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D&D

Lingering Horde

This will be my last horde for a while. I am getting a little burnt out and/or my detail brush has become too frazzled. But the reason i did this last batch was i saw that i had missed a final Drider. My party is currently in the Underdark facing Driders and last time i had to supplement with some Centaurs, so having another actual Drider figure will help. One weird thing is that you'll notice from a previous batch that the female Driders are much larger than the males. I originally thought that whoever at Reaper was sculpting these miniatures decided that there would be some sexual dimorphism amongst the Driders (in D&D, there actually are no female Driders). But then i found this miniature, and it is a female, but she's the same size as the male Driders. So i don't know what's going on. Like the other females, though, this one was barechested, so i had to paint a sports bra on her. I didn't have to shave any nipples, though.

Since i was painting the Drider, i also picked out a nice looking Drow elf.

And some others just to round out the set, including this horrific slime monsters with its gibbering mouths and a skeleton in its belly.

A standard armored guy...

...who does have a cool shield. Although the hidebound leather and monster teeth is an odd fit for a guy that is otherwise wearing full metal armor. I guess when you find a +3 Shield of Fire Resistance in a dungeon, you pick it up even if it doesn't match your outfit.

Moving on, here's a dwarf:

And a gnome (in D&D, dwarves can't use magic, so this short wizard looking guy must be a gnome):

And lastly, another one of these humanoid demon characters. I painted a male fighter in the previous batch and a female sorceress a little earlier. You'll again notice that the male is wearing a lot more clothing than the ladies. I guess that's partially due to the fact that these demonkin or whatever they are seem to have character classes. We have the sorceress, the fighter, and this one's pretty clearly a thief. I wonder if Reaper had in mind some game system where demonkin are a playable race.


By fnord12 | January 29, 2015, 5:45 PM | D&D | Link



Mooooooar Horde

The Horde keeps rolling in. I keep telling myself it's the last batch for now, but then i pick out a few more (and i've already got another batch in progress after this).

Nothing too special about these first two. I used the guy on the left as a prototype for the wash that i wanted to use on the demon below. I did leave his short shorts bright orange, because i read too many superhero comics.

This next one is the reason why i decided to do another batch. The next adventure coming up features a magic fountain, and lo and behold look what i found in the box. I don't normally use the Brush-on Sealer that came with my paint set, because it makes the figures look too glossy, but i did use it on the water in the fountain to make it look more wet (i also occasionally use it on the eyes of bigger creatures for the same reason).

This next guy has a lot going on. First of all, he's a demon-man in armor, including on the tip of his tail. I therefore colored him the same as the demon sorceress from a previous batch, but that does raise a double standard regarding clothing (which is not surprising for these Bones figures). Second of all, he had a really jagged sword that looked like a lightning bolt to me, so i painted it bright yellow.

He's also got a cool shield.

And finally, he is wearing a wolf on his back. Notice the wolf's arms draping over his tail.

Next up are two bigger figures. First that demon i mentioned earlier. I was a little unsure if that fireball in his hand was going to work out but it seems to be ok.

Then this awesome giant skeleton. He's so huge he uses a tombstone that's as big as a regular miniature as the head of his hammer. He's also got all sorts of little details on him, like wooden planks and such to keep his body together, and (not shown) a sword sticking out of his side.

Finally, for scale, here's the whole group together. The picture got photobombed by C'thulu, the ham.


By fnord12 | January 26, 2015, 11:48 AM | D&D | Comments (1)| Link



Hording away old age

Someone told me that if i wasn't so old, i would have finished these Bones miniatures already. So at great expense to my career, family, and health, i've been pressing on. Here's the latest batch.

This group included an easy to paint but cool looking Stone Golem, and a Skeleton Knight where i decided to paint the head as metallic instead of bone. Maybe i'll introduce a villain into my campaign called the Silver Skull.

My last batch had a pirate in it, so i fished out the pirate figure that came with the Bones set, even though she's a Sexy Pirate that i had to denudify a bit. I wanted to paint that wizard figure in a Modred the Mystic color scheme but not enough of his interior clothes are showing, so i'll see if i can do that with a different figure. I think the Ali Baba and the thief both came out pretty cool.

