Monday 15 June 2020

Eight legs, how many watches?

Continuing on the theme of ‘my laser like focus to complete the miniatures I need to play a solo war game of Rangers of Shadow Deep’, I finished painting some giant spiders: 


Sculpted by Mark Copplestone, these gribbly little beauties are gross in the best possible way - I tried to give their abdomen that mottled, gross pattern you get on some spiders. Also: see their glinting, multitudinous eyes, which you wouldn’t believe there are four different colours on (not counting undercoat and grey dry brush) to look at these pictures. 

One thing I like about this sculpt is that you can get a variety of poses with a little careful bending:


(I even managed to only break a single leg being a bit heavy handed, which was carefully glued back on!)

One of the things that attracted me to Rangers of Shadow Deep was the fact that I could play the majority of the missions using my backlog of fantasy miniatures without having to buy anything new, but these spiders were the exception to that, an odd hole in my collection...

As well as menacing my Ranger (well, Paladin, as you’ll hopefully see soon in a future blog post), they can do double duty for Dungeons & Dragons, although again they only get an appendix entry in the Monster Manual so don’t qualify for my Monstrous Alphabet challenge!

To give you an idea of scale, here is one of them menacing an under coated Captain Scarlet:


Not so big that you couldn’t boo it with a stick, but big enough that it would be a terrible nuisance when you’re busily trying to loot their forest...

Finishing these 8 doubles my number of painted miniatures this year, and takes the Tally to:

16 vs 68 = -52


Next: one last miniature to complete my companions for Rangers of Shadow Deep, then some scatter scenery, some civilians, then to make some trees...

In other news, we showed our daughter Princess Mononoke last weekend (side note - I didn’t remember it being that violent until I showed it to a 5 year old), and before the movie had even finished I was already considering starting a Japanese Fantasy project reskinning Rangers of Shadow Deep to Ronin of...

Last minute edit: I forgot, I actually acquired another miniature! Uncle Johnny posted this through my letterbox:


As I saw (on Scruffy Crow’s YouTube channel) some conversions using this old school monopods Chaos Warrior as a base, and fancied giving it a try!

This does, however, leave the Tally at:

16 vs 69 = -53

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