Cursed City: The Blood-Born

So, I was one of the folks that was lucky enough to get my hands on Warhammer Quest: Cursed City - I pre-ordered it through those lovely chaps at Mighty Lancer Games. I literally can not remember the last thing I pre-ordered from Games Workshop, so that should give you an indication of how much I loved the look of the box. Here are my first finished miniatures from it!

When it came to putting the box together I decided to create scenic bases for all of the figures - breaking up small model bricks into more interesting shapes, gluing them to the bases (to fit with whatever scenic parts the miniatures incorporated) and then carefully chipping the edges. I then followed this with fine gravel and sand to finish them off.

I generally love the contents of the box, I love the lore, the atmosphere, the heroes and the villains. That being said, my least favourite miniatures in there are these three - the Vyrkos Blood-Born, young vampire servants of Radukar the Wolf.

As for why, It’s hard to pin down. I like the concept - freshly created vampires, still slightly feral (note the wolf-paws for feet!), graceful and lithe, the turned youngsters of the noble houses of Ulfenkarn. Is it the hair? I know it’s over the top but I like that it adds a sort of anarchic/punk aspect to them. The weapons? No, they’re very nice swords. The clothing?

Nope.

Oh well! Despite not being my favourites, they were still a pleasure to paint! 

I’m very pleased with the red vines crawling up the ruins - I imagine that these are an effect of the city's domination by the vampiric overlord - the death magics that he wields corrupting even the plant life of the once fair city, roots and tendrils from the plants seeking freshly spilt blood and gore. That’s my excuse to paint them such a vivid red - that, and my love of the red weed from War of the Worlds.

Finally, I also painted one of my favourite parts of the box - the unlucky zombified kitty! I painted him orange to match my lovely ginger tom Leon. In hindsight, the orange blends a bit too much with the bloody bones that are on display - I’ll go for a paler colour for the other one from the box to add a bit of a contrast.

So where does that leave me on the ol' Hobby Bingo board? Only with my first bloody line! Huzzah! By my reckoning I'm at 140 points - probably less than I'd have wanted to have been at this point in the year but probably more than I finished in all of last year! Here's to many more squares crossed off!

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 Throne of the Goblin King

Presenting the throne of the Goblin King! Or Ogre King, Ghoul Queen, Bugbear Emperor... You get the idea!

This is from the Escape from Goblin Town boxed set accompanying The Hobbit films - I realised the other day that I’ve bought almost all the components from the set apart from the dwarves and Gandalf! All in separate auctions or at wargaming shows (my last score was a bag of about 30 of the lovely (disgusting) goblins at the Vapnartak show in York a couple of years ago). I’ve also got the rickety platforms all painted up and a horde of the goblins that I believe I’ve shown previously on the blog!

What can I say about the terrain piece as it comes from Games Workshop? Mediocre? I can see why it was done that way but it certainly lacks something, hence why I added foam to bulk out the missing rear (see what I mean in the final picture (which is not mine and was found online for reference)) - the reverse of it is effectively just...not there! I used scraps of polystyrene glued together to form the rest of the rock outcrop, then carved it into shape and slathered over a mixture of PVA, a little sand and wall filler to create the texture of the rock. Once dry I worked out where the metal banding holding the (fancy formerly dwarven bed) to the rock would go and connect to the other side, which I then carved into the plaster mix and foam, to create the grooves for it to sit in. I made the banding with thin card, cut to size and then glued in place. I added rivets to this (pearls from a water filter) and then mounted it on a shaped piece of plasticard.

Painting this was a joy - I got so many colours in there for all the grime, mold, moss and algae and added patches of flock for the thicker areas of moss. It could of ended up a boring slab of grey rock, but these added life to the piece and set it nicely in a damp underground catacomb or pit. One thing I’d like to mention is the fact that this is also the King’s toilet - how grimy and glorious is that?! There is a bucket full of turds just underneath and a hole in the seat!

 

Magister Cthirian Coldheart

Introducing Magister Cthirian Coldheart and his familiar Mórðvíg! Available for all resurrections, curses, enchantments and glamours, with a specialisation in bringing ones allies back from the grave...

This gent is a lovely *classic* wizard from Reaper Miniatures in the Bones plastic material - I love all the details and shapes used in it’s sculpting. This guy is intended for use in all sorts of different games but as I was painting him I had it in my head that he’s generally a good guy that has developed a slightly unhealthy interest in necromancy. Purple is the colour of Death Magic in Warhammer and Age of Sigmar and I do think of it as a very appropriate colour for wizards! Thus, I tried to incorporate a bunch of shades of purple in his scheme - I hope you agree with me when I say that I think I achieved this! Also, this miniature has been sat undercoated in my collection for aaaages! I picked him out of the backlog last month and cracked on!

