15mm terrain goodies

Shipping containers

 

My Instagram buddy @winnipegmichael generously sent me a bunch of nice corrugated craft paper, so naturally the first thing I made with it was that classic terrain piece, intermodal cargo containers.  If you own something manufactured, there's a good chance it once traveled in one of these...

I tried to make them look used but not totally abused.  The graffiti was fun, I did some of it with my child's Posca paint markers.

Wind turbine and solar unit

These two pieces were surprisingly easy for how good they came out looking. They're made from cardstock, corrugated paper, printed papercraft designs, and some toy parts.  The techy turbine blades are from a Kinder egg toy; there's a bit of Lego in there too.

Graveyard Watcher

"Angel of Death" Statue

28mm scale

Not a ghost bloodied country
All covered with sleep
Where the black angel did weep

A deserted churchyard... neglected, moldering headstones and blowing leaves.  And a tall, masked figure, its wings spread ominously behind the scythe looming in its grip.  "Just a statue", you say... "Just the moonlight", you say...

This was my utterly non-seasonal pre-holiday project from a few weeks ago.  It's a really old Ral Partha figure, dating back to 1979 and sculpted by the legendary Tom Meier!  It was part of RP's original extensive and characterful lineup.

 

I threw together a few old graves with mossy headstones to go with it, they should make good scenery for some ghoulish character at some point.

A Rush Job - Red Barchetta

Red Barchetta
20mm scale

I strip away the old debris
That hides a shining car
A brilliant Red Barchetta
From a better vanished time
Fire up the willing engine
Responding with a roar.
Tires spitting gravel
I commit my weekly crime...

This little vignette is inspired by the epic 1981 Rush song "Red Barchetta" from the album Moving Pictures.  Neil Peart wrote the lyrics based on a science fiction story called "A Nice Morning Drive", about a future where old, "unsafe" cars have been replaced by safe armored behemoths... whose drivers sometimes run old cars off the road for sport.  A man takes his uncle's carefully hidden roadster for a country joyride and has a narrow escape from two "gleaming alloy aircars". 

The car is a Matchbox 1949 Kurtis Sportcar.  The human figure here is actually my very first 3-D printed figure, a model from Thingiverse printed off on my supervisor's Ender 3.  I included a few Rush references in the model just for fun:

Cetacean cyborg

Jones
28mm scale

Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light exploded, swarming across the frame and then fading to black. We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war
in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he'd swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the SQUID he'd used to pick Ralfi's pathetic password from the chip buried in my head. - "Johnny Mnemonic"

Jones is a cybernetically enhanced dolphin, used by the navy to sweep and hack sea mines during the last war, and addicted to amphetamines to ensure his obedience.  He somehow left the service with his implants intact, but to feed his addiction he now lives in a tank at a grubby fun park, as a low-rent attraction for the children of Nighttown... "Talk to the War Whale!".  One day, razorgirl Molly Millions comes to him with a challenge: a data courier with an encrypted program in his head that only Jones' implanted superconducting quantum interference device can unlock...

 

He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he might have seemed
like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water stopped
over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.
He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun,
his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on
either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on
exposed sections of his gray-white hide.

I first read "Johnny Mnemonic" in high school in the 80s and poor Jones stood out to me as one of the great characters in a story crammed with delicious cyberpunk detail.  I clearly wasn't the only one; Jones made a memorable appearance in the cheesy Keanu Reeves movie (loosely) based on the story.  I opted for a sleeker look here than in the film when I converted a WizKids dolphin.

"Why are we here?"  "Because Allison doesn't really have any
cyberpunk minis.  Also the dolphin was lonely."

Undead Master of Knowledge

Count Orlok, Scholarly Vampire
28mm

Immortality... a gift, and yet also a burden.  A vampire can only enjoy rampant carnage for so long before even the hunt becomes a chore.  The weight of centuries can lead to apathy, immobility, descent into near-stasis... or a realization that all that time opens up new potential.  Some like St. Vigeus embark on martial conquest, amassing a vampire army and putting humans to the sword as well as the fang.  But for others, their intellect guides them.  An infinite quest for knowledge, discovery of lore and arcane secrets, and possibly immense power! With nothing but time, they scour the world for obscure tomes, magical artifacts and substances, hideous rare beasts, and other arcana.

A CP miniatures figure, with a scratchbuilt desk and accessories from WizKids Deep Cuts.  I also added a few details to his base, implying some tentacled horror imprisoned beneath his floor.

"Ah... nothing like a bottle and a new book.  It's a pity there's nobody
here to share them with... oh right, I hate company."

Emissary of Carnage

TROG
15mm

While GORT model automatons travel the universe promoting peace and understanding, TROG seeks only to visit planet after planet, spreading death, fire, and destruction.

TROG is a slightly modified Alternative Armies figure.  His spaceship is made of foamcore board, coated with Modpodge and dirt, with an LED inside.

DESPAIR, MEATBEINGS.

Thankfully, GORT arrives in time to save (some of) the planet...

Remember the Pigs

The Terraformers' Memorial
15mm scale

"The company put that statue up, you know.  Paragon Exoplanetary, the ones who had this world terraformed.  It's dangerous business, terraforming; hard to get workers willing to travel light-years just to scrape by on a toxic planet for decades.  They came up with the idea of making workers.  Genetically engineered pigs, with enhanced intelligence and opposable thumbs!   Picture that, eh?  Pigs, man!  Anyway, the pigs did the terraforming, god knows what they told them would happen after.  But just as this place became inhabitable... boom!  A mysterious disease.  They all died within weeks, just before they would have gained full First Settlers' rights here!  Way too convenient, if you ask me.  And then they built a god damn memorial to their 'selfless sacrifice'..."

 

These pigs were a Kinder Surprise toy that floated through the house for a while before I came up with the germ of this idea.  Then yesterday I felt the need for a quick, easy project so I finally did it!  Those poor pigs... never trust the company.

Urban protector

Foxy Detective
28mm

There's no pretending it goes away
With every step that you take, you pay your dues
And I ain't lying
You got to struggle to see the light
Cause someone's looking to steal your right to choose

Maybe her little sister got hooked on drugs... or her friend got shot.  Maybe she found out her man double-crossed her and was mixed up in some corrupt business.   Or maybe she just got tired of the good people in her neighborhood living in fear of the pimps and pushers.  Whatever it is, she's going to teach criminals a lesson... any way it takes!

 

 

The figure is Reaper's "Ebony Foxx, Modern Heroine", a lovely Bob Ridolfi sculpted homage to the "blaxploitation" genre of 70's action films.  As lovely as it is, I think the part of this I'm happiest with is the fire hydrant, which I made from scratch after poring over photos of New York City fire hydrants.

Inspired by, of course, the incomparable
Pam Grier, star of "Foxy Brown" and "Coffy".

Exobiology Major

First Contact

15mm scale

Dr. Phan watched in amazement as the roiling mass of spheroids churned this way and that, finally elevating itself to over two meters off the ground.  The individual globules seemed to grow and shrink smoothly, matter flowing between them in a faintly discernible phosphorescent process.  As she peered at the entity, it slowly arched forward, several large spheres taking up position an arm's length from her faceplate. Particles seemed to travel through its body, coalescing in a constellation of bright spots in the sphere closest to her. "Hello," she said, "Who are you?"

This piece was a "quick" (2 days) response to a friend; I asked for a prompt for my next piece and she offered "first interplanetary meeting".  The astronaut figure is from Ground Zero Games, the alien is my own design. I tried to come up with a truly unique concept for an intelligent alien: a sort of syncytial giant slime-mold-like entity that's not formless, but doesn't have a fixed skeleton or appendages either.  I wanted to hint at sensory structures that float free in the body and are recruited to whatever part is proximal to the object or direction of interest. 

On a technical level, the alien is just a collection of balls of greenstuff, stuck together as haphazardly as possible.  The blue life form on the ground is a mixture of blue paint, acrylic gel medium, and sand.  The photo backdrop was hastily painted today, I've never done that before!

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..."

Upcycled tribal terrain

So at work, we recently started receiving solvent bottles in paper fiber packing, replacing styrofoam.  Huge environmental improvement aside, this immediately gave me ideas.  I knew that something could be done with them.

I trimmed the top couple of inches off the "lid" piece:

... and voila!


Ikwen hogans
15 mm scale

Ikwen warriors confront corporate mercenaries on the home front.

Forest Ikwen often live in large huts or hogans, made from pulped and enzymatically-cemented plant material over a frame of megafauna endoskeletons or branches.  As the Ikwen come into conflict with offworld resource-seekers, their hogans often conceal entrances to escape tunnel networks and caches of weaponry.

Also just painted:


Wrecked Adder armored car
15 mm scale

Despite being cheap, fast, and agile, "Adder" combat vehicles are extremely vulnerable to virtually any mid-heavy weapons, from portable railguns to spider mines.

This mangled heap makes for a nice objective or knock-out marker, or just some interesting cover for squishy infantry.  From The Ion Age.