exist, but I want them to"... which is good enough for me.

"They told me you were all right, Jane."

This Bears Head Miniatures figure is a great version, nicely combining the loping gait of the classic imagery with a slightly more human-like "Harry and the Hendersons" style face and hands. 

(* At 55mm tall, its scale may depend on exactly how BIG you think Bigfoot should be...)

Enter the Beholder-verse

Narthoks the Terrible
28mm scale

Burning cities
And napalm skies
Fifteen flares inside those ocean eyes

An arch-villain, an overlord, a mercenary, a destroyer, a monster... Narthoks is all of these things.  Floating through space takes on new meaning when the floater is a 2m-wide highly intelligent creature with a taste for carnage, pillage, and devouring sapient flesh.  Heavily armed and utterly ruthless, Narthoks bears the scars of past battles but only becomes more dangerous with each bloody encounter.

Narthoks is a Bears Head miniature... in my opinion the most spectacular character Phillip has created so far!  I made a few conversions: swapping his club for a vintage chainsword, replacing his round grenade, and adding a claw to his tech-tentacle.

"Going somewhere, human?"

Into the Spider-verse

Mother of Spiders
28 mm scale (~40 mm)

The subterranean world holds many mysteries and terrors... savage driders, huge cavern crawlers, slimes, myconids, and more.  The looming Mother of Spiders is one of the most cryptic.  Rumored to roam the caves, accompanied by a swarm of venomous arachnids, she has been said to lead explorers astray, attack them, or even strike bargains in exchange for tasks or items from the surface.

Added stalagmites and extra spidery goodness... 

The Mother of Spiders is a Bear's Head miniature.

Captain Esmeralda and her crew encounter a terrifying hag as they
search the seaside caverns for Butcher Sutcliff's treasure hoard.

Bump in the Night

HP Lovecraft, Paranormal Investigator
28mm

I opened the door and went out in the gallery toward the stairs to my study, ******-Man following at my heels. Before we had reached the stone steps, however, the cat darted ahead of me and vanished down the ancient flight. As I descended the stairs myself, I became suddenly aware of sounds in the great room below; sounds of a nature which could not be mistaken. The oak-panelled walls were alive with rats, scampering and milling, whilst ******-Man was racing about with the fury of a baffled hunter.  
- "The Rats in the Walls"

Another great Bears Head figure, of the (in)famous horror writer H.P. Lovecraft as an investigator in his own mythos. Accompanying him here is his brave cat of unspeakable name, ready to take on any paranormal threat to his master.

This is actually the second figure of Lovecraft I've painted.  It's perhaps less dramatic than the first, but I think I might actually like it even more.  The face is less gaunt and exaggerated and he has a lot of gaming potential for those who play mythos games.  The cat is an old Reaper familiar which I think really adds a lot to his character (as well as referencing the classic HPL story "The Rats in the Walls").

"He went that way!"

(Cultists courtesy of winnipegmichael!)

Thick-skinned undead

Zombie Rhinoceros
28mm scale

Animal zombies... a philosophical mystery.  We know human zombies as mindless, bloodthirsty savages, reduced to a single drive: kill the living.  But when other animals are infected, do they become the same species of generically aggressive, flesh-rending creature?  Or is some vestige of their original nature preserved?

This is another Bears Head Miniature, received as a miscast freebie in my last order.

Since somebody asked, the basing is Milliput textured with an Instant Mold stamp of the bumpy privacy glass from our bathroom door :D

The last sight of many an African zombie-hunter...