'Cause I'm a Rocket Man

Star Pilot
15 mm

Finished my spaceship pilot from 15mm.co.uk.  Not a great sculpt, TBH, but not difficult to paint.  I tried for a shiny gold NMM visor on the spherical lump that is his helmet, I'm not sure if the effect is so great, but oh well, still learning.

The stripes on the base are outright cheating.... I colour printed a web graphic and sliced it into thin strips, then glued them down and blended them in with a little grey paint around the edges. 

"Uh... I'll just use the other landing bay."

Eccles-cellent!

A couple of new projects:

Ninth Doctor
28 mm

Heresy's "Doctor Malcolm Ecclescake".  Great name, and so horribly British ;)  Again, the likeness is uncanny.  I gave him a "London Blitz" themed base, to tie in with one of my favorite episodes:

"Are you my mummy?"

Star Pilot
15 mm

A figure from 15mm.co.uk.  Just your classic space jockey, as found in every grimy fictional space port ever.

I wear a fez now, fezzes are cool!

The Eleventh Doctor
28 mm
 

Well, he's done!  I'm not entirely happy with the photos, but I do like my paint job (I'm allowed to do that, right?).  I didn't even try for that subtle tweedy texture on his coat, I just got on a roll last night and did the blending on it and that was that.  I would have highlighted the pants more, but IRL they're this super dyed denim that barely reflects any light.  His skin looks more yellowish here than it really is, I may try to reshoot these if time allows.

In other news, I've done some painting for Khurasan Miniatures, and I'll post those whenever I get the greenlight to show them to you.  A few new sculpts of amazing quality, with a hint of 90's TV nostalgia...

To CAPTCHA or not to CAPTCHA?

"Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart".  We all hate them:

 

 But they do work... sometimes a little too well.  A few times I've actually given up on trying to post comments on blogger because of a series of near-impossible captchas.

Anyway, I've had to thin out a bunch of spam comments from older posts on this blog recently, and while that was totes fun, bro, I'm wondering if I should give in and put authentication on my commenting the way most other blogs seem to.

What do you, my regular readers, think? 

Take me to your leader!

"Not another primitive planet..."
15 mm

Some little grey men figures from 15mm.co.uk.  Cute lil' invaders...

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.

This one goes to eleven!

The Eleventh Doctor
28 mm

"I wear a fez now.  Fezzes are cool"  (relevant "Doctor Who Confidential").  Miniature is the Nerdlord from Heresy.  A lot of people don't like this Doctor, but it's just been announced that they're killing regenerating him off, so there's that...

I'm not sure if the fez is too high on his head, it was awkward to sculpt on without mangling his existing hair in the process.  Feedback needed.

Star Grunt

Alien Trooper
15 mm

Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A quick fun paint job on a 15mm.co.uk figure, before I start work on a slightly more elaborate project.  Cute little guy, and my classic "green fatigues" scheme seemed very clever until I noticed that it's very similar to the way Spacejacker painted this guy.

---

Carcassone Scoring Markers
28 mm

I did another set of these for some Carcassone-playing friends.  Thanks to the (now-defunct) Mega Miniatures' impressive selection of medievals, they're a slightly different set of characters: Abbess, King, Constable, Warrior Lady, and Knight.

Science sidebar

So I recently saw this press release from the University of Michigan Health System, about an infant's life saved with a custom 3-D printed polymer splint implanted in her collapsing airway.

[Dr. Glen] Green and his colleague, Scott Hollister, Ph.D., professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering and associate professor of surgery at U-M, went right into action, obtaining emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to create and implant a tracheal splint for Kaiba made from a biopolymer called polycaprolactone.

On February 9, 2012, the specially-designed splint was placed in Kaiba at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. The splint was sewn around Kaiba’s airway to expand the bronchus and give it a skeleton to aid proper growth. Over about three years, the splint will be reabsorbed by the body. 

 Remember polycaprolactone?...

Apparently Instant Mold CAN do anything ;)

City 17 Survivors

Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance
15 mm

(This post has a soundtrack) 

Well, I finally finished my "dream miniatures" that I started back in March.  Painting these was a genuine pleasure, despite having to squeeze them in around the ever-increasing time constraints of "real life".

Not perfect likenesses, of course.  Gordon looks less nerdy and a bit more badass in opaque sunglasses, and I rather like darker-skinned Alyx.  I converted the boxy, generic gun that was on the original sculpt to at least resemble the Combine Pulse Rifle from the game - an incredibly potent weapon.  With more sculpting mojo, I might have tried for the Gravity Gun...  As for painting, I wanted figures that would really "pop", and so went with the high-contrast style that I'm getting better at (as well as contrasting Gordon's colorful armour with Alyx's subdued street clothes).

The base turned out well in my opinion, I didn't want anything too flashy that would distract from the figures.  But I think it's suitably thematic.

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."

Judgement Arrives

Mega City Judge
15 mm

A 15mm.co.uk figure, obviously inspired by a certain quasi-fascist comic book hero.  The pose is a bit static but the likeness itself is about as close as you're going to get without running afoul of THE LAW.

Something a little different

Carcassone Scoring Markers
28 mm

I thought our copy of the tile-laying strategy game Carcassone could do with an improvement - namely giving the players personas in the form of figures matching the colours of the "meeples" used as game pieces.  These will go on the scoring track rather than being used in the game itself:

So now when you play our game, you're not just picking a colour you like, you can play as a character... do you want to be the Abbess, the Burgher, the Warrior Lord, the Noblewoman, or the Warrior Lady?  My original plan was to do proper paint jobs with the respective colours as themes, but "ain't nobody got time for that" and this way I won't feel as bad when the paint gets all banged up :P (hopefully the thick gloss varnish will protect them somewhat)

Thief of Catan
28 mm

And another board-game-related project: a tabletop quality paint job on a nice Werner Klocke sculpt.  This figure is destined for a friend's copy of the addictive game Settlers of Catan, where one of the pieces is a thief who can steal players' resources.

