Kooky Tanuki!

Traveling Tanuki
15 mm scale

Tanuki, or raccoon dogs, are a common subject of Japanese folklore.  They're good-natured, even foolish trickster spirits capable of shape-shifting and disguise.  Traditionally, tanuki were often depicted in humorous art, wielding their preposterously large and prehensile scrotums as tents, hats, fishing nets, and many other useful items. While not including this particular feature, this sculpt from 15mm.co.uk. was still a cute, fun project to quickly paint up.

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And a sneak peek at a project I've just started.  It's what I believe is a... unique take on the "parasite" zombie concept.  Figures are from Khurasan.

Riders of the saurian age

Hell Divers theropod rider
15 mm

Anyone on the 15 mm sci-fi Facebook group has already seen this, but I just started a fun little project.  I adapted a Clear Horizons "Hell Diver" figure to be the rider and sculpted a saddle out of putty.  There could be various explanations for soldiers in the future riding dinosaurs, but I can think of at least one based on fluff I've written in the past...

I mentioned the high-quality Schleich toy dinosaur in a previous post but never had a good idea what to do with it.  With a bit of putty added to cover up the embossed text on the belly, I think it's at least as good as most dino sculpts intended for gaming.  As oddly good as Schleich's paint jobs are, for some reason the primed model really gets my creative juices flowing...

Hardpoint, in Progress

Honestly, I haven't abandoned this project:

Sprayed white, then washed with grey until it looked totally dirty and horrible... now I'm bringing the features out with white again.  Not the most exciting painting work, but it's coming along okay.

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As a side note, I see the Ion Age are releasing some cool connectors/tunnels to link together all their sci-fi colony hab structures:

Looks pretty amazing, not to mention versatile!  More details in their blog post here.

Sneak peek

Female Bounty Hunter in Ghost Suit
15 mm
 

One of the Khurasan female bounty hunters I'm working on.  Not much else done on them to be honest, but I liked how the OSL looked on this one so I thought I'd post it...

11th Doctor WIP

So far, so good.  A good sculpt makes all the difference; I don't think I've ever had an easier time painting eyes. 

I don't usually complete parts of the mini before touching the rest this way, but for some reason I felt I needed to give this guy some "life" before I moved on to fussing over his clothes etc.

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.