Jungle Flora - Spikers

I built these alien plants a bunch of years ago, after collecting some pine cones in the woods of my home town. For years they'd languished in a tool drawer, until I rediscovered them and decided to tart them up...

To begin, I removed the spikes and their bases - they were originally on plastic 40k bases, but luckily I'd picked up some MDF bases at Vapnartak for this exact sort of thing! I glued the pine cones to the bases, then built up the rest of their bases with cork. I addd my usual sand and gravel, then took the cocktail sticks and whittled them somewhat to make them a little more natural. The spikes were then superglued in and the plants got a grey spray priming. I stuck pretty close to the original paint job I'd given them, which drew its inspiration from the classic 40k cacti (for which I bought some polystyrene ovoids back in March of this year...).

Let me know what you think of them in the comments below!

Vapnartak 2014 - Spoils of Wargaming

Well, Vapnartak was fun! It was bigger than I was expecting, with a lot of stuff that I'd have liked to buy (I'm looking at you, Lead Adventure/Empire of the Dead/Misc. Foundry) but I managed to keep my purchases to a minimum. I didn't exactly have much in my monthly budget for miniatures...

The spoils.

Treemen! I really wanted to replace the dodgy ones in my fledgling Wood Elf Hordes of the Things  force. The current ones are a) too puny to be a behemoth and b) striking a ridiculous Travolta-esque pose...

Previous Treeman...

The new ones are from Kallistra Miniatures and are nice and bulky - I'm going to sculpt another in a similar style, but with a silver birch feel (it'll be a bit skinnier/taller).

Sheep! As suggested by Spacejacker (of Tiny Solitary Soldiers) for the bases of the giants (Behemoths) allied to my dwarf army.

My housemate wants me to build him a Harry Potter "Forces of Voldemort"  Hordes of the Things force - I'm a fan of the books and films and I really like the idea! Obviously I'd need a "Good" army to pit against them - the stag was purchased to paint up as a Patronus...

I also picked up a skeleton (54mm? Maybes.) and a lion (10mm), just because. All of these misc. metals are from Irregular Miniatures. The skeleton might become a Behemoth for my undead Hordes of the Things, or an objective (I'm sure my necromancer would like to get his hands on the remains of a titan giant...).

A busted up Celtos figure from the tabletop sale. This is as a gift for a gaming friend - it'll be his God for his Hordes of the Things barbarian army. He'll get a nice sword and a cork-base..
Finally, I picked up a new pair of clippers, some Citadel Bloodletter glaze and some round MDF bases. My current clippers were looking shabby, I fancied the glaze for use with the Hordes of the Things undead (and I got some use out of it straight away on the beards of the Forgeworld Chaos Dwarf unit I completed last night). As for the MDF bases, they always come in handy - I also have some pine cone/cocktail stick creations that I've wanted to make some better bases for for a while (they're currently on normal 40k bases) that were to be used as spiker plants in the jungle terrain. The smaller bases are perfect for this. The larger ones will be for objective markers.

Did anyone else attend?