Just Boosting Post Count - Nothing to See Here...

 Here are some quick quickies - Reaper Bones "Wall of Fire" spell effects. I mostly put them together with "Paleo Diet - Eat or Be Eaten" in mind, but could be used for anything. 

Heheheheheh, Fire! FIRE!

Simple enough, really - slap translucent flame on 40mm wooden disks that I've had forever, flock, partially paint flock black, attempt OSL and DONE. Might get a pack or two more (three per $5 pack - decent enough) depending on how pyromanic the players with torches get.

More Turd Polishing

 Easy stuff this time. 

To start - I really like Reaper Miniatures and their crazy-ass offerings, but I never really could get behind their Bones line. For sure, the material has improved to the point that it little resembles the bendy unworkable crap that it once was, but it still has issues that annoy the hell out of me - not being able to use spray primer/sealer on them being a big one. Warped spears, swords, etc. being a close second.

Bless their hearts though; Reaper has put a LOT of effort in promoting the Bones line, even resorting to giving them away by the handful (especially true of the early white ones). Swag bags, paint-n-take tables, you name it. 

Naturally, this lands me with miniatures that I'd never buy and have no idea what to do with them. Here, that is realized in the following two miniatures, a couple of sea hag types (the tall one has a name like Mags Grindylow or summat). These sat in a parts box for a loooong time until I started reading Robert Howard's original Conan stories. I always loved that a lot of his supranational entities were often vague shadows, sometimes with animalistic characteristics (the critters in "The Phoenix on the Sword" and "The Scarlet Citadel" are a little like this).

Hey, says I - rather than try to paint these bendy, low detail bits of nonsense with a good paint job, why not paint them black with a couple indifferent drybrushings and call it a day? And if I feel REALLY frisky, I can use OSL on their glowing eyes...

Something something bad photos

I probably did the most work on prep with these things - attempt to remove mold lines, base them and (in the case of Mags), cut off the S-shaped trident pole and affix it directly to her arm, rather than use her low-detail empty fist. Some first time attempts at OSL for the eyes (Mags was the second attempt and far better), and that's it. Probably 30 minutes paint time each, blindingly fast for me.

Boring butts

Hah, yeah, bad pics again. These are a lot darker in reality than here. But now I have a couple shadowy minions for any game I care to use them in. Not bad for a couple of hopeless throwaway-level figures!

Big Booby Ballista Batallion

(Or, why you should always make sure your pictures don't suck before you pack up the miniatures.)

As life feels to be on a more even keel these days, I have been making more time for hobby work. A couple months ago, I reached out to Jacob at Ral Partha Legacy to see if he needed any miniatures painted for their website. As it turned out, he did and had quite a list of miniatures to choose from. One of the first sets to catch my eye (of course) was the Amazon ballista and crew. I say "of course" because these ladies (sculpted by Tom Meier) are quite noticeable due to their exaggerated female proportions (they have big boobs for the thickies in back).

And I do mean exaggerated.

Odd really - I bought a blister pack of Amazons from the OG Ral Partha a lifetime ago, and they had very athletic (downright skinny) forms, and were nude (these were also sculpted by Meier). Somewhere along the line, someone looked at these and said, "no, there proportions will not do. Tom, get the sculpting putty out - you're putting in overtime."

Originals on the left, Heroic Scale on the right.

SOMEone's got a fetish. Not complaining, mind you, just pointing it out.

As RP Legacy gives you copies of the miniatures you paint upon successful completion, this is a really good deal. I mostly wanted the two ballistae that come with the 6 crewwomen, but I will certainly find a place for the ladies themselves - probably in a Dragon Rampant army.

Thanks to my weird schedule, extra shifts and the hell of being on call often, it took me about 1 1/2 months to finish them. They really don't look all that bad either, even after a near-disastrous experiment with bronze armor. Couldn't do the eyes though - Meier miniatures are teeny and they have helmets on. After I finished, I took a bunch of pictures for Jacob to see that I was done, boxed them up and sent them on their way.

Then I looked at the pictures.

UGH.

This is amateur hour, folks. 

I bought a new photo box from Reaper miniatures recently. Pretty nice really - even has a built-in light strip. Word of advice, never use the light strip. Harsh, ugly light, washes the colors out and makes their surfaces looks super rough. Their armor doesn't even look metallic FFS. 

I post these not to harm my readers, but to remind myself to tear out the damn light strip.

Always gotta show the butts.

So yeah - check the pics before packing.

I took one of the backs of the ballistae without the lights for some reason - so much better and closer to reality...

Ballistae Butts.

ANYways - once Jacob get the miniature back form me, we'll see if I want to do more for him (I do - there is a ratling artillery set and some troglodytes that have my eye), and I'll get copies of these girls and their engines of destruction. The Amazons will probably be painted up the same way as here, but they'll all get spears to hold (I think these are meant to be "artillery tools". I painted the stubby spears up like the ballista bolts to designate those girls as the loaders.) The ballistae will be generic for whatever army/game needs them.

