Lurking in the shadows...

...to suck out your brains - finished painting my converted Illithid rogue (that I finished converting from a Hasslefree figure way back in December of 2014):

Lord knows when I'll meed a Mind Flayer in studded armour, but when that day does come I will be ready.

His flesh was one of those times when you finish painting happy with what you've done, then come back to it the next time and decide it needs more done to it over and over, hence quite a stark difference between the darkest shade in the deepest recesses and the lightest areas. His weaponry was painted in non-standard colours after being inspired by a flick through the 4th Edition Monster Manual (hence the aqua/teal hilt to the purple-sheened blade, and grey rather than colourful gems on the scabbard of his secondary weapon).

I also had a play posing him with some of my wife's plants (more and more of which seem to appear in the house each week):

As well as playing with the settings and applying filters to make moody pictures like this:

Tally:

7 vs 0 = +7


In other news, a family emergency last week led to us heading down to Portsmouth a week earlier then originally planned - horrible times, but one upside to spending four hours each way on trains was that I cracked on and managed to mostly get the set of zombie rules that I've had knocking around half-formed in my head longer than I've had this blog that have been previously alluded to on paper:

Don't worry about trying to decipher my scrawl about rules for fighting across barricades, the picture is just illustrative to break up blocks of text ;)

It's in no particular order currently, fairly free-form as I remembered / thought of things, but I think I've got a fairly workable framework once I rearrange it and chisel out the heart. I have a vague thought to run a zombie game at halloween, which would need some scenery building and cards making (well, as well as actually playtesting these rules to see whether they actually work at all!)

Otherwise, I'm still wanting to get on with Necromunda, although I'm in a bit of a quandary - I'm reticent to start building models until I've built a gang roster, but don't want to build a gang roster without knowing what's good or that I like to play with... I could just build the models in their stock poses (which are lovely, don't get me wrong), but shouldn't I choose their loadouts myself? Argh, such conflict...

I also starting playing the Game of Thrones: Conquest game whilst waiting for the laptop to fire up tonight, which I'd assumed would give me a hankering for that project, but the game is so buggy (oh how it crashes) that hasn't kicked in at all...

Cut off one head, and two more adorable ones will grow in it's place...

Whilst finishing off the Flameskull from the previous post, I also started a couple of other miniatures that have been sat undercoated for far too long, and managed to finish this baby hydra:

One of many of a number of rather lovely Mage Knight sculpts, potentially from one of the Dungeon sets. He's old Mage Knight (and lord knows how long ago I cleaned him up) so awkward mould lines are a bit of an issue, but I quite like it flaws and all.

I hadn't really thought about how many 'generic fantasy' miniatures I've painted in between other projects, but when you look at them all at once it's quite a few! Especially when you include the ones tucked in other drawers that I'd forgotten about... Hey ho, they can all menace Conan or get drafted in for Dungeons & Dragons though, so there's hope for them seeing a game table yet...

Here he is menacing a Lannister Foot Knight that whilst digging out I discovered one of the aforementioned drawers of finished miniatures that I had forgotten were there:

And here's an aerial view so that you can see that yes, some of the heads are a little cross-eyed!

Tally:

6 vs 0 = +6

The plan at present is to finish off a couple more miniatures in the queue to make space for some figures from the Necromunda Boxed Game. Part of me wants to make some more terrain though, considering the piles of interestingly shaped pieces of plastic and polystyrene I've been hoarding over the last couple of months...

You won't believe how long this took...

So, after a period of low painting mojo (aided and abetted by .hack on the PS4, Super Bowl etc), i knocked off another miniature that had been sat half-finished in the painting queue for six years or so:

Yup, it's a flameskull:

In the 4th Edition era of Dungeons and Dragons, at one point I considered painting up a miniature for every entry in the Monster Manual. So, for the Flameskull, I grabbed a spare skull from a GW Skeleton Warriors sprue, pinned it to a base, basecoated it green, and then carefully stored it away in a drawer for more than half a decade. I think it moved house like that at least twice.

So, finally freeing it from it's hellish limbo, I popped on some mystic symbols in lurid shades of green and called it done:

I mean, it took so long that in the interim Games Workshop actually released a kit containing flaming skulls, which probably would have worked better for representing a FLAMEskull...

He's so tiny, it's hard to get a decent picture. Here he is posed on a sewer tile:

And with a Heroquest wizard for scale:

Finished is finished, regardless of size though, which takes the Tally to:

5 vs 0 = +5