Giant Spider

Working on more minis for my 15mm fantasy project. Here's a couple of pics of a Giant Spider from Megaminis. Nice big sculpt, one of those really useful figures that works any scale and lots of genres.

new Ettin pics

The picture on the last post was terrible, can't seem to take any decent pics! Tried a different approach with some floor tiles as a background. Worked a lot better than the white background of the previous pic.

...and a pic with a couple of  blurry 15mm adventures for scale :)

painted Ettin

Here's the paint job I did on the Ettin conversion. Skin ended up more green than I planned but pretty happy with the colour, a mix of vallejo charred brown and scury green.

28mm Ogre = 15mm Ettin

That damn'd scale creep means alot of the old pre-slotta 28's are too small by todays standards. This superb old Ral Partha 28mm two-headed ogre measures in around 32mm's to the eyes. Wouldn't be hard to find a standard human figure this size these days! Still this will be perfect for an ad&d Ettin in 15mm scale. The monster manual had these at 13' and over so the figure is perfect size wise. It looks great along side a 15mm character figure!

The right hand originally had no weapon so I added a spear which I'll paint up as a crude, rusted iron javelin. This was just a case of drilling through the clenched fist and gluing some brass rod  in place which was given a rough texture with some green stuff.

The faces were really nice on the model, was a bit reluctant to change them but I wanted to give him a proper 1st ed look. The monster manual describes how these look alot like orcs and those being the pig-faced variety I added some large piggy snouts to the heads.

I'm planning on painting this the same colour as the description of orcs so it'll have dark greeny brown skin with the snoutsand ears being a "pinkish". Going to be funny looking but hopfully will have the feel of the illustration from the old MM.

Threshold team for Strange Aeons

Some pics of my two man Threshold team for Strange Aeons. I thought it would be cool to have a character with a Long Bow from the weapons list in Shocking Tales #1 and from this developed the character Nagaski Jones. Dr Jones is a converted Black Hat samurai and Mr Boone is a Copplestone Hillybilly.

Character: Dr Nagasaki Jones

Eccentric Professor of Archeology and Folklore, dedicated practitioner of both Kendo and Kyudo, Dr Jones never enters the field without his antique samurai armour, katana and bow.
Skills: Command, Parry
Equipment: Katana (Civil War Saber), Long Bow, Metal Point Arrows, Light Armour

Agent: Mr Clement Boone

Appalachian mountain man Clem was a loner who came to the attention of the Threshold when a local newspaper reported a story about Clems bizarre ravings about "flying space crabs" which he said had been harrassing him for months during the winter of 1929. Clem is currently the only member of Threshold to have actual first hand knowledge of the mysterious alien race Mi-go.

Skills: Dex increase
Equipment: Bolt action rifle, Hollow point bullets, Wood axe (meat cleaver).

A couple of Lurkers....

Finished off a couple of figures for Strange Aeons over the weekend.An Artizan cult leader and a resin 1920's zombie from Uncle Mike's range.

Formless Thing...

Here are some pics of a Formless Thing I painted up for Strange Aeons. I originally painted and based this model for last years Strange Aeons Brush-off but wasn't happy with the base so removed it and did a little repainting as well as attaching a couple of extra tentacles! The purple and pink colour scheme was inspired by one of these painted by Fairoaks and posted over on LAF.

I've only played against this creature once and it totally tore the Threshold team apart! I can't wait for the chance to take the thing on again with a new team I've assembled... bring it on!

Painting WIP

Here's a pic of some figures I've been working on. Hoping to get some time to finish them off this weekend . Except the clown (waiting for varnishing) the figures will be used for some Strange Aeons games. Hoping to get some larger lurkers finished over the weekend too.

Bubo the Clown

Been working on painting this guy up. Took some test pics pre varnishing. I thought it would be interesting to paint  the warty lumps a darker colour than the skin. It turned out to be tricky to do and seemed to take ages, still clown pants are always fun to paint.

A group shot with the other two clowns.

Shoggoth....

Here's some pictures of painted shoggoths, the latest model I've sculpted for my Dark Foam range. Almost all of the shoggoths previously sculpted were done so low and flat so for this one I went for a taller more blob like version. The thing with sculpting one of these is you've just got to pick a shape and go for it because of the amorphous nature of the creature, described as constantly changing form with the green bubble-like eyes forming and unforming constantly. Any sculpt of a shoggoth ends up being a like a snapshot of the thing. Like the old Grenadier and Rafm shoggoths I went for toothless "mouths" mere pukered holes. In the story the creature came from it was not a host of toothy jaws the sent someone insane but from the suggestion that the thing could develop a rudimenty form of speech.

The model itself is a resin casting. Here's a pictures of my painted version of the basic model.

Now Lovecraft had a thing about tentacles so it would be poor form not to give one of these at least a few :)
Here's a second models with three tentacles from my Son of Yog-Sothoth kit.

I painted the models with Vallejo paints. Basic method was to drybrush the whole thing in progessively lighter shades of green. A little red mixed with green was painted around the mouths then the whole this was washed with thinned black acrylic. I kept applying wahes until the body was suitably dark. Once that was done the eyes were picked out with a progression of mutation, sick, escorpena and livery green. the the whole thing was given multiple coats of gloss varnish.

Finally a couple of pics of the shoggoths next to a figure for scale. "Tekeli-li Tekeli-li"

Painting set-up

For years I used old paint pots to hold figures whilst painting but occassionally this lead to access issues with some parts of the figure because the top of the paint pot was often larger than the base of the figure. Then last year I started using a different method inspired by one on the DnD Lead site.... here.  The guy over there was using nails as miniature holders but I ended up using screws instead of nails. Basically by supergluing some coins to the top of a screw you can create a great figure holder. The screw thread gives good grip when handling the figure holder, nice and non-slip!

A cardboard box with holes in will hold many of these in place. This is where the figures go when priming and between painting. By giving the screw a spin when placing them in the holes they bite into the cardboard staying secure.

The way the figure holders grip becomes really useful when priming multiple figures. The whole box can be turned upside down to prime the underside areas without the figures dropping off so many figures can be primed quickly at the same time. As well as turning the box while priming the individual figures can be turned in the hole, a quick way of getting a even coat of primer on lots of figures.

Now just finding some time to paint them.... ;)