Medieval Beekeepers - Midlam Miniatures

 

Blasted through these lovely mega quirky medieval beekeepers from Midlam Miniatures this evening - they do these and some lovely Halfling ones too! Their whole range is great and has many gems that you’d struggle to find elsewhere! I’ve catalogued my dark ages/medieval/fantasy villagers elsewhere on this blog (back in the mists of time) and these will fit perfectly alongside the rest of the stuff I already have!

As you can see from this recreation, the sculpts are pretty spot on from what we know about medieval beekeeping! I’ve seen an amazing terrain piece including bee hives in a shelter built in the roots of a fallen tree that I really want to emulate when I get around to building more dark ages terrain! I also have a set of hives from Midlam that I’ll be incorporating into that piece!

That leaves me on a healthy 260 points for Hobby Bingo!

The Deep One

I’m a sucker for expanding my Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos Bestiary - I already have a few different Deep Ones but really liked this “Swamp Monster”-style one that I believe is a Dungeons & Dragons metal miniature.

I’ve just realised that I meant to give it a glossy greenish coat to finish off the base to represent the swampy areas I imagine it dwells! Bugger! Oh well, it’s finished for now!

250 points! I’ve not done the board for him yet, so I’ll update later! Looking at the boards though, it seems I need to be painting some larger groups of figures! I’ll get on that!

Nodding Donkey Oil Derricks - TTCombat

These two are a terrain feature that’s been hanging around my desk for a few months now, always with the worry that one of the cats might scatter some of the sub-assemblies into the netherworld of the office floor...

This is an old kit from TTCombat and it shows - newer kits of theirs tend to fit together a lot smoother and get the details better (for example, anywhere you see connecting rods originally had square pegs to go in round holes...).

Even still, I’m really happy with the end result - two decent sized pieces of terrain that will fit in a few different theatres of battle!

Now this kit comes from the “Wild West” section of TTCombat’s brilliant MDF terrain, but that’s not quite right - I wondered when they were actually first used and apparently that’d be around 1925 and onwards. As such, they’ll likely not appear in any “normal” Wild West games I set up, but they might still sneak in to Dracula’s America games - I’d just headcanon it as some mad scientist having come up with them sooner in order to extract the sorcerous elements coveted by the factions in that game! 

They’ll also see use in the 1950s Man in the High Castle-themed American Resistance games I have planned as well as Gaslands, the post-apocalypse, the zombie-apocalypse and even Necromunda!

That’s 240 points!

The Night-gaunt

A creature that literally leapt from the nightmares of that genius of horror, HP Lovecraft - the night-gaunt.

This figure is another eBay purchase - I think it’s supposed to be a Starspawn of Cthulhu but I thought I’d give it an oily black finish and use it as a night-gaunt in my Lovecraft-flavoured games.

The finish was ridiculously simple and also really difficult to get a picture of - undercoated black, drybrushed stone grey, Citadel Contrast Black Templar over the top followed by brush-on gloss varnish.

Now up to 230 points! Two more blog posts to come today!

Allan Quatermain - Giants in Miniature

Allan Quatermain is the most well known character created by H. Rider Haggard and is the protagonist of King Solomon's Mines, as well as numerous other stories by Haggard - the character was later included in the wonderful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic/graphic novel series by that wonderful word wizard Alan Moore. In the original books he's a big game hunter and explorer, but by the time of the League he's a decrepit elderly drug addict...

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was then turned into a crappy action film, taking away all the nuance of the comics and replacing it explosions and a token American character to play better with a US audience. My feelings about the film aside, this miniature portrays Sean Connery in his role in the film and I think it's a lovely sculpt that captures the essence of the older character pretty damn well!

The figure is from Giants in Miniature by Wargames Illustrated - if you haven't come across the range before, they're a series of historical or literary/TV show/film characters sculpted for Wargames Illustrated as a limited edition series - 500 casts and no more. Quatermain is still available, as are a bunch of other wonderful characters - I've got Django and a couple of Inglourious Basterds that are patiently waiting in my paint queue!

The Mysterious Stranger

Who’s that knocking on the door?

A squid-faced abomination from outer space? 

Wielding a ray gun and wearing a trench coat? Okay, where’s the punchline?!

Bit of a lovely oddball miniature here - it’s from Crooked Dice and I would guess it’s a reference to some TV show from the 70s/80s that eludes me! Great sculpt though, clean with crisp details! I’m really happy with the ray gun and slimy flesh (which has a glossy finish). Who knows where he’ll get used? Post-apocalypse? Some kind of home-brewed Doctor Who-themed game? Your guess is as good as mine!

That takes my total this year to 210...

 

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!

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!

Dark and Dirty Dracula’s America Terrain

I loved the miniatures, art and setting of Dracula's America when it was first announced (back in August 2017) and hopped on the pre-order campaign, securing almost all of the starting warbands ("Posses" in in-game parlance) and the wonderful creatures! I've got a nice little chunk of it painted up and I had plans for a Louisiana-themed setting - swampy New Orleans gothic horror? Yes please! 

I started off by purchasing the Ghost Town Derelict Church from Sarissa Precision - a lovely American-themed church that had seen better days. I imagined this working either as part of an abandoned town or even surrounded by swampy terrain...

I also added to this a Perry Miniatures/Renedra Ramshackle Barn around the same time, with plans to scratchbuild some other similar farm buildings to complete the set - I got both of these buildings built, cut them MDF bases and added gravel and sand, undercoated them, basecoated them...then moved house several times. As you know, fellow hobbyist, life, uh, gets in the way...

After a few years I finally came back to this fledgling terrain collection early this year and around that time I discovered the Perry Miniatures/Renedra Ramshackle House which compliments the barn perfectly! One quick eBay purchase and a couple of days of building and painting and you have the set you see before you! I intend to write a separate blog post for each of the buildings as I'm really happy with how they've turned out!

How does that leave my HOBBY BINGO! board looking? After some discussion with Lewis we agreed that given that I mainly play skirmish games I could count the odd big monster I paint or a collection of terrain as a the Lord of War or Behemoth square - I think these fit that description nicely!

Gorkamorka - Mekboy Nuzdrar Irnfang

Meet Mekboy Nuzdrar Wozzdrak Urk Irnfang, Cheef Mekaniak to Warboss Kharlukh Klawkrushah.

I have great affection for these oldhammer orks - I love the extent of his bioniks - I imagine that’s a field he specialises in, tinkering away at new ways of “improving” injured ork war boys. Somewhere between a Mek and a Dok.

I absolutely adore the mad amount of tools he’s carrying, from mallets to bonesaw, a hand-drill, a funnel, a fork...

I don’t have a specific project in mind for him currently, although I do have a bunch of orks that I got together to play Gorkamorka, so he might make an appearance there at some point - what do you think - Morker or Gorker?

I painted this figure back in February and in the meantime Games Workshop has shown this brilliant reimagining of this classic figure! I love it and I really want to pick him up at some point!

I’ve got lots of catching up to do after a hectic couple of months of no painting (work re-opening as the Covid lockdowns ease and a serious case of Xbox-itis...). Next up are some spiders and then eventually I’ll get some pictures up from the things I’ve started for the brilliant Cursed City! Stay tuned!