Workbench Wednesday - Batman Minis, Deep Ones, Orcs and Neave!

A miscellany of items currently in progress! 

Professor Pyg and his Dollotrons from the Batman Miniatures Game by Knight Models - looking awfully like ghosts at the moment! I'd originally zenithal-sprayed them but when it came to painting them it just wasn't working very well. I then decided to drybrush them all light grey followed by white. I started painting the bases on all my figures a while back whilst basecoating them, so that's why they look particularly odd right now! Professor Pyg is a relatively new Batman villain - he's your classic mad surgeon archetype, trying to create "perfect" humans. Since arriving in the comics he's gone on to appear as a sidequest in Arkham Knight (which this depiction comes from) and in the Gotham TV show.

The Electrocutioner, also from the Batman Miniatures Game. He's a minor villain and sometimes portrayed as a mercenary - this miniature is how he appears in the Arkham Origins prequel game as one of the assassins that have been hired to kill the Batman. He's in an armoured suit and has electroshock gauntlets that Batman eventually "borrows".

Malifaux Silurid Slaves, aka Swamp Deep Ones - I love these Catfish-themed Deep Ones by my favourite sculptor, Paul Muller. They're sadly OOP now that Malifaux is strictly plastic only, which is a shame! These aren't far off being finished.

Warhammer Orc Slaver - it being Orctober, I decided to pull this venerable mini out of the lead pile! I imagine him working for a small group of Hellknight Anti-Paladins I've been slowly working on over the years, keeping their servants in line!

Neave Blacktalon, Stormcast special character, almost finished! Loved this figure from it's first preview and picked it up a while back, only to have a cat chew off her axes! A kind soul on Instagram sent me some replacement axes which are also from the Vanguard. I've recently removed the little spiky back piece she had behind her head as it just seemed a little over the top. Just a few little touch-ups to do - this is how I'm going to paint the other few bits of Stormcast I have.

I do have a load of other stuff Work-In-Progress, these are just a very small selection! Hopefully I'll be able to show you them completed soon!

Work in Progress - Reaper Bones Cthulhu

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming

― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

I recently built the Reaper Bones Cthulhu that I got as a birthday gift from my housemate last year - once I'd assembled it and spray-undercoated it, I couldn't help but take the glamour shot above! My housemate has recently gotten into figure painting and has a piratical RPG planned for later in the year, so I grabbed one of the ships I'd assembled for him to use in the picture. 

Here's the beast once assembled - it's a massive figure! Note the Studio Miniatures plastic zombie for scale and the scenic piece from the base the figure comes with. I prefer to use proper bases with my Bones figures and purchased a 120mm lipped base for the figure when I received it as a gift, so the integral base was spare - I chopped out the chunk of masonry Cthulhu was originally standing on and then mounted that on a lasercut MDF base to act as an objective marker - more on that in another post.

Assembly was overall easy with the figure - most gaps were covered by standard assembly but I did use a boatload of Liquid Green Stuff to help with the joins. I  also added some wood filler around the feet of Cthulhu and then sand to blend in the figure to the resin base.

I then raided my spraypaint collection - I ended up using Halfords grey primer and matt black, a Tamiya wehrmacht green and Army Painter Necrotic Flesh - I've ended up with a nice amount of shadowing to help when I come to properly paint the figure.

Comments, questions, praise for Lord Cthulhu??

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!

#6MMRPC - Month One So Far...

When the start of the Challenge was recently coming up, I'd decided (and discussed with a few friends) that I would be ceasing assembly of miniatures from the Lead Mountain until I'd managed to finish off a hundred or so of the items I already had assembled and undercoated. Unfortunately, this plan failed - here's what I recently got put together/cleaned up...

This basically started as me taking a few sprues of Gripping Beast plastic Saxons and Dark Age Warriors home with me to my parents house to have something to assemble on the couple of evenings I stayed over theirs and just continued when I got back to my house...

In the end I've assembled:

16 Saxon Warriors
24 Dark Age Warriors (half assembled with close combat weapons, half with slings, but all every figure has a pouch for missiles plus a sling or axe/sword at their waist, depending on what they're armed with, so I could use them all as slingers if needed)

Around 7 different Saxon leaders or Champions - I needed more for Dux Britanniarum or if one Warlord dies in a SAGA campaign and I want to replace them

A large pack of Chaos Hounds - these have been on the to-do list for a while. Some had been previously built and painted as part of my old Warhammer Chaos army, but for skirmish gaming I decided that I wanted them on the lipped bases. Whilst rebasing them I decided that I'd just repaint them all

Misc. fantasy RPG characters

Bats - these are from Avatars of War, I drilled holes into them and mounted them on flying bases

Knights/Troll/Apothecary - these have been waiting in my assembly queue for a while - I thought they'd be useful for Frostgrave

Fantasy Celt warband - a mix of human troops from the wargame Celtos armed with slinger poles, some oldhammer barbarians and a Tharn Ravager as heavy support - I decided that these would work well together with the fen beast/shambling mound/re-purposed Heroclix man-thing/Truthsayer that I have in the painting queue as a swamp/wildlife-themed warband

Lord of the Rings Elf Warband - another potential warband for fantasy skirmish games.

Whilst this lot took me a good while to sort out, I did have some painting success once these had been assembled and based:

More on these and the other completed items another time...

Up and coming...

Just a quick shot of what is currently on my painting table. This obviously doesn't include the other stuff that's already painted. I've already taken photos of the completed miniatures - they've begun to appear on the blog and will continue to do so with snippets of background. I'm attempting to flesh out what will be my main gaming setting (a formerly civilised Imperial world on the edge of being abandoned in the decades after a fairly catastrophic war - Necromunda meets Rogue Trader meets Firefly meets Fallout) and the fluff sections should help me put together the ideas and archetypes buzzing around my head...