What do you get if you cross an owl with a bear? Banned from the zoo...

Ah, owlbears. Half owl, half bear, all twisted hate. Created just because they could be. The perfect pinnacle of 'a wizard did it'. I'm weirdly amused by them.

This delectable beast was originally a playing piece from an old Dungeons & Dragons board game that I rebased, and is a surprisingly nice sculpt for something that was originally monocoloured shiny plastic.

I think I basecoated him at least five years ago... but he ended up geting brought along for the ride when I took some miniatures to paint at work, with the finishing touches being added at home over the last couple of evenings. The feathers didn't come out quite as I'd envisioned, but I think other than that overall I'm fairly happy with him! You'll notice a lot more flock on the base than usual - this is due to my extensive research into the lush flora of the owlbear's natural habitat, and not to cover up some slightly dodgy basing with weird gaps left by past me, not at all.

And here he is terrorizing a hapless cleric - you can just about see his orange eyes from this angle. He'd have been completed and posted a day earlier if I hadn't decided that I needed to go back and add the tiny reflection spot of white on each eye...

Tally:

28 vs 40 = -12

Next - who knows? I'm tempted to build some more scenery, or maybe did out the bag of bits for Inq28 conversions (as I've been poring over the Inquisimunda pdfs recently)... But then again, minus twelve on the Tally is tantalisingly close to being back in the black isn't it

4-Lom & Zuckuss

We got the bug eyes / it doesn't bug us:

Yes, that is why I painted these bounty hunters as a pair!

 

 

For the longest time, Zuckuss was the only bounty hunter of those seen in Empire that I was missing a miniature of, but after umming and ahhing all this time, I got one for Valentine's Day this year!

 

Both are originally prepainted bendies from the Wizards of the Coast range - weirdly, unlike the rest, Zuckuss wasn't included in the original release (which is probably why I didn't already have one - I bought a lot of boosters when the game first came out, but ended up buying less and less as time went on...). They're fairly nice sculpts considering where they're from - detail was generally clear and pleasant to paint, with exceptions like an annoying mould line over 4-Lom's eye (which are always a pain to fix on models like this, as you can't just scrape them off and have to try to creatively cut them) and slightly soft detail on Zuckuss head, but with careful paint application I think they've both come up looking alright!



 

 

4-Lom was especially interesting to paint, given how scruffy and worn he looks - another difficulty with trying to paint Star Wars miniatures is that you'll often find contradictory information when you're trying to check colour choices! Handily, I have a copy of the old Action Figure archive (so that I can look at both stills from the films and the colours chosen for the action figure releases) and try and make an educated guess from there (with the occasional bout of Google Image searching trying to find a reference image that I like!).

In the end, I washed him with a highly diluted orangey-flesh colour, to try and recreate the tarnished finish on his shell (before giving him a once-over with some sponge weathering), which I'm fairly happy with! Zuckuss' robes were also quite nice to layer...



And for those of you wondering, that thing under 4-Lom's foot is a Rebel Pilot helmet, with an orange band with gold chevrons along it!

Finishing these two brings the Tally to:

27 vs 40 = -13

Who knows where we'll go next...

The Hammer is my Penis

Totally worth the expense and effort just to have a blog post with that title.

You've all watched Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, right?

If not, go do it now.

I'll wait.

Seriously, it's three parts, will take forty minutes of your life, and is highly recommended if you like things that are good.

Done? Good. Pow, that ending!

But on a more cheery note, having re-watched it this year (as it turned out that my wife had somehow never seen it) I had a hankering to pick up the 'Sergeant Spanner' figure from Hasslefree that bears a passable resemblance to a certain Hammertastic hero, and so picked one up at Salute (even better, he was one of the freebie figures on offer for pre-ordering, so double score!).

He was painted mostly on lunchtimes at work, under terrible lighting conditions. The shirt was one of those cases of painting until I decided I couldn't tinker with it any more, and so took the plunge to freehand on the tiny hammer logo - I started by carefully painting on a black circle to outline the whole thing, then a couple of gentle layers of yellow, breath held and fingers crossed! A dash of brown and a curve of silver later and voila, we have a tiny hammer!

The thing that took the longest to paint was probably his right eye - I don't think that micron pen that I use for dotting in pupils travels particularly well, and seemed to splurt ink out somewhat, so his right eye was probably repainted three or four times in the end until I managed to get a satisfactory result!

I have no idea what project he is for - I could probably shoehorn him into the Zombies project as a random event, and he's probably underpowered to go toe-to-toe with any Marvel superheroes... Ah well, sometimes you need to paint something just because you want to!

Tally:

25 vs 40 = -15