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.... ;)

Dead flesh!!

Zombies tend to get painted one of three colours, blue, green or some kind of  fleshy colour. Digging out some fantasy figures yesterday reminded me how I was always went for the blue flesh with my zombies. That wasn't a surprise as such,  Romero's Dawn of the Dead with its blue faced Z's was burnt in to my conciousness in the days of  video nasty hysteria. Seeing those old blue skinned figures did make me realise just how green my zombies had gotten of late. Thing is there was never a concious decision to go green, it just happened!

Here are some old blue skinned fantasy zombies. I don't reckon there's a logical reason for flesh to turn such a blue colour but it always looks suitably pale and undead... maybe the blue is something to do with the necromantic magic used to create them.

I remember giving the flesh on some of these figures an orange glaze, which being the colour opposite to blue, greyed the flesh a little.

Some old citadels... I think one of these was from the AD&D range.

The paint job of those figures must be around 10 years old, if not more. I think these were one of the first groups of figures were I stopped using slotta bases and went back to how I based pre-slotta

Anyway as I mentioned earlier all these blue zombies made me realise how green my Z's had gotten recently.... so last night I took a couple of part painted boss zombies I had on the work bench and slapped on some blue toned flesh to see how they compared with my recent green ones!

As odd as this may sound this was the first time I'd painted under artificial light for maybe 15.... 20 years...

Anyway looking at them this morning I'm liking the way these turned out. Sort of look a bit more realistic which in turn makes them more creepy maybe. Actually they ended up being not so blue in the end... certainly not as blue as the old fantasy figs.

On reflection the females Z's breasts look a bit odd, some kind of extreme tan line effect :) but overall a nice dead colour on both of them. The colours used were a dusty peach ( this was an Anita's brand fleshy colour for no other reason than it was on the desk!) and vallejo ultramarine blue. So the shading was done with these two colours alone. Then I used black, green and blue ink to apply really thin glazes to give the skin a mottled look, and dirty it up a bit also.

So here's the taste test so to speak! Last nights' Z's next to some recent greeny ones.

The pic reminds me to mention the little conversion work... adding hair to the male and more lumpy bits to the female here and there!!

Well what's left to say? Here's a group shot of the zombies. Thanks for reading!!!

painted Space Gray

For a long time a picture of this figure was on the tengu site primed but unpainted. Can't remember why he never got painted with the others. Painting him up was one of those things I kept meaning to do but never quite got round to, until the other day. Went for the orange look for this fellow's suit using Vallejo Bronzed Flesh.

Someone on a forum asked the question why would Greys be wearing spacesuits? Good question! Here's a group photo of the current figures from the range. I'll have some new Greys with my next batch of figures, something I'm looking forward to since I'll then be able to field a skirmish force.

I'm thinking of making a change to the current UX01 pack by removing the blue space-suited fellow and adding another standard Grey Alien. Could make the pack more useful. The suited Grey will be available separately like the others.

Boss Zombies

Finally got a re-stock of Boss Zombies this morning. Been a while since these were available so it's good to have them back in the shop. Here are some pics of the set painted by Vesa Makela.

LNOE plastic zombies

At this years Gauntlet event, run by Deeside Defenders,  I picked up a copy of the Last Night on Earth boardgame. I'd known about the game for a while and a big draw for me was all the figures that come with it, 8 survivors and 14 zombies in 3 poses. Here's some pics of the zombies I ended up painting and converting.

The first thing that I noticed about the figures was how bendy they were. These are real soft plastic. Most noticable around the ankles of the figures, very flexy. Now this is a good thing in terms of the figures as un-painted game pieces. You could probably tread on one of these figures and it would spring back into shape, very durable in that respect,  but the flex could cause problems if trying to paint them. Soft plastic can be really tricky to get paint to adhere to, and the flex in the plastic can cause the paint job to crack. Having had some revell 1/72 soft plastics resist every attempt at getting paint to stick to them I didn't hold out much hope.


Still, I'd seen enough decent paintjobs over on Boardgame Geeks for me to do a test on one of the figures to see how durable the paint job was. Just a quick simple job, I also used this figure to try out some blood techniques. As it turned out the paint went on really well.

Because I re-based the figures on coins, to match my metal figures, I tried drilling up into the legs and gluing some wire in place. This really strenghtened the figure, taking away most of the flex. I ended up doing this on the other six figures I plan to paint. Here is the painted figures with the 3 unpainted zombie poses, a the lower profile coin base.

Because there are only 3 poses there is limited variation... but this is where the soft plastic of the figures is a real bonus. The figures are so easy to cut and drill conversions take minutes. I played around with these over the course of a week, and few minutes here and there. I got 6 done and called it a day. The remaining 7 zombies I'll leave unpainted. Here are the six conversions.

These two had an right arm swap and one of the heads was repositioned with bit of wire. Gave the bare-chested guy a t-shirt with some green stuff.

Next two was a torso swap, this worked really well. Repositioned the arms. The zombie with the green body and brown legs is probably my favorite of the conversions.

There is less conversion options with the female since she's the only Z chick, so it was a case of re-positioning arms and twisting the torso around on one of them.... (looks like I need to put a bit more putty on one of the arms..)

All in all in was fun playing around with these, especially since they're so easy to cut and convert... not sure when I'll get a chance to paint them though....