Future Freelancers

Devo Ranks, Cyberist

28mm

I saw this amazing cyberpunk hacker sculpt online a couple of times, and just had to have it!  It was surprisingly hard to get, but shipping from the US was more than worth it.  It's from Reaper's new Bones USA line, which are cast in extraordinary detail from some kind of resin-plastic mix.  Really quite amazing!

Since the sculpt is quite androgynous, I painted Devo up to mark International Non-Binary People's Day on July 14.  The jacket is inspired by modern Japanese street fashion.

 

Jeb Underscore, free agent

28 mm 

 

Rain or shine, Jeb always gets the job done.  He's not a bad guy, mind you, he's got standards.  Professional like.  Bodyguarding, debt collection, bounty hunting, light to medium larceny, that sort of thing.  If you pay him to babysit, he'll gladly play with your kids for a few hours and shoot anyone who tries to hurt them.  Accompanying him on most jobs is Boo, his pet Denebian devil, all teeth and claws and very protective of his owner.

Jeb is a Mark Copplestone sculpt from North Star Military Figures

 

"I won't lie, I prefer shine."

Hakuna Matata!

Timon and Pumbaa

28mm scale

It means no worries
For the rest of your days
Yeah, sing it, kid!
It's our problem-free philosophy
Hakuna Matata!

 

 

 

Just a fun idea I've been wanting to put together for a while... Pumbaa is a Bears Head Miniature, Timon is from the North Star Africa line.

Sellsword and Scamper

Harry Fell and Chiseltooth
15 mm

 

"Fell, right? I heard you quested with Sir Roderick to defeat the Blood Baron of Skull Keep!"

"Defeated, all right, I struck the killing blow myself!  I'm actually wearing his armour. Heh heh... I wasn't risking my hide except for treasure. And that's where I found Chiseltooth here.  Good fighter he is, and smarter than any dog.  Now... even a Blood Baron's spoils don't last forever, so if you've a mind to retain me, best be saying something.  And I'll trouble you for another ale, too."

I'm not sure who makes these figures, I received them in a swap from my Insta buddy winnipegmichael, along with a bunch of other neat 15mm stuff (like these Alternative Armies Tengu he painted).

"Oh you want to eat crow, huh?  Sic em, Chiseltooth!"

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:

Interstellar Pigs

Silt pigs of Kwiell
15mm scale

 

The Ikwen of Kwiell were first assumed to be, like Terran hunter-gatherers, a stone-age society.  But the first scientists to discreetly observe them were shocked to discover they possessed a wide variety of metal tools and ornaments, without any apparent mining activity.  It turned out the answer to this riddle was their domestication of "silt pigs", a species of humble grazing creatures.

Silt pigs eat vegetation, but a major part of their diet is a constant earthworm-like processing of rich mud, ingested through their extensible snout.  Mud passes through their elaborate gut, emerging as silty casings.  But periodically, the pigs expel a dense, dark-colored stool the Ikwen call the "fire pellet".  This stool contains a high concentration of bio-accumulated metal oxides.  The Ikwen smelt these in small forges to produce substantial quantities of copper, tin, and iron.  

These silt pigs have been grazing on soil rich in copper, hence the greenish hue of their dorsal spines.  Their tender carries a bioluminescent staff, and waves a coloured cloth to signal back to their village.

The silt pigs and their tender are from Loud Ninja Games via Alternative Armies.

An Ikwen herder, with their signature bioluminescent staff, checks
on silt pigs grazing in an estuary near a large fungal dome.

Water of Life

Moisture vaporators
28mm scale

Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink

Not an easy life, farming on a desert planet.  In fact, there's really nothing to farm.  A few hardy souls make a living at it though, running vaporators that concentrate water out of the air and pump it to underground cisterns.  On such an arid world, that earns enough cash to own a cozy home and maybe even send a kid to the Academy...

These great laser cut MDF models are from Multiverse Gaming.  

On a remote farmstead, a duel to the death: bounty hunter vs. mystic warrior.

The New Mutants

Wasteland mutants
15mm

Nothin' left is sacred
So I've changed my point of view
You're the ugliest thing I've ever seen
And I think I love you

Ah, the apocalypse.  Mushroom clouds, fallout poisoning the air and land.  Maybe the disaster wasn't a nuclear war, and yet the world is still laid waste, survivors left to wander a bitter Earth seeking whatever remnants will help them survive one more day.  Crumbling reactors and chemical factories have disgorged tons of teratogenic waste; adults manifest tumours and growths, while new babies emerge with bizarre and horrific mutations.  In this new world, does the term "human" retain any meaning... or value?

This mutant gang and the Wasteland Witch (below) are Loud Ninja Games figures sculpted by Eli Arndt.

Raiders attack the witch's hovel!  The mutants, while outgunned,
are inhumanly tough and quick... who will prevail?

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."