Last note - Meier sculpted the Amazons themselves, no clue who sculpted the ballista. Whoever it was, that person is on "Gitkikka's List Of People Wot Need To Be Spanked", just for sculpting all those damn studs!

Caramon the Rabid

 My latest puttering is also my most favorite classic Chaos Champion that GW ever put out - some might know him as Chaos Champion #14, but to me he'll always be Caramon the Rabid, leader of the Skullrippers.

Badass.

Scary fella, no? His name comes from the "armies on parade" section of Realm of Chaos - Slaves to Darkness, where several champion miniatures and their warbands were painted up and given names/backstories. This Jes Goodwin sculpt was called Caramon the Rabid, and the name has stuck in my head ever since.

His original paint scheme is a bit...eclectic...

As you can see, I did keep the face on the daemon weapon green, as it seems to be traditional (just about every version of this guy I've seen has it in green).

The disturbing color for the tail is intentional.

Yay, Chaos!

Fukkit, Have Some Crazy Space Bondage Elves

 Nothing special, just most of a team of Dark Eldar Wyches for my Teams Arena of blood project. you'll see that the Hellion isn't in the picture, because I haven't figured out how I want to paint it yet...

As you can see, I was originally going to have them photographed on the AoB mat that came with White Dwarf, but my ineptitude with photography got the better of me - try as I might, they looked too yellow in the pictures! I do know that adding white helps fix this problem, so I went the shittiest route possible and slapped a white piece of plasticard in there. It helped, at least. ;)

Things leaned from this batch - 

- Sculptors really need to not put eyebrows on 28mm scale miniatures. Two of these guys had brows that I just couldn't paint as flesh and be done with it, so I did them up as hairy brows. The result is pretty awful.

- The Wych Succubus makes a great Beastmaster, what with that whip.

- Drybrushing has made it into my heart once again.

Not much else to say - no time to really figure out better pictures with school breathing down my neck. At least I got something done!

A G-g-g-g-ghost!

MRI school is hard. Only having one day off a week sucks (and I have to study on that one day off).

Here's some easy-assed ghosts.

Plastic GW spirit hosts. MASSIVE pain in the ass to assemble (which is why you only get one this time). I didn't take the highlights up to white, as I feel that it makes them look more "opaque" instead of ethereal. I used a glaze of ancient but still very good Citadel yellow ink on their upper faces and arms to give them a little glow and add some visual interest - I stole this idea from one of the blogs I follow. If it works, it works!

Late For Gnollvember

As usual, I paint something and then forget to blog it. In this case, I painted up a trio of gnolls for the "Gnollvember" thing from the Ral Partha Harag Skullsmasher and his Gnoll Raiders box set that came out in the early '90s. I didn't care much about them being gnolls (although they have become one of my favorite humanoid monsters over the years), but I was certainly excited about using them in my 2nd Edition WH40K Chaos army as a unit or two of Khornegor - that is, beastmen aligned to the Chaos god, Khorne.

Yes, I know gnolls are basically hyena-men, and hyenas are felids, not canids but work with me here...

Yep, ol' Harag has a bolt pistol. Better than the tiddly dagger he was originally waving around.

In actuality, I painted these in December instead of No(Gnoll)vember. Oh well, I don't really keep up with internet painting fads. 

25 years old, and these are still very nice miniatures. Good size, detailing that one would expect from Partha stuff; the only real letdown is the meh poses that seemed to plague the Battlesystem sets (and again, Partha in general). The gnoll box has 17 minis in it - one leader (Harag), one flind shaman (who looks like a Mardi Gras drag queen), and 15 mooks, in 3 different sculpts. As seen in the photos, I chose two in my favorite sculpt. the third is in a weird crouching, jazz-hand pose that I'm going to need to work a bit for it to look decent.

Freehand shield. No Free Willies.

I didn't like the integrated bases, so I trimmed them a bit to fit into some 32mm bases from Wrath of Kings and am fairly pleased with the result. I don't care about tournaments or any real "official" gaming, so I'm not to fussed about the size or shape. They're big enough to justify the base size, so even better. Sadly, they will never see a game of 2nd edition painted (yes, yes, I was a horrible person who used unpainted miniatures in his games) as I don't have a copy any more. Rogue Trader edition, however I do have, along with the StD book.

"Oh, ARSE!!"

Edit: Ok, so I don't know WTF I did to the format here, so this post is just gonna look weird...

Edit, edit: Forgot to mention - these are the first miniatures that I painted wearing my new reader glasses. I feel that there is a HUGE improvement in the quality of my work over the stuff done in the past year or so. It took me a while to get used to them (still not, really) which is why these gnolls took a while to finish. Wearing glasses is uncomfortable to me, but I can't argue with the results.

THESE FOOKIN' THINGS