Marble Madness

Yes, more marble.  Like I ever get tired of painting it! ;-)

This is the usual cork and sculpey treatment, with a little twist.

You have already seen the all sculpey bases with the columns...

Flat sculpey baked into sheets and set onto cork.

But this time I added a few statue faces.  I believe from Sci-bor.

Since the Holy Orders faction has been behind the scenes of many of Mankind's ancient civilizations, I thought these classical statues would be very appropriate.

It's a nice little change of pace for painting, that's for sure.

After all the red bases and green bases I have painted for a variety of Inquisition armies, this blue set has been very fun to paint.

Here we see one of the the bases with Mimreg Zain attached.

Stay tuned for much more!!!

Monster Mash... again.

We conclude this Halloween extravaganza with some more beasties!!

A set of Minotaurs from Mierce Miniatures.

This group shot gives you a better sense of the variety between the sculpts.  This allowed me to do some fun variations in the flesh tones.

It was neat that the armor and weaponry had some variations as well.  It certainly kept things from getting mundane or repetitive!

There's still one more, however... a big banner toting bull!

They all have the Eye of Balor in common, however.

Stay tuned for more!

Turning water into fire!!!

Yes folks, it's true!  You can make fire from water!

All you need is a brush and some Vallejo Water Effects.  Like all the Vallejo gesso products, it has quite a bit of body, and literally stands up on its own.

I had a number of Reaper BONES fire miniatures that I wanted to use a fire markers in various games, such as Flames of War and Wild West Exodus.  Just using the flames themselves had little appeal to me, but trying to sculpt a bunch of extra flames to juice them up had even less appeal.

For some reason, the thought crossed my mind that using water effects gesso might actually make passable flames.

I started out by putting the black lava around the flames at the base to create embers.

Then I started to build up the flames using the all purpose craft brushes.  All you have to do is plop down some water effects, and then 'pull' it off to the side, twisting the brush along the way.

I even carried the effect up the side of the miniature itself!  And, there was no 'collapse' of the material.  Every flame was just the way I left it hours later.

Some white primer to unify the effect...

And time to paint!!!

I started with a white/yellow mix at the base.

And gradually began to add Vallejo fluorescent orange to the mix...

Each layer meant more of the fluorescent orange.  I didn't drybrush this.  I used flow improver to thin down the fluorescent paint, which despite its transparent nature, is quite thick.

At this point I began to introduce a bit of burnt orange to the mix.  If the previous layers were still wet, that was fine, as I took advantage of that situation to do some wet blending.

Each layer was more of the burnt umber color, which you see on the left.

I added a reddish black to the mix for some of the final layers.  You can see the difference that it makes already.

I didn't want to get too dark on the tips of the flames...

I then went back in with a white/yellow/fluorescent yellow mix to enhance the brightness at the base of the flames.

Here you go!

These will be fantastic for just about any game system, and they really took no time at all.

I am going to use this method from now on, and I intend to use it on a tin of stuff!   I will make flamethrower tanks for Pacific Theatre in Memoir '44, flame effects on my Warrior Nation WWX minis, 40k, WFB weapons, and much much more!!!

A beast of a man...

From Mierce Miniatures, another beastman.

He had a neat face, and some fun shapes to the armor.

One big honkin' weapon, though...

Eight is enough?

I'm not quite sure how, but it seems that I forgot to post group shots of all the Wayward Eight together!!

These are a set of mercenaries for Wild West Exodus.  They do a variety of interesting things in the game.

Ladies first!

These gals can fix vehicles, irradiate you, hack you apart or whisper sweet nothings in your ear...

Now for the 'Gents'.

Again, a whole different set of skills!

And yes... the Eight all in one view!

And again.

One last time!  I do hope to get a set of these for myself, and see what these characters can do in our games.

The Mysterious Stranger

Yup, the Stranger is in town, and she's mighty mean with that Winchester.

This is a very fun Reaper BONES miniature that I ran across, and thought it might add some flavor to the Wild West Exodus scenarios that we wanted to run using the new Jailhouse.

For some reason, I kept thinking of the Next Gen episode 'Fistfull of Datas', where Troi joins Worf & son on the holodeck.

She helps them out with the Hollander gang, and even guards the prisoner in the jail.  I thought it might be fun to have that character in our scenarios, helping out the Lawmen.

Ironically enough, much of the costume Troi wore in that episode matches this mini... and it happened to be very similar to my Lawmen color scheme.  How convenient!!