A Cluster of Spiders

Greetings! Here’s hoping you aren’t an arachnaphobe! These eight-legged beasties have taken a bit longer than I originally expected! I blazed through the bases of the 8 *normal* spiders (normal if a spider roughly the size of a medium beast of burden can be described as normal...) and had most of the spiders drybrushed...before realising they still had approximately 1200 moldlines to clean (after I’d spent a good chunk of time cleaning them up already!). Those spiders are actually from Sainsburys supermarket, from their Halloween selection. I’ve had them for a couple of years with plans to do this and finally got around to it for Rangers of Shadow Deep.

The other two (the ones with more than eight-legs and a lot of eyeballs) were from eBay - I believe they’re from the Bloodborne video game boardgame that was released - I also have a lovely weird sort of greenman/wodewose that came from the same game in the to-paint queue.

With another line that takes me up to a nice 200 points - still getting trounced, but feeling good about it!

But wait, there’s more...

Blogposts that is, coming today to clear my backlog of completed minis! Huzzah!

Carrion Crawler (Reaper Bones Charnel Grub)

Bit of a random figure here - I was searching for my basecoated Oldhammer ogre collection the other month and found Mr. Slimy here in the same box! He's a Reaper Bones Charnel Grub which is apparently their way of saying "Dungeons & Dragons Carrion Crawler". If you click that link to the Forgotten Realms wiki and click the "3rd edition" image of the Carrion Crawler you can definitely see where Reaper's sculptor found their inspiration for this particular sculpt!

As far as fleshy slug-maggot-tentacle creatures go, this is a nice enough figure. It's years since I cleaned up the standard figure and I remember struggling a bit to get all of the moldlines. It's sculpted with a nice trail of slime that it's obviously travelling along on.

Originally I'd planned on painting this creature in pasty maggoty colours, befitting a subterranean-dwelling beastie and I was almost finished with painting in that particular style when I decided that I disliked it's flaccid tentacular clubs (ala a giant squid) - they just sort of hung trailing onto the ground. Instead, I decided to chop off all the tentacles and splice the clubbed ends onto wire (with creative use of the pin vice), followed by drilling holes to allow these to fit nicely. These were then bent into shapes suggesting that the Carrion Crawler had just found some kind of prey and was either in the middle of an attack or a threat display. 

It was at this point that I decided to make things a bit more interesting - I needed to basecoat again, so why not in a lurid pink/orange combo, with the slime being in the aforementioned acidic orange? I also used copious amounts of gloss varnish to finish off this sickly-looking, potentially acidic or poisonous, dungeon denizen!

Here's where I currently stand for the year, with a bunch of other completed figures to blog about!

The Petrifying Cockatrice

This big beasty was an experiment in almost exclusively using Games Workshop Contrast Paints to paint a large
figure - I'm happy to report that it was a success! The figure is a Cockatrice from the Joan of Arc 15mm Board Game/wargame. I’ve removed the plastic base it arrived on and mounted it on a 60mm round GW BASE - the creature is big at 28mm so it’d be gigantic at 15mm! 

The rest of the range for the game looks absolutely amazing - they have a fantastic range of monsters as well as more down to earth medieval humans that are really so detailed for 15mm miniatures!

I think I can call this result a success - the surface texture is perfect for use with Contrast paints. This was painted in a couple of hours!

10 points on the bingo board...

Weekend Workbench - Cheap Giant Spiders

Just a quick post to show what I'm working on - a horde of giant spiders for Rangers of Shadow Deep, Dungeons & Dragons and various other miniatures games.

These are a great representation of one of my favourite parts of wargaming - transforming cheap toys (or in this case, Halloween decorations!) into figures for gaming! I needed additional spiders for some particular Missions in Rangers of Shadow Deep (each comes with a list of the amount of particular NPCs and enemy miniatures required as standard, although additional enemies can arrive during the game, so it's good to have some extras on top) and I can see them coming in handy for some games in Mirkwood-set games, recreated classic Warhammer Quest and maybe to add to the forces of some Lolth-worshippers if I ever take my D&D players to the Underdark...

These spiders came from the Sainsbury's Halloween range a couple of years ago - they're nicely detailed but all in one pose, scuttling along, and with a cavity on the underside of their thorax and abdomen. In order to add some variety to their poses I used some very hot water, submerged each spider one by one until there was a little more flex in the plastic I slightly twisted the legs. I had two aims with this - bringing the legs on most of them in a little tighter to fit on the bases and to make them look slightly different to each other - I'm particularly fond of the ones with their front legs rearing up in a classic "about to strike" pose. Once they'd had some time to dry from the hot water bath I lightly sprayed them from the top with light grey primer in order to be able to properly see the moldlines, then used a few fresh scalpel blades to clean up any that could be found. The hollows on their undersides were then filled with epoxy putty.

As for their bases, these are plastic ones that I'd removed various pre-painted Pathfinder monsters from in order to strip and mount on my normal lipped bases. It turned out that I had exactly the right amount for the spiders and it felt good to reuse them - the kitbasher creed comes to mind - "never throw anything away!". In order to have a good amount of the base connecting to the underside of the spiders for gluing I built up a little island of cork sheet along the middle of the base, with various chunks around the edges, followed by gravel and sand.

I added the skaven clanrat to the picture for scale - he's on a 25mm base, so these guys are pretty big... painting them should be a whirl, although I do keep finding additional moldlines!

Thanks for reading - completed pictures will arrive within the next couple of days!