By the pricking of my thumbs......

.... something wicked this way comes.

 It's a Shoggoth!

It is a big resin piece, around 7cm long, 4cm high and 5 cm wide from Fenris Games. It is a one piece cast with three optional metal tentacles, which I used because, when it comes down to it, who doesn't want a dreadful sanity-threatening, slithery, protoplasmic Horror with tentacles? The young Assassin, a Bad Squiddo Lucrezia Borgia mini is here to provide a sense of scale.

The backdrop is from a Jon Hodgson book and the flooring is from a Warbases dungeon tiles set.

I'm rather pleased with how this Thing came out. I finished the eyes and larger pustules with a lick of gloss varnish after spray varnishing the finished beastie in a matt finish.

Hopefully this Abomination might get some gameplay in the future.

Linus Van Pelt never expected this.......

 ......The Great Pumpkin Arises !!!!!!!!

Well, not actually. This is the Pumpkin King. Hallowe'en will never be the same again. Trick or Treat? It doesn't really matter to this being. He's coming to get you. Just leave the tub of sweets outside the front door, turn all the lights off and hide under your bed until dawn.

I had a lot of fun painting this one. He's a lovely resin piece from Bad Squiddo.  I've had him for quite a while but now I'm going through the unpainted mountain I'm picking out things I just want to paint rather than things aimed at specific rules. He's a big guy too, around 7cm tall, so over twice the height of an average 28mm figure. The backdrop is, once again from one of Jon Hodgson's background books, available from Bad SQuiddo and Handiwork Games.

Feelin' Hot, Hot, Hot!

Here's another resin piece from (I think) Bad Squiddo;

He is some kind of Fire Elemental or Daemonic entity. Anyway, he's a hot guy. He is also a nice simple sculpt and cast, with lots of crisp detail which made painting him a doddle. 

As I say, I think he is from Bad Squiddo, although he isn't on the website. If he is a discontinued model that would explain it. Also, I think Annie sent him to me as a freebie in an order of other stuff. Nice mini, though, standing at around 5cm tall.

If he isn't Bad Squiddo, perhaps someone could tell me where he's actually from?
 

She's big, red and angry.....

 ...... yes, she is a female ogre (28mm Amazon warrior for scale only)

I didn't want to do her as a green Princess Fiona sort of ogre. I wanted her to look more "human", so I gave her a human flesh tone, which I darkened with Citadel Reikland Flesh wash, because I liked the idea of her becoming red when filled with rage and in stone-throwing, warrior-crushing mode. 

She is a Bad Squiddo resin figure and a lovely piece of sculpting. She was a joy to paint because the casting is so crisp and detailed. I'm really very happy with how she has turned out.

The background is a Jon Hodgson fantasy one from Handiwork Games and the hapless, about to be squished warrior is from Bad Squiddo.

I'm sure she'll have lots of opportunities to see tabletop action.

A big gribbly thing

This thing is from Fenris Games, it is called an Otyugh and is a Dungeons and Dragons monster.

It (he/she/they/it?) is a resin model that comes in seven pieces and, which assembled is around 7cm tall and 10cm from the end of one arm to the other. Assembly is relatively simple and the pieces fit well with only a small amount of trimming and smoothing required

I've wanted to get this one painted up since I first got it, but holidays and life in general got in the way, also a loss of my Painter's Mojo. Still, I thought that this was a great way to get back into the groove.

I've painted it in a fairly similar colour scheme to the one on the Fenris website, mainly because I think that the green is the best way to go. The actual painting was pretty straightforward, the bulk of the heavy lifting was done by using Halfords' Dark Green matt camouflage spray paint and lots of drybrushing with lighter shades of green, although I sprayed an off-white matt primer into the mouth before using the colours you see now. I washed the thing with two different Citadel shades, Reikland flesh in the mouth and Mortarion Grime elsewhere. I kept the base simple, AK Terrains Dark Earth drybrushed with Vallejo Iraqi Sand.

The photograph uses a Jon Hodgdon backdrop from the Fantasy Ruins and Tunnels book.

I think that apart from D&D (I seriously hope this thing doesn't end up in our club's current D&D campaign), this is the kind of Gribbly Horror that could be useful in anything from Victorian Pulp Horror and Cthulhu to skirmishes in far-away planets in the distant future.

A few more finished figures

These would have been finished a week or so ago but an arthritic flare-up in my right wrist made painting difficult and painful. Anyway, here are two angry Yetis from the Copplestone Back of Beyond Adventurers set.

Blue skin and white fur seems to be de rigueur for a Yeti these days, but I wanted mine to be more naturalistic colourwise. I thought that a Yeti living in the woods or below the level where everything is covered in snow would need to blend in with its surroundings, so I chose a brown palette. I think that these are terrific figures which could fit into many different games and locations. I am particularly pleased with their reddish skintone.