 

Farmer Maggot & His Hounds

I love the Lord of the Rings universe and I have a special place in my heart for The Shire! I’ve been slowly collection some figures together to potentially play out some Scouring of the Shire-themed games using my brigands and a little (pun intended) force of hobbits! I love the scene with Merry and Pippin picking mushrooms (and half of the other vegetables on Maggot’s farm!) and Farmer Maggot standing up to a bloody Ringwraith! The miniature version of the good farmer and his dogs, Grip, Fang and Wolf, are lovely sculpts and practically painted themselves - I’m a sucker for figures of A) civilians and B) animals, so these were an obvious addition to my collection. 

I actually finished these in January - I have a backlog of finished stuff to post that I’m pretty chuffed with!

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...

Cheap Bugs!

I saw these on a blog last year and loved the idea - I've used toys amongst my wargames stuff in the past and with a bit of work they can look great. These are from a set which was sold in Poundland in the UK. The set contained ants, flies, maggots and spiders, but the flies, the spiders and half of the maggots were of little or no use. The flies and spiders didn't have much potential and the other half of the maggots were made of a jelly-like silicon, so would not retain paint very well. 

I assembled these last year, on the round bases that come on the Wargames Factory Male Survivor kits. As usual, I added pennies to the bottom hollow of the bases, to add a little bit of weight to the figures. 

I added some sand and gravel to the bases, spray-undercoated them grey, painted everything brown (Charred Brown from VGC) and then, put them to one side for a year. I found them whilst trying to locate another figure on Wednesday night and decided that it was time to get them finished. I drybrushed everything with tan and then stone grey, added flock and left it to dry overnight. For the ants I painted them a reddish-brown, washed them with Army Painted Strong Tone and then used a Tamiya Clear Orange (with a touch of brown) glaze to get the ant finish. With the maggots, I used thinned VMC Ivory and then once this was dry I washed them with Army Painter Red Tone.

Very happy with how these have turned out - only took a couple of hours to finish the whole bunch last night. I also have some spiders from Poundland coming up, as well as these irradiated beasts...

Future Project - The Giant Crocodilian

I always like the section in Toys R Us with the Schleich animals and Papo knights/dragons/random creatures - this is one that I always considered picking up whilst perusing them - a Papo Crocodile Mutant - but it always seemed just a bit too pricey compared to what I could buy from the Reaper Bones range for the same sort of price. I decided to search for it on eBay a few months ago and found one going for less than a fiver including post! So obviously he got added to the mountain... He'll make a brilliant giant for use with my Fantasy Skirmish stuff - that's a 28mm Gripping Beast miniature with him for scale!  Thinking about it, he almost looks like a Hordes Skorne creature with that armour and paintjob!

Comments and suggestions for paint scheme and weapons are most welcome - thank you for reading!

The Jabberwocky

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son 

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! 

This is easily one of my favourite figures that I've completed in some time! Finished a few months back, it's the brilliant Reaper Bones Jabberwocky. I had it undercoated and washed for about a year before I finally found the courage to tackle it!

I broke out the old Citadel Inks to get a glossy finish for the creature - I wanted it to look sickly and ill to match the unnatural look that the creature has in general. I'm especially happy with the result on the eyes. 

I had to add the piece of branch to the base following assembly and undercoating - I love the Bones plastic material, but the leg joint on this particular figure was sadly just a bit too weak and it began to slump forward over time. I'm very happy with the end result!

Comments and suggestions are most welcome!

Merric Tealeaf, Halfling Rogue

I gave my housemate the recent starter set for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons as a Christmas gift - neither of us had played it before and he expressed an interest in running a campaign of it - here's the character I put together for those games:

Meet Merric Tealeaf, Halfling Rogue, Thief, ex-Brigand. Not a bad man, as such, just willing to do some bad things every now and then. His warband-mates tended to express some disgust at the fact that he wasn't usually to be found in the front rank in most fights, but he tended to work best from the shadows and by using his wits rather than brawn. 

Amusingly they left him in charge of the coinage and treasures they discovered...
Sadly, after 3 or 4 sessions the rest of the players seem to have become distracted and my housemate apparently struggles to keep to one setting for an extended period of time...

The figure is a Reaper Bones Hellakin Gorecutter. I changed the short sword he was previously wielding for one that looked a bit more vicious and stealthier (from the Dark Elf Witches plastic kit).

Comments are welcome!

Work in Progress - Fantasy Gladiators

I picked up some Reaper Bones Barbarians a while ago after seeing a great conversion on Facebook that I wanted to echo - the original was created by Rusty Painting - check out his blog for more great work!