Brutally Enhanced

Grafted nightmare
28 mm

There's no shortage of possibilities in artificial body modification.  Many mods are sleek, streamlined or even invisible, greatly augmenting their wearers' abilities without even changing their clothing size.  But for others, the visibility is intentional: bulging vat-grown muscle tissue, extra or extended limbs, and bulky cybernetics.  The most extreme mods go beyond even the minimal legal restrictions, and must be sought from overseas black clinics, or just a medical school dropout operating in a dirty garage with stolen tools.  The results are often horrific: barely-human monstrosities driven by social disengagement, distorted self-image, and violence...

This miniature is a real mystery! I received it in a swap many years ago, and have no idea who made it or what exactly it's supposed to be.  It kind of has shades of "Weapon X" from Marvel comics, and "Adam" from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

"Stay back... This guy's one of those Shinjuku jobs..."

 

Dark Troopers

Viridian Marines
28 mm

I got no face, no name, I'm just a killing machine

These sinister soldiers, Viridian Colonial Marines from Scotia Grendel, have been sitting in my lead pile for a LONG time (so long that I'm very surprised they're still in production).  These sure aren't my best paint jobs, but I decided it was time to get them done.  I always imagined them resembling the horrible fascist troopers in the anime "Jin-Roh", and that's definitely the look here.

I tried a variant of gently drybrushing with a fairly wet brush to speed-paint them, but they definitely turned out looking... drybrushed.  As chalky as a glass of metamucil.  Oh well.

"Halt!  Who are you?  You're in the wrong place, citizen..."

The Dodge Dart of Cthulhu

The Dukes of Al-Hazred
15mm scale

Yig Snake Daddy we come lookin' for you
We got a bored-out Chevy and a twelve pack of brew
Well we're a right-miffed party and it's easy to see
We've got a one-way ticket to the pit of insanity...

With a roar of supercharged pistons and a hazy contrail of eldritch energy, this rune-covered hot rod peels down the strip, its unspeakable riders cruising for... what exactly?  Well, it's probably better to just stay well out of their way.

Vanity plates, $300 well spent!

This is a Hot Wheels '68 Dodge Dart (I couldn't find a Dodge Charger) with an engine lifted from another car.  The riders are Khurasan cultist heads with fairly crudely sculpted bodies by me.  Worked surprisingly well...

I wish I could take credit for the titular pun on this one, but this car was squarely inspired by the album cover of "The Dukes of Alhazred", from the amazing Lovecraftian band The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets.  Ever wanted a song about shoggoths, Erich Zann, or the Dunwich Horror?  The Boston Molasses flood?  Coelocanths?  They gotchu, fam.

"Get in loser, we're wgah'nagl fhtagn!"

We Can do It!

Wanda the Welder
28mm

All the day long, whether rain or shine,
She's a part of the assembly line.

"I always tell them how long it will ACTUALLY take to fix up their pile of flying trash... these space cowboys think they can fly in here with life support offline, hull plates falling off, and the engine mounts cracked, and be up in the air again in a day.  Well... it doesn't work that way.  And in business, it never pays to make promises I can't keep".

This great WizKids Starfinder plastic figure is half of a blister pack called "Human Mechanics".  I really like how perfectly greasy and working-class she looks, as well as the fact that the character is completely non-combatant... not all that common.  Not even a holster.

It's an extremely detailed sculpt, but honestly not very crisp.  I had to emphasize details with some strong contrast... which fortunately is my style anyway.  And I didn't get all the mold lines, but oh well.  This line seems to fit in nicely with the Stargrave minis I've been painting recently; it's thinner and more gracile but not enough to appear out of scale.

"I don't normally work on bots, but I'll see what I can do to help you."

Treasure planeteer

Captain Karzen Alessandro
28mm

Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free, you are a pirate!

The right of salvage falls to any spacers who find a wrecked ship with no survivors.  But some are not above bending that condition, including the part about it being wrecked in the first place...  Karzen is a veteran captain who has survived numerous close quarters shootouts, explosions, and decompressions, though not without horrendous scars.  His cybernetically-attached plasma blaster is a brutal but effective weapon, and he never misses.

 This is a Stargrave figure from North Star Military Figures.

 

"Trying to poach my salvage, space squid?  I stole it fair and square!"

A nose for history

Quintorius Kand, field historian

28mm scale

They say an elephant never forgets.  But Quintorius can never seem to recall where his copy of Bulrush's "Lore of the Known Realms" is.  Thankfully, he always has a backup, "Verified Explorations and Accounts" by Ning...

 

This figure is actually a character from "Magic: The Gathering", appearing on a number of cards.  I didn't even know there was an MTG miniature line until I found this guy hiding among the Nolzur's figures at my local store.  Anyway I really like this unarmed, non-aggressive figure; according to the fluff Quintorius is a mage-scholar who explores ancient ruins to discover the history of his people, the Loxodons.

"The long-lost Temple of Contemplation... where to start?"