The next figure is from Bad Squiddo. It is a Forest Spirit.

I've had this figure for absolutely ages, maybe as long as three or four years and it has been undercoated for most of that time. I thought I really ought to get it finished. It is a resin figure, cast by Ristul and is a sort of manifestation of the forest in animal form. I think it is a lovely piece, a spirit inhabiting a body that is both tree and creature combined.

I've got a few more figures finished, but I'm not happy with the photos, so I'll have to redo them tomorrow.

By the by, I don't recommend having arthritic wrists. It is not only very painful but it really limits what you can do.

Anyway, I won't be starting anything else off because I'm off on holiday soon.

Two Bad Squiddo resin historical figures - Jeanne de Clisson and Mata Hari

I've had these two for absolutely ages, but I only got round to washing and cleaning them up when I started work on the North Star resin Necromancer and Apprentice in early March.   

First, Jeanne de Clisson, both front and back. Her white coif doesn't show up well in the first picture;

Jeanne de Clisson was born in the Vendée in 1300. She was a member of the noble Montaigu de Belleville family. She married four times, but it is her third marriage to Olivier IV de Clisson that led to her fame. Olivier was executed by the French King Philippe VI, le Fortuné. As a result, she took up arms against the French Crown. She sold off the Clisson lands and raised a force to fight French forces in Brittany. She later took to the sea as an English privateer with a fleet of three ships, attacking French vessels and killing the crews.

I've chosen to paint her in green because I like the colour and I didn't want to just do another standard Jeanne de Clisson figure. In green, she becomes a more flexible figure for all kinds of gaming.

Mata Hari, born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in 1876, is best known for having been executed as a German spy in 1917. She is portrayed as an archetypal femme fatale but her life was really terribly sad. Her marriage to Rudolf MacLeod, a Dutch officer serving in the Far East was a miserable thing. He was a brutal alcoholic infected with syphilis, which he passed on to his wife. Both their children were born with the disease, from which both of them later died. After divorcing MacLeod in 1903, Margaretha moved to Paris, becoming an artist's model and exotic dancer. She claimed to be a Javanese Hindu princess and became the mistress of a prominent French industrialist, Émile Guimet who was a devotée of Oriental Art. Mata Hari was a promiscuous woman and ended up as a courtesan rather than a performer. As a Dutch citizen, Mata Hari was able to cross borders freely during the war, the Netherlands being neutral, and she was recruited by the French Deuxième Bureau as an agent. She was charged with getting close to senior German military figures and she may, or may not have become a double agent.

In any case, the French government had her arrested, tried and executed as a German spy, although there doesn't appear to have been much in the way of evidence.

I've chosen to paint Mata Hari as a kind of generic femme fatale figure, who could quite easily be a Temptress in fantasy games, a seductive priestess, a mystic or something else.

I am pretty pleased with how she has come out, although I think that I could have done better with her face. I will have to do a spot of touching-up to improve that. I've stuck to green again but with lilac as a foil. Even her hair is lilac, which I think gives her an otherworldly feel.

North Star Frostgrave Necromancer and Apprentice

Back in February, Nick Eyre at North Star announced a painting competition. The objective was to paint the new Frostgrave Necromancer figure. Of course, I had to give it a go. I bought the figure, who comes with a nice (well, nice if you exclude all the necromancy stuff) apprentice. They arrived, I prepped and undercoated them and then I caught Covid and didn't feel much like painting for a few weeks. Finally, I got back to painting and today I finally finished them and even got them varnished, because it stopped raining and the sun came out. Here are my finished efforts; Necromancer front and back, ditto for the apprentice and then both of them together.

He is a pretty dynamic figure and, being a resin cast is beautifully crisp. I decided to do a fairly simple base to portray a blasted heath with clumps of dead grass. The tufts are by Gamer's Grass. Overall, I think he looks OK.

Here is his evil sidekick. He clearly graduated from pulling the wings off of flies a few years ago.

Annoyingly, I noticed a stray piece of ballast on the strap of his bag after uploading the photo. It is gone now, but doesn't really matter because it is the main man who matters for the competition, which I am not expecting to win anyway. It is the taking part that matters.

I think they have come out reasonably well. Certainly good enough for gaming purposes, which is the reason I paint things in the first place.

Here they are together;

Something different - angry cat guy!

This lovely mini is a Bad Squiddo one, created by Leandro Ventic and cast in lovely crisp resin. He is called David the Cat on Annie's website. 

To me though, he is called Basil the Bold, in memory of a wonderful ginger tom we used to own called Basil.