Here's the first, based on the original conversion - I'd bought some of the brilliant Gladiator helmet sprues from CP Models for a Post-Apocalyptic Gladiator project that I also have planned and they were obviously perfect for this project! They're nice and chunky which suits the Reaper figures brilliantly! I also decided on a weapon swap and the best that I could find was this Tomb Kings khopesh which fit nicely with the posing of the figure. After a bit of drilling and gluing he was done apart from a little gapfilling.

The CP Models head sprues - check out their range!

This was the second Reaper Bones model - one of the chunkiest helmets seemed to suit this base figure nicely, as did a shield from Hasslefree Miniatures that has been in my bits box for years, plus the full arm and spear from a Warhammer plastic Marauder Horseman. 

Finally, and possibly my favourite - I had a spare Heroquest Barbarian with a broken sword - I carefully removed the head with a jewellers saw for a clean cut, replaced it with a perfect Gladiator helmet and replaced the broken sword with a scimtar from the old Warhammer plastic skeletons.

These have all since had gaps filled with putty, sand added to bases where required and they're undercoated - I'll be painting them in the next few months. I plan on eventually using them as a random encounter in some fantasy skirmish games and I'm still on the lookout for others to add to bring them up to a usable warband-size!

Thanks for reading - comments and questions are most welcome!

Wildlife - Bears!

More relatively-recently completed stuff!

These bears were recently completed for my Wildlife project - I'm currently working on a bunch of creatures to populate my fantasy and historical worlds. The project covers a range of animals that would work equally well in both genres, with a few other odds and ends that are more firmly set in the fantasy realm. The mother-bear is an old Warhammer figure, whilst the young-bear is from the Reaper Bones Animal Familiars set - both are lovely figures and were a pleasure to paint! Expect foxes, cats, wolves and lots of other critters in the near future!

Thanks for being a reader! Comments are always a pleasure!

Recent Assembly...

I went a little mad on figure clean-up/assembly recently - here's a group shot of what I based up:

High Elves from the flashbacks in Fellowship of the Ring (plus Haldir!), a Formorian-turned-Goblin leader, a cowering Empire soldier, some metal Mordor Orcs who have been slightly converted to be added to my Game of Thrones Wildlings, the Moon Duke (at the back), an Oldhammer Manticore, Theoden and Gamling of Rohan, an ancient Citadel Gandalf and finally, an ancient Citadel Norse (to be used as a lower-level hero for my Vikings in skirmish games).

The Formorian started out like this, in a box of free Orcs and Gobbos from my mate...this was my favourite item in there and I had the perfect use for him...

I stripped the previous paintjob and cleaned up the moldlines, lopped off the halberd past his hand, found a donor staff from a Goblin shaman. I found him a suitable base (40mm in this case!) and cut a hole in it so the integral base would sit lower - easier than sanding it down or removing it. I added a spare GW rat and spiked skull to the base and I'll be adding sand and doing some slight gapfilling - he'll lead my Goblins from The Hobbit (I bought these to use as troglodyte mutants of some kind - he'll be the perfect leader for them!).

The Moon Duke - I love this miniature! The axe head was missing so I found a suitably classic-looking replacement from the original plastic multi-part Space Ork set. 

Finally, a closer shot of the Manticore - a lovely old Warhammer sculpt. He's small by modern standards, but the pose is suberb and he's got a lot of character - something the modern plastics seem to lack. The figure was an eBay purchase in a job lot a while back - I had to find a replacement tail and chose a plastic spike-ended tail/tentacle from the Chaos Spawn kit - I still need to finish up the join between the main body and tail. When I'm painting him the tail will get a sort of dripping-poison effect...

Comments most welcome - hopefully there'll be painted pictures sooner rather than later! I've spent most of today tidying through my boxes of unpainted/part-assembled figures/bits/sprues to get it into some semblance of order and it's still going to take a few more hours tomorrow!

Fantasy Skirmish - The Hierophant

Another recently finished figure, although, it was only a little bit here and there that needed completing - this character is the Hierophant of the metal GW flagellants I finished a while back. I realised that I needed a leader for them and discovered this wizard from the Reaper Bones range, which with a bit of converting would be perfect! His robes, the chains and the wild beard fit brilliantly alongside the other figures. He's also a bit bigger (see below) and there's also the cost to take into account - I bloody love the Bones range!

The original figure came with a bone-encrusted scythe, which looked a bit too evil. I replaced the head of the scythe with a mace taken from the GW plastic flagellants. I also trimmed the edges of the scroll he is holding up, as it was also in the shape of a bone. The hooded cape is another way that he's differentiated from the rest of his supplicants.

Here he is alongside one of his wild-eyed followers - I used a larger base for him in order to better encompass the robes.

Comments are most welcome as usual! Hopefully it won't be long until these gents are purging a graveyard or accursed temple!