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.

The Underground Menace

21st-century biological research revealed that naked mole rats possessed truly remarkable abilities:  resistance to pain, low-oxygen atmospheres and ionizing radiation, as well as the effects of cancer and aging.  However, centuries passed before the mechanisms behind these were fully understood, and the necessary technology available to transfer these advantages to genetically engineered human beings.

Astr-O-Myne Corporation's interest in exploiting the mineral riches of newly-explored extrasolar planets conveniently coincided with these advances.  Robots were fine for chewing through relatively homogenous space rocks.  But for planetary mining, Astr-O-Myne required a new and exceptionally hardy breed of human workers.  Arrangements were made with certain Terran governments wishing to reduce crowded prison conditions, and the first genetic experiments were a spectacular success.  The new miners were stronger, tougher, and instinctively knew their way around tunnel networks.  And best of all, they had little choice in the matter: aside from their lifetime contracts with the company, the gene transfer resulted in a pallid, warty appearance that set them apart from normal human society.

"Mole Men"
15 mm

 

It was only a matter of time, however, before these underground super-men and women felt their working conditions had become intolerable, and decided to throw off their corporate shackles...

Insurrectionist miners emerge from a reconnaissance tunnel to search a company outpost.

I've been working on these for a while, and figured I'd finish them up before I really got going on my Half-Life figures.  These miniatures are "Titan Scouts" from Rebel minis.  The papercraft buildings are "IKubes" and a PODS container, downloadable for free from Topo Solitario papercraft.


(Obligatory link to Spacejacker's different take on the same figures)

Black Mesa Survivor

Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance
15 mm

"So Gordon, nice day huh?"
"..."

So I finally decided to tackle these two figures, Khurasan's "Dave Rimmer and Desiree Kim", pretty decent proxies for the protagonist of Half-Life 2 and his surprisingly resilient NPC sidekick.  It's a bit intimidating.  They're some of the most amazing miniature sculpts I've ever seen, in ANY scale let alone 15 mm!  The incredible paint job (edit: by Jen Haley, so yeah) posted on Khurasan's website doesn't help... O_O

Anyway, I hope my results are even half as good... I did try to make a cool base for them, matching the game's post-invasion wasteland atmosphere.  This was done mostly with Instant Mold: taking a texture impression of a rough stone and dabbing the IM against the putty base until it looked irregular enough.  The half-buried drum and tires were duplicated from some bitz using IM, and pressed into the base material.  It doesn't perfectly match my headcrabs, but it's close enough and looks good IMO.

Half-Life 2 sculpt and paint

Headcrabs
15 mm scale

I quickly made these and painted them over the last day or so as a fun, low-pressure project.    Headcrabs are the main "small and annoying" foe in the Half-Life games.  They only do a little damage to the player, but poor NPC's attacked by them are turned into inhuman "headcrab zombies" that are much more dangerous:

These will tie in nicely whenever I get to painting Khurasan's not-Half-Life-2 figures "Dave Rimmer and Desiree Kim".  I've already converted Dave's weapon to look more like one of the game models (the Overwatch pulse rifle):

"Staging" miniature photography

I've been envying certain bloggers' terrain collections for a while.  Not because I want it for gaming, but because with the right set-up,  it can produce some really impressive photos of miniatures that "bring them to life" as it were.  Some good examples from some of my favorite painters:

Yeaaaaaah, pretty nice.  I don't have nearly the time to make this kind of thing, or the space to display it, but some kind of thematic backgrounds might be an improvement over the blue-white gradient or simple coloured paper I use now.

The other day I found a page with a pretty amazing collection of  free Star Wars-themed downloadable paper terrain, that I thought might do the trick and be simple to use. I printed some off, and quickly whipped up this super-basic backdrop:

Your typical Death Star corridor, nothing to write home about.  But even this produces some fun photos:

"Only a master of evil, Darth!"

Trying something a little more elaborate:

"Hey, what's HE doing here?"

Wow, right out of the movies!  OK, maybe not exactly, but I like it.  And it gives the figures a bit more "story" or context, which any even halfway-decent sculpt should already be trying to evoke.  Also, while it's not very creative on my part, I could print these at different scales to display 15 or 28mm minis.

A Girl and her Dog

Sarah Jane Smith and K-9
28 mm

Finally done!  I'm pretty happy with this piece - not action-packed, not dramatic, just a couple of characters I like, together.  Sarah Jane Smith was a fun companion to my favorite Fourth Doctor, as well as his predecessor, and she was involved in some of the Fourth's coolest early adventures.

The eyes look pretty bad in this shot, for some reason...

I was really happy when she was brought back to be in an episode with the Tenth Doctor, as well as having her own show (aimed at teens, admittedly, but it doesn't suck).  Sadly, actress Elizabeth Sladen passed away in 2011, so Sarah Jane will never return.

"Again, K-9?  It's a good thing I brought bags."

Award Ceremony

This is an idea I've had for a while.  Looking back (8 years!) on my blog, I've had a number of visitors over the years, as usual coming and going over time.  But I have to say, there's one guy who just keeps coming back , since March 2006 in fact.

So, javi, this award is for you, my most loyal reader :)

It's easy to forget that the things we do online do have impact, positive or negative, on actual people in the real world.  So to everyone who visits here, thanks for reading!  And for those who leave comments, they're always appreciated.