Vortigaunt

Vortigaunt alien

~50mm 

This is a truly unique figure; it was sculpted by a child!  My child's 12 yo friend designed it in Blender, and his father 3-D printed it in resin.

Vortigaunts are aliens from the "Half-Life" games; Gordon Freeman first meets them as opponents, enslaved troops firing an electrical attack.  In the second HL game, we meet free Vortigaunts, and they've joined the human resistance against the Combine's invasion of Earth.

City 17 Survivors

Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance
15 mm

(This post has a soundtrack) 

Well, I finally finished my "dream miniatures" that I started back in March.  Painting these was a genuine pleasure, despite having to squeeze them in around the ever-increasing time constraints of "real life".

Not perfect likenesses, of course.  Gordon looks less nerdy and a bit more badass in opaque sunglasses, and I rather like darker-skinned Alyx.  I converted the boxy, generic gun that was on the original sculpt to at least resemble the Combine Pulse Rifle from the game - an incredibly potent weapon.  With more sculpting mojo, I might have tried for the Gravity Gun...  As for painting, I wanted figures that would really "pop", and so went with the high-contrast style that I'm getting better at (as well as contrasting Gordon's colorful armour with Alyx's subdued street clothes).

The base turned out well in my opinion, I didn't want anything too flashy that would distract from the figures.  But I think it's suitably thematic.

Jean Jockey (Half Life 2 WIP)

Alyx's jeans, a.k.a. sometimes we can rise to a painting challenge:

Ooh, me aching eyeballs.  But, so far so good...  I enjoy painting denim, for some reason that worn, faded blue look is so satisfying.

Black Mesa Survivor

Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance
15 mm

"So Gordon, nice day huh?"
"..."

So I finally decided to tackle these two figures, Khurasan's "Dave Rimmer and Desiree Kim", pretty decent proxies for the protagonist of Half-Life 2 and his surprisingly resilient NPC sidekick.  It's a bit intimidating.  They're some of the most amazing miniature sculpts I've ever seen, in ANY scale let alone 15 mm!  The incredible paint job (edit: by Jen Haley, so yeah) posted on Khurasan's website doesn't help... O_O

Anyway, I hope my results are even half as good... I did try to make a cool base for them, matching the game's post-invasion wasteland atmosphere.  This was done mostly with Instant Mold: taking a texture impression of a rough stone and dabbing the IM against the putty base until it looked irregular enough.  The half-buried drum and tires were duplicated from some bitz using IM, and pressed into the base material.  It doesn't perfectly match my headcrabs, but it's close enough and looks good IMO.

Half-Life 2 sculpt and paint

Headcrabs
15 mm scale

I quickly made these and painted them over the last day or so as a fun, low-pressure project.    Headcrabs are the main "small and annoying" foe in the Half-Life games.  They only do a little damage to the player, but poor NPC's attacked by them are turned into inhuman "headcrab zombies" that are much more dangerous:

These will tie in nicely whenever I get to painting Khurasan's not-Half-Life-2 figures "Dave Rimmer and Desiree Kim".  I've already converted Dave's weapon to look more like one of the game models (the Overwatch pulse rifle):