Handy is as handy does

Several weeks ago, like many people we watched the Fallout TV show, and it made me want to revisit my Fallout project, so I dig out a Brother Vinni robot that had been sat unbuilt in his baggie for far too long. After putting together so many tiny fiddly bits, it looks real nice, and several applications of dirt grime and rust over a shiny chrome basecoat later looks like this:

The flying stand is slightly wonky, but let’s be friends and pretend that was intentional to create the illusion of movement.

I’d long ignored the Modiphius Fallout game, as the minis for it are on the larger side and so wouldn’t match anything that I’d previously painted for the project, but thinking about it I could just use the rules with my own minis, which a timely Humble Bundle furnished me with. I’ll probably pick up the two player starter at some point in the future too, as I figure Super Mutant miniatures looking over my survivors would look less out of place than a survivor being head and shoulders taller than is companions.

Although…

Speaking of looming head and shoulders over a survivor, here’s our handy robot chum next to a vault dweller to give you an idea of scale:

The Tally has also take a couple of bits in the opposite direction.

I popped into GW before picking my son up from Squirrels during the week to grab a pot of paint, and also grabbed the latest mini of the month:

As there’s always space for a lady barbarian in my life, and doubly so if she’s free.

Also, it’s Father’s Day today, and so I was gifted with this:

A kit with a miniature, a couple of brushes, and some little pots of Vallejo paint, which was nice. Funny story, my wife asked if there were any particular miniatures that I wanted that she could point the kids towards, so I explained about the Monstrous Alphabet project, and told her that I’d actually made a list recently of what monsters I still needed to do, explaining that the ones in brackets were the ones that I didn’t actually own yet. She had it backwards though, and thought that the ones in brackets were the ones I didn’t own, so I should probably dig out all of the other Yuan Ti minis I already own so that he can have some friends on the painting tile!

All in all, the Tally now stands at:

23 vs 149 = -126

Next - something that’s been alluded to a few times in previous posts…

Oozy like Sunday morning…

Once again necessity for the family D&D game has steered my output, with the possibility of needing an Ochre Jelly in the near future:

Having seen how much it would cost to buy an official mini, I set out to make my own. Especially since if an Ochre Jelly suffers slashing or light ing damage, it splits into two smaller jellies (and theoretically if it gets hit again could then split into even smaller jellies!), so I’d need multiple miniatures. Years back, I’d planned to make a gelatinous cube using a hot glue gun, and a few YouTube videos seemed to suggest that this was a viable plan. So, I dug out my trusty glue gun, and traced around the various bases that I wanted slimes for to use as a template:

Then it was a case of gooping an appropriately sized glob of hot glue onto the template, and then desperately flipping it round to let gravity pull it into various shapes to look like it was reaching out an oozy tendril towards a hapless adventurer:

I had a ramekin of cold water on hand so that I could quickly set any results that I found particularly pleasing. With a lot of trial and error (and managing to burn the palm of my hand as I reflexively caught a blob of hot glue that I had allowed to drip too much towards the kitchen counter), and in some cases additional layers of glue, I had my five ooze miniatures. 

I made them on greaseproof paper rather than straight onto a base to give myself some room for error, and figured that I’d be able to glue them, with their nice flat bottoms, straight onto a painted base:

Obviously that looked awful, so I bit the bullet and applied a generous dose of hot glue to the bottom of each of them and smooshed it onto the painted base, so they actually looked like they were on it. The first attempt I was a bit timid, and ended up ripping a chunk of painted sand, but even more hot glue fixed that and you wouldn’t actually be able to tell if I hadn’t told you now, so I’d consider that a roaring success.

Then, it was time to paint them. Worrying that it might not take paint well, and I might ruin what I’d achieved so far, I quickly knocked up another mini slime to test out paint on:

And it came out looking like this, which I was very pleased with!

That’s a coat of the old GW Casandora Shade, and came out looking great - it’s definitively yellow, but still remains translucent and so looks nicely oozy.

Here’s a family picture of all of them, which due to their relatively low profiles are fairly hard to get a good picture of:

The biggest one is on a 50mm base, with the medium on a 25 and the smallest on a 20. 

Here they are from side on, to try and show their oozy lunging:

And from above, just because:

Finishing these brings the Tally to:

22 vs 147 = -125

And also updates the Monstrous Alphabet:

A is for
B is for Bullywug
C is for Carrion Crawler
D is for
E is for Elemental (More than one)
F is for Flameskull
G is for Goblin
H is for
I is for
J is for
K is for
L is for Lich
M is for Mind Flayer, Myconid, Mummy, Manticore
N is for
O is for Owlbear
P is for Purple Worm
Q is for
R is for Rust Monster
S is for Shambling Mound, Scarecrow, Skeleton
T is for Thri-Kreen
U is for
V is for
W is for Wraith
X is for
Y is for
Z is for Zombie

I’m also tempted to make some more in different colours that can also double as vapour snakes for Frostgrave. Not an original idea I know, but I’ve really come around on it now…

Back at work this week (and working further afield than usual, so deathly tired by the evening), so this is the end of this current streak of productivity!

On the family D&D front, we’ve now finished Dragons of Stormwreck Isle - they’ve killed their first dragon, and my youngest’s response was to ask if he could carve it’s heart out, so I guess he’s taken to the stereotype fairly well. They’ve had some quest hooks exposited to them, with the plan being to run a mash-up of Dragon of Icespire Peak and Lost Mine of Phandelver, but first they were bequeathed the deed to a keep, and need to clear it out so that they can claim their prize…

Additional gargoyles

As ever, I continue to hop from project to project as my fancy wanders to keep motivated. Looking way ahead, if I play through the Silver Bayonet expansion The Carpathians I’ll need four gargoyles, and handily years back I painted… three Mage Knight gargoyles. Handily I knew I had some more stashed somewhere, so dig them out and tried to match my decades old paint job:

If anything, they’ve come out a bit cleaner than my original paintjob, but it’s close enough I think.

Here they are all together:

I only need four, but I figured I might as well paint both the figs that I found just in case, especially as I’m finding running D&D that I often need multiples of the same type of miniature, so all these one off low level creatures like frogs and snakes I’ve painted in the past are less useful than you’d think… 

Interestingly, it seems the newer paintjobs are slightly different sculpts to the originals, having smaller wings, which is odd as I thought they were all the same Mage Knight Dungeons Gargoyles figure. Google suggests that the gargoyle does on fact have small wings, so I wonder if past me cut up a named character gargoyle? Eh, I needed gargoyles, and gargoyles I have, so it’s all good.

Finishing this pair brings the Tally to:

17 vs 147 = -130

Dem bones dem bones

 Dem huge bones:

I’ve been reading my children the D&D Dungeon Academy books on and off at bedtime, and one plot point involved the party fighting a necromancer who had a bunch of defeated skeletons reform and combine into a bigger threat and I thought you know what I’m stealing that, and so this Mage Knight figure that was in parts in a baggie got fast-tracked to the front of the painting queue:

Bam, a giant skeleton made of smaller skeletons, mostly drybrushed so very quick to get finished.

I own a couple of construct based mini campaigns for Frostgrave too, so it can also stand in for a large Construct if at some point in the future Tim the Necromancer learns how to make those…

Another mini painted, another gradual slide back towards being in the black for the Tally:

15 vs 147 = -132

Speaking of minis that are quick to get finished, I’ll leave you with a sneak peek of something else I’ve been experimenting with: