Azulejos wooden mannequin

While I have new stuff painted, I haven't got the time to make photos, so here we go with some older filler - a bit off-topic, but better than nothing, right?

Some time ago I decided to keep the knick-knacks in the living room in a white and blue color scheme. I got rid of some old ones, got new ones and repainted others. This is one of them, a cheap, small (~20cm high) wooden mannequin that I painted to resemble artwork found on azulejo tilework, a motive I absolutely adore. I even coated it with gloss varnish to make the glazed ceramic effect more convincing. The whole project turned into quite a freehand, so I decided to share it here.

If I was a daring person, I would field it as a Lord of Change and start a very weird Tzeentch army.

Dungeon Twister Miniatures

Another side-project - miniatures from the Dungeon Twister board game, painted as a (late) birthday gift for a friend.

The game is about two teams of diverse adventurers and creatures who got teleported by an evil wizard into a dungeon - after which they try to escape while fighting each other. Each team is composed of the same 8 types - each miniature is duplicated and only color makes them different. This proved to be a unique painting challenge - to paint 8 miniatures using yellow as the main color and then paint the same 8 miniatures using a blue scheme. You can see the comparison below, on the Mekanorc, my favorite miniature from the whole bunch:

The miniature themselves are somewhat hit-and-miss - some of them are very good, while others have weird proportions or anatomy. The quality differs a bit too, but it wasn't anything too noticeable. Still, the sculpts are clear and the detail is sharp, so the work on them was pleasant enough, especially seeing that I went through them relatively quickly. My wife also helped with the base colors, so that's something new too!

I also wanted to mention that I never encountered such hard-to-work resin ever in my life - paint was getting scraped off the miniatures after the slightest touch, worse than with metal minis! That's why I varnished them pretty thickly afterward, hopefully they'll be able to survive handling on the tabletop.

Here is the Blue Team:

And the Yellow Team:

And the picture of all of them together.

Monster Slaughter - The Triton Family

And now for something different, once again!

Some time ago we visited our friends here in Berlin and they always have a whole pile of new board games to try out. That one time we tried something called "Monster Slaughter" - a game by French company Ankama that got funded through Kickstarter in 2017. It centers around a "cabin in the woods" horror movie plot where a group of teenagers explore a creepy, abandoned shack with monsters trying to murder/eat them - with the players controlling the monsters. Everything is represented by pretty good miniatures.

Each monster group is a family - a dad, a mom and a child - and there is a crazy amount of them: vampires, ghosts, clowns, werewolves and many others. I played Tritons, the fish-people, the ones you can see below. After the game, I asked if I can take them home to paint because I got to like those guys. That, and they are also probably the least stylized family of the whole bunch, which also was a plus for me. Most of them are pretty comical, which fits with the comedic style of the game, but it isn't really my taste that much. Besides, they are green and dirty, and that's exactly how I like my miniatures!

They were pretty fun to paint and our friends were happy with the results. The only thing I didn't like about them was the material, which is kinda soft and bendy, like the ones used by Reaper Bones. It was a real challenge to get the mother's trident straight and removing the mold lines was also pretty tough - but besides that, they are fine minis. They were also first board game minis that I painted, so that's something too.

And here are the cards with their stats that are used in the game - I used them as instruction how to paint them. This picture was taken from the Kickstarter page.

Zombie Wedding Present

This week a small intermission - a wargaming wedding gift!

I visited Cologne this year - and before going there I asked a friendly Carpe Noctem user living nearby if he wanted to meet. He told me that we couldn't hang out normally in the city, because he would be busy having his own wedding at the moment, but he would be happy if I would come to the party. So, by pure chance, I got invited to my first German wedding - one that was horror themed too! It was only logical for me to make some undead-related, wargaming present for him and his wife. I choose zombies because I became kinda known for them on the forum, that would make it more personal and because they were simple enough to do them on that rather tight schedule.

Thankfully I managed to finish it on time and we arrived on the party - where not only the married couple and other youngsters were dressed as zombies/vampires/cultists/witches, but also most of the uncles and aunts! A cake had a graveyard decoration on top with a bloody red inside, the snacks were little cookie 'fingers', drinks were red, the decorations were cobwebs and skeletons. In front of it all, a tent was organized - with a grisly escape game! Now that's some dedication, no wonder that the guy collects also undead miniatures! The present was a perfect fit into all that, they looked almost exactly like that.

Blood Bowl Team - The Badlands Badbuttz

My first painted Blood Bowl team, that was a fun project, with lots of things that I didn't do for a long time. I haven't painted any greenskins since 2002, didn't use any decals since 2006 and didn't paint minis on round bases since 2012 - so that was kinda refreshing after the unending hordes of undead. I had to keep myself from getting into too much detail because I wanted to finish them as fast as possible, but some detail still made it to the finished minis.

For the armor, I choose wanted to go with the red depicted on the box, but that was too uniform for me - something messier would fit the greenskins more and I needed some differentiation for the duplicated models. Thanks to adding black to the mix, I could make sure that two identical linemen wouldn't have two pauldrons or greaves of the same color - that should help to set them apart a bit. After that, the armor got all the freehands markings and numbers. When that was ready I applied all the damage - first by making dark brown spots and only later adding bright silver ones on those. It turned out quite good and properly orcish, but I think I made it too messy and chaotic in the end - they did lose that strong, red effect they had before adding all the dents. It was also quite problematic to keep their colors strong enough, as my painting tends to be pretty dark and dirty - fine for the undead, but here I wanted something crisper. Refining that time and time again added another messy layer to this paintjob, but I think it turned out not that bad on the Badbuttz here. I just need to be more careful on the next, Bretonnian team.

