Eye Scream

Eye-terrors
28mm scale

Eye-terrors lurk in the dark heights of dungeons and forests, waiting for unsuspecting prey to pass below.  Dropping onto the victim's head, they rapidly infiltrate the nervous system with their tendrils and take over control of the body. The head is then digested and the eye-terror is free to roam, seeking sustenance. It uses potent psionic attacks to subjugate prey, which it then consumes with its digestive tentacles.  The host body inevitably withers, and at some point it is discarded and the eye-terror seeks a high place to perch and wait for its next host...

Here we see a pair of vicious leucrottas that have fallen victim to the eye-terrors' ambush.

The eye-terrors are based on a pair of Nolzur's leucrottas models, which I found rather uninspiring by themselves, but playing with a handful of ball bearings at the bike shop gave me an idea...

The sincerest form of flattery

Mimic chest
28mm scale

Sometimes you hunt the treasure... sometimes the treasure hunts you

 

Mimic chests are a very popular subject for miniatures right now for some reason and I've wanted one for a while.  This Nolzur's version is perhaps not the most unique, but it's definitely iconic. I love the lunging motion, and that giant tongue whipping out to snare unsuspecting adventurers into that horrible mouth :O

This was a quick paint job; it's not going to win any contests but I'm very pleased with the result!  Nolzur's minis are generally really easy to paint, the one drawback being that their multipart nature means there are often deep recesses that are hard to get paint INTO.  The mouth here is a good example.

"Why does the boss even keep this thing around?  It's a menace!"

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

Hasty pudding

Gelatinous Cube
28mm scale


So it was election night in Canada, and I could have spent the evening anxiously glued to my laptop waiting for the latest scraps of data... but instead I spent it doing a quick, fun hobby project! 

At work we ran some small plastic media bottles through the hot dishwasher... they did not like it, producing what us scientists like to call "autoclave art":

This could have merely been a funny desk decoration, but I had other ideas.  I sawed one in half:

Made a cheap base out of cork, with dungeon stones painted on with a piece of sponge:

Glued a few shoddily-painted skulls and a spare sword to the inside surface, and tada!

A pretty decent, though smallish, version of the classic D&D Gelatinous Cube!  It's perhaps not going to win any hobby contests, but I'm happy with it!  And it's nice to have a project come together so spontaneously after painstakingly painting up Narthoks the Beholder...

"Looks like it already found those bandits we met earlier..."

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.

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...

A bloodsucker born every minute

Cyberpunk Vampire
28 mm

Before the morning can break we retire
The searing heat of the sun we avoid
Await the dark, proud Walachian fighters
Armata strigoi

I have absolutely no idea where this amazing figure is from; I found it in a bitz bin at Nexus Games in Kingston ON a few years ago.  It's cast in delicate light blue resin with a fair amount of flash, so I don't think it was from a board game:

Anyway I was very excited to finally paint it, and it didn't disappoint!  What a cool character.  He's got a mix of high-tech and medieval style armor, and he's wearing an IV that constantly feeds him blood for that all-night vampire fix...

"You must be new in town!  No wonder you haven't met Mr. Pointy..."

A sucker born every minute

"Kraken" game piece
no scale

I'm happy to say I finished the "Abyss" Kraken game piece in record time!  It helps that it's only three colours, all based on the same blue shade to tie it together... but still.  That's a lot of suckers!  I wanted a murky but richly-colored deep-sea look so I tried to avoid my usual near-white highlights here.  It's a bit shiny; I gave it a durable (I hope) satin clear coat to keep it looking good for many plays.  Fun, and a bit different :)

Teeny Greeny Tough and Meany

Marauding orcs
10 mm

I had a few 10 mm scale Copplestone fantasy figures left from my not-a-commission project a while back, and decided to paint them up a few days ago.  Fun!  I don't paint a lot of orcs either so their grimy green aesthetic is a bit novel for me.  The result is pretty standard Tolkien-style orcs, though I did borrow from Warhammer for the shield design :)  I have some corresponding heroes, painted over eleven years ago (!), that I now want to re-base to match them.

Stag Party

Peryton
28 mm

Here's another model that's a bit different from my usual fare.  It's not often that I have a chance to tout fantastic(al) Latin-American author Jorge Luis Borges on this blog, but here's my chance.  The griffon-like Peryton is his creation, from his 1957 Book of Imaginary Beings.  If you read one Latin-American author ever... maybe it should be Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but Borges seems a lot more fun ;)

The figure is Reaper Bones Peryton (A Julie Guthrie sculpt!); it was a Christmas gift from my daughter :)

As usual, I'm seeing a lot of things I should improve or fix now that I've taken photos, but that will have to wait for another time...

Protoplasmic Terror

Shoggoth
no scale

Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes - viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells - rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile - slaves of suggestion, builders of cities - more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative! Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and carve such things? - "At the Mountains of Madness" by H.P. Lovecraft

This Reaper Bones miniature is a weird and convoluted sculpt that captures the amorphous spirit of the powerful bioengineered creatures that Lovecraft wisely described in vague terms.  I've seen various interpretations, but this one definitely fits the bill.  It is small for 28 mm but perhaps it's an immature specimen, and consequently the Bones figure is "priced to sell", as they say.  A quick, fun paint job!

"Don't worry Leela, they're quite harmless if you know how to talk to
them... Would you like a jelly baby, teke-li-li?"

Birthday Monster

Lizardman Soldier
28 mm

You hear the door come crashing down
The birthday monsters are in town!

This is kind of a special project for me.  My 4 year old daughter thoughtfully selected this Reaper Bones mini for me for my birthday this year, and I wanted to paint it up as soon as I could to show my appreciation.  It's a good figure, a bit "flat" but still exhibiting a dynamic character.  The Bones plastic was even softer than I'd expected, but the hot water trick worked to straighten the spear and generally make him stand more upright.

I'll admit you can tell my skills have slipped in the last few years, but on the other hand, painting 15 mm has made me accustomed to using strong contrast, which I think suits this scaly guy.  The other figure she got me might have to wait a bit, I have some 15 mm projects I'm anxious to get going on once the back-to-school madness settles down.

Some kind of mushroom...

Myconids
15 mm scale

Myconids are a peaceful, telepathic race of mushroom creatures who live in the D&D world's "Underdark" caverns.  These Khurasan figures could be peaceful Myconids wishing to be left in peace by more aggressive species... or menacing and harmful Cursed Myconids defending themselves with bursts of necrotic spores.