Some generic creatures on the right, all repeats of figures i've painted in previous batches, but the point is to have a horde of them. For several of these figures i tried something new with the wash technique. Technically to make a wash you should just water down a color that is darker than your base coat and then brush that over the mini, and the darker paint will find its way to the crevices. But i can never get it to work right. But i do have two pre-made washes, a Black Wash and a "Flesh" Wash. And i think there is something in them more than just watered down black and "flesh" paint. Some kind of additional chemical that makes them work better as a wash. So for this set of minis, i tried mixing the black wash into my diluted colors, and it worked better. On the the armored figure above, i painted him a light grey and then mixed some dark blue with the black wash, and it worked pretty well. I did the same thing in green for "Modred" and in blue for the sorceress in the top picture. Of course you can't see any of it in these pictures even though i did break them down into smaller groups instead of taking one giant group picture.


By fnord12 | January 22, 2015, 1:18 PM | D&D | Comments (4)| Link



Horde Attack

As Penny Arcade says, some of us have overkicked and are buried in mounds of plastic, but i tried to paint my way out of it a bit this past month.

Min always complains that the pictures of my miniatures are too small to show any detail. That's partially due to me not wanting to show off (i.e. trying to hide) my paint jobs, and partially because the minis are pretty small and hard to get good pictures of. But especially since this batch was a large one, i broke them down into smaller groups of pictures, which will hopefully show off / not hide the detail. They're still kind of blurry.

We start with some basic wizards and warriors. I liked the flaming sword guy and went with an unusual color for his armor. The pirate figure is not a Bones; he's an extra piece from a Kickstarter that a friend gave me.

These elves are not Bones either. They are metal miniatures. I originally bought them wanting to add some female Drow elves to my collection, thinking i could paint some regular female elves as Drow, but as i started getting ready to paint them and looked at them more closely, i noticed that one was actually a dude, and then another was actually a dude, and really their woodland themed armor didn't really work as Drow after all, so i painted them as regular elves.

Some goblin type creatures. Since i already have a lot of standard green colored goblins, i went with blue skin for these.

This guy is pretty funny: the over-encumbered adventurer. Half my party should really look like this. I tried to capture him from multiple angles to show off the various stuff he is carrying. His face kind of reminded me of Terry Gilliam's squire from Monty Python & the Holy Grail, so i let the eyes remain a bit bug-eyed when they came out that way.

Mimics are one of the meaner creatures that a DM can foist on their players: a creature that disguises itself as a treasure chest until an unwitting character sticks its head in to see what's inside. And of course demon sorceresses can be pretty mean, too. So i balanced things out by including a bartender.

I actually wanted the giant in my last batch to be a Fire Giant, but her armor and interesting mask convinced me she was really more of a woodland giant, so this one gets to be the Fire Giant. I have no idea what the other thing in this picture is. Min said it was maybe an egg in a nest, so i kind of painted it that way, but i think it'll just be some sort of dungeon creeper horror.

These aren't Bones. A while back i bought a cheapo set of plastic minis because it included a really classic looking D&D Troll (seen here) at a time when TSR/Wizards/Whatever isn't making that kind of troll anymore. These are the other minis from that set. After looking at them for a while, i realized the larger creatures are Apes as in from The Planet Of, so i tried to go with that look. Love their shields. The shorter guys will be used as generic orcs or similar.

Two wolf-like creatures. The one on the left is not a Bones. It's an official D&D miniature of a krenshar, a pretty weird thing. The one on the right is a Bones and "normal" Dire Wolf.

Finally, a big group shot of everything i painted during my semi-break from my comic timeline project, and this one can be clicked to full-size:


By fnord12 | January 14, 2015, 3:10 PM | D&D | Comments (2)| Link



Recap 63

Chunneling Deeper into the Underdark


By min | January 13, 2015, 10:58 AM | D&D | Link



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