For their skintone, I always wanted to try out the recipe for a pale orc skin shown by Duncan on Warhammer TV HERE. I either messed something up or my laptop is showing false colors, for my orcs turned out much more saturated and neon-like than those on the video... Thankfully that was easily fixed with a dirty, yellowish glaze.

The Badlands Badbuttz are a team that was always about representing the Badlands as a whole - yet while earlier it meant taking unwanted rejects from other teams, these days it’s more about gathering valuable talents from all around the land. All thanks to the famous goblin headhunter, Dugtig the Headhunter, who started helping the team recently. Even though they hail from many different tribes, when they don the black-red colors of the Badbuttz, they act as an effective, unified force composed of diverse talents. Well, that’s the idea, at least. In practice, they are only slightly more interested in crumpin’ their opponents than themselves on the field. It’s probably only thanks to their stern Black Orc captain, Ogak the Flayer (known for flaying game balls when angry) and their own competitiveness that they manage to win matches from time to time. Still, even if they are slightly unruly and have difficulties following plans, they are all talented players with great intuition and ability to improvise. They just need a good reason to set aside their differences and winning the Blood Bowl is definitely one such reason.

First, the whole team:

And the individual players:

Blood Bowl Converted Players

Okay, now it's time for something completely different - some Blood Bowl miniatures!

I bought the box with the main game rather spontaneously about a year ago - and it was lying on the shelf, gathering dust ever since. Only recently the motivation came to me to actually take it all out and paint those dudes to play the game properly. I wanted to get over it quickly, not wanting to invest too much time on any non-undead miniatures... but then an idea came to me. As I was putting the human team together, I found a helmet from an Empire cavalryman lying around and I saw that changing their generic helmets into those over-the-top ones with ridiculously large plumes would be quite cool. Then I noticed that I don't have enough Empire helmets - but I certainly have enough of the bretonnian ones - even better! I cut the standard heads off and put the bretonnian ones in. I could do some more converting on them, but I also wanted to finish them quickly - this seemed like a good middle ground. You can see the human team below, I hope they look ridiculous enough (I still need to come up with a name for the teams).

EDIT: Finished, painted team can be found HERE.

When I converted the human team I remembered that I also bought the big guys for both teams - the ogre and the troll. The greenskin team and that troll don't need any conversions, but I still needed to do something with that ogre to make is somehow chivalrous. So I cut off the top of his head, gave him a cool crest with some cloth addition, added some shields as greaves and adorned that gutplate with some fleur-de-lys.

I know that Bretonnia traditionally didn't use any mercenaries in their armies, but I like to think of my bretonnians as cynical a-holes for which the nobility and chivalry is only a facade. Wanting to get some edge on the field, they found an ogre willing to play for them, quickly made him a knight to bypass the 'no mercenaries' rule and called it a day. That also explains why his conversion is rather simple.

EDIT: Painted one can be seen HERE.

Last but not least - the single orc player that I converted, he will be the captain of the team. He got a helmeted Black Orc head and I gave him a bear trap in his hand - which seemed like a proper Blood Bowl fun implement. I converted him because I was really disappointed with Black Orcs Blockers - how can you have them in the game and not give them those cool iconic helmets? Thankfully I had some spare heads so one orc will be parading on the field like a proper boss. The other one will keep his standard head to make this one stand out more.

EDIT: He, together with his team, can be found painted HERE.

Blutmane von Nachthoof

And a spontaneous side project that I painted to enter a Halloween 2017 competition on Carpe Noctem - a vampire horse! I finished it few days before the beforementioned holiday. It was quick, but it was also a good excuse to try two things: copying a horse tail using greenstuff mould and painting glossy red armor - both of which will be helpful in the future.

Behold, Blutmane von Nachthoof, a genuine Blood Dragon horse!

Ever since the times of ancient Lahmia and first vampires, words were spoken about a mysterious terror galloping through the nights, searching for worthy challengers. He changed his names many times through the ages, but now he's known as Blutmane von Nachthoof, the stallion of blood. Countless men, women and beasts were felled by him and even whole empires crumbled because of his influence - and nobody knows how he does it because anyone that sees him drawing a sword, dies. If you ever hear someone challenging you using horse puns, know that Blutmane has come for you.

Side Project - Wedding Minis + WIP

Another side project - this time it's two minis I prepared to be mounted on my wedding cake - my 'input' into the preparations, so to say. Both miniatures are from Andrea Miniatures, 54mm scale - she is 'Verthandi, Sword of Light' and he is 'Brogan, the Bonecrasher'. It was an interesting change for me, painting much bigger figurines and in a much cleaner style.

And here you can see the unpainted versions - I had to convert them a bit to fit the occasion better - and to make her a bit less fanservic-y too.

Side Project - Christmas Present

And now a little side project - minis I sculpted for my girlfriend back in December 2013. I post it here as a curiosity mainly because these were the first minis I sculpted from scratch ever - well, save for the weapons. It was also the first time I painted something more contemporary than the usual fantasy stuff. Here they are before painting:

And after painting: