Moloch's Revenge

Eidolon Possessed Statue of Moloch
28mm scale

I saw this figure in my recently-reopened FLGS and instantly wanted it!  It's a deity's idol, possessed by an "eidolon", the vengeful spirit of a faithful follower and tasked to guard the temple from intruders.  I don't play RPGs now, but I definitely remember the glory days of 80's D&D, including this book:

 

Yep, that's the statue on the cover, including the missing eye, prised out of its setting by what "adventurers" who appear to be nothing better than common bandits!  So regardless of this entity's alignment, one can't help but understand why it's disgruntled...

Even more menacing in 15mm scale!

Massacring Mendicant

Groo the Wanderer
25mm

I loved Groo comics when I was a kid.  I didn't own many but the public library, always mindful of of literary demand, stocked a decent supply. The combination of Sergio Aragonés' distinctive art, murderous slapstick, and ridiculous storylines about the adventures of a total idiot really hit the spot for adolescent me.

I have no idea where I got this figure.  It was presumably either a trade, or I found it in the miscellaneous figures box at my local FLGS (or as they tended then, "smelly nerd cave").  I don't remember ever seeing any of the other Dark Horse Miniatures figures in person... They're all worth a lot of money now, so I'm unlikely to try and expand my collection.

Rufferto, Groo, Chakaal, Sage, Minstrel.  This set would probably
cost a couple of hundred dollars... if anyone would sell it.

"Did you just call Groo a... MENDICANT?!"

Adeptus Caduceus

Space Marine Medic (1988)
25mm scale

Well, this Marine is a real blast from the past... he dates all the way back to my earliest teenage years in the hobby!  He first appeared in the 1988 Citadel catalogue alongside a horde of other charming sculpts:

Space Marines were definitely a different breed back then: a lot less like walking tanks and more like elite soldiers, and the sculpts reflected that.  More personality, fewer skulls and purity seals.  And we walked uphill to school, both ways, it was a golden age, etc.

Anyway, I bought this guy for cheap on eBay many years back, a satisfying score.  His backpack is from the remnants of the old plastic "Beakies" set I keep in my bitz box.  He might not be my best work ever, but I think I captured that old White Dwarf painting style pretty well.

"By the Emperor, I think it might be too late for this one..."

Hell Divers WIP, and a gift

Hell Divers are fantastic.  Really.  I'm working on another six right now and as good as the sculpts are, I think what I like most is no doubles!  I'm pretty sure that in the three packs I bought (Alpha, Bravo and Omega squads) every figure is a different sculpt, so no bending arms and cutting heads to avoid your squad looking like a chorus line.

Obviously I'm painting these to match my previous four, so lots of Ordic Olive/Okavango Swamp.

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Robot Monster (redux)
15 mm

I enjoyed painting this Khurasan figure again, this time as a birthday present for my brother.  Retro-licious!  I have to say I got a lot of use out of these packs...

Klaatu Barada Nikto

Gort
15 mm

Barely a paint job at all, really.  The figure is from 15mm.co.uk.

Sidebar: The Day The Earth Stood Still, as classic as it may be, has got to be one of the most BORING films I've ever seen.  It's not just "different era slow", or "arty Solaris/2001 slow" it's sloooooooooow.  Of course you can't fault the moral message about the barbarity of war, but for better or worse this is not a film that has aged well.  Then again, I don't like The Maltese Falcon either, so maybe I am just a barbarian :/

"Gettin' real tired of your sh*t, Robot Monster."

B-Movie Madness!

"With the swiftness of a deadly cosmic ray, the Earth is invaded by indestructible Moon monsters. Their ghastly mission: death for all Humans!"

Robot Monster
15 mm

So I finally got around to painting one of Khurasan's awesome B-movie critters!  In the original monochrome of course, since a movie this bad had nowhere near the budget to use Technicolor... 

"There is no escape from me!  Very well, I will recalculate... your death will be indescribable.  Fool humans!  There is no escape!"
 

A slightly more thematic presentation...

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

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.

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":

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.

Dog Soldier

Canid
25 mm



Just a quick mini to get me painting. It's another old one, "Grenadier 1985" is imprinted on the base.

Back in the saddle...

Space Marine 1988
25mm



A blast from the past to get me painting again after so many months. This is the sort of miniature that was hot and new back when I first started painting, in high school... Now mine, thanks to the miracle of eBay.

Abdul-Qadir
28 mm



I never really got into painting this guy, but maybe I should finish him...

Beginnings

Home for Easter, I found a few things I painted a long time ago. I think these were done around 1990-1992, when I was in high school. They actually don't look too bad to me now, but I think that's probably more an indication of how little I've developed in the intervening time, rather than any precocious show of talent.

What's available to paint has come a long way too... back then the range of characters to choose from tended a lot more towards basic sci-fi and fantasy tropes. There was some unusual stuff, but if it wasn't available at a local store... it wasn't available. No eBay, of course: what a grim and joyless world, I don't know how I survived.

Chaos Archer

My Chaos Archer is finished, I think he turned out pretty well:




The bronze bits look very good with flat varnish on them - not totally corroded but not polished either. I gave the steel armour plate a gloss finish though to make it look newer. The "mud" base actually looks like mud with boot prints too, which is nice. I just sculpted it by hand from epoxy putty after the figure was fixed to the base. The flesh came out looking rather flat but that was hard to avoid with the lack of detailing on the musculature.

A note about plastic miniatures:
Metal miniatures are "spin cast" in flexible rubber molds. The mold can flex to allow a complex casting to be removed from the crevices of its mold cavity. Plastic figures are cast in steel injection molds. As a result they cannot be as complicated or detailed - since the mold is inflexible any fiddly bits would be trapped in the mold cavity. The sides of the figure tend to be especially problematic and thus details there can be distorted or just absent.

Bad mini

I wanted to paint up an evil archer for my uncle for his birthday, to go with the Wood Elf archer I gave him in 2003. All I could find was this plastic "Chaos Archer" that came with my brother's "Battlemasters" war game. It's pretty poorly-molded, and has little fine detail. This is what I've done so far:



So the challenge is: make a cheap ass injection-molded piece of crap look good enough to give as a gift. Wish me luck.