The real life Basil was a big chap, a scrapper, a ratter and the top cat of the area where I was living at the time. In other words, pretty much what this fantasy cat warrior would be all about if he was an actual person, apart from, possibly, the ratting, but you never can tell. Some things run deep in feline genes.

Anyway, as a fighter, I've given him a somewhat battleworn and grubby appearance, with a fair few questionable stains on his tunic and armour, a battered old leather belt and some well-worn patches on his cloak.

He would make a splendid addition to all manner of fantasy settings, maybe even as a knight in a Frostgrave warband.

Scarecrows!

These three scarecrows are from Bad Squiddo Scenics, sculpted by the incomparable Ristul. Annie used to sell them under the banner of Ristul's Extraordinary Market, but bought the line in 2018.

I bought these at Colours last year and recently painted them as a change from painting figures for 7TV. Of course, these would be perfect for 7TV games, especially ones involving strange goings-on in one of those inward-looking villages somewhere in rural England.

Anyway, I've photographed them from front and rear, to show off the truly splendid detail on these gorgeous resin pieces.

Worzel Gummidge would never have been allowed on children's TV if he'd looked like this.

I wanted to paint these up looking old, tatty and faded, so after undercoating in Army Painter leather brown, I used mainly pale brown and tan colours, with bits of green and dark red well diluted to act as washes on some parts of the figures. I wanted the orange of the pumpkin heads to look quite faded too, as though these scarecrows had spent too long out in the weather. There is so much detail in the figures that I did a fair amount of dry-brushing, both before and after an ink wash. I made up small mounds from blue foam, covered with mixed ballast. After finishing the figures, I used the same pale browns and tans to dry-brush the bases before finishing them with a mixed flock.

Fenris Games - Cauldron Warband Kickstarter

Last year I backed a Kickstarter from Fenris Games. I found out about it from Annie Norman, of Bad Squiddo Games, the Mother of Peegs herself.

The Kickstarter interested me, because I already had a wonderful resin piece from Fenris and also because the figures looked so amazingly weird. I could see many possibilities for using them in various ways. 

The basic premise of the Cauldron Warband was a bunch pf plague-ridden Chaos Dwarves, Sorcerers and various other nasties and gribblies. I could think of a few ways of building them into games right from the beginning.

Anyway, the Kickstarter shipped in late December and I received my parcel on Monday. I thought I'd post a few pics, even before I'd cleaned up and assembled anything. Here they are. In addition to the figures themselves, there are some really very nice resin pieces, including some excellent detailed scenic bases that are almost too nice to glue the figures onto, the evil Black Cauldron itself and a scary Chaotic beast (called "Spot" in the Kickstarter).

I won't get started on these for a while, as I am currently devoting all my painting time to Peninsular War Portuguese line infantry.

He's big, he's red, he's got horns growing out of his head

Yes, he's another daemon, and he will be a Behemoth in my Saga AoM Otherworld warband. Of course, he could also play a role in Frostgrave and other games too. He is a multi-purpose monster.

He is from the North Star Frostgrave Bestiary, where he is listed as a "Major Demon". I don't think that anyone could realistically argue with that! The actual figure stands around 5.5cm high and is a two part model with a resin body and a metal head. To make him appear even more imposing I decided to base him on a rocky outcrop, so that he can really tower over the opposition's troops.

Here he is from behind;

This rear view really shows off the whirly patterns etched into his hide. I decided that I wanted these to glow with magical power, but not for this to dominate the figure. Therefore some parts of the patterns are glowing gold while others are just showing up as darker patterning.

I decided to keep the red/purple/brass/old gold theme I've used already, but I wanted him to be a lighter shade of red, so I gave his fleshy parts a glaze of Burnt Sienna Windsor and Newton ink after painting.

The base is made from dense blue insulation foam, roughly carved into a rocky shape. I glued on ballast of varying sizes and then gave the whole thing an undercoat with grey paint mixed with PVA glue. This was to ensure that when I spray undercoated the whole thing with black primer the propellant wouldn't eat into the foam.

Once painted, I added a few tufts to the rocks for a more natural effect. Once again, I am really happy with the results. I think that this warband is shaping up nicely.

Here he is again, with another figure for scale;

My female wizards certainly seem to have a pretty casual approach about standing around rocky objects and chanting. In true pantomime style, I feel it is essential to shout out the traditional warning "He's Behind You!"

More Daemons .....................

............... for my Otherworld Saga AoM band.

These are going to be my Creatures, clearly bipedal ones. I've had these figures hanging around for absolutely ages. They are from Alternative Armies, I think, and I bought them because I had an idea for a possible Alien Squad Leader army in which I thought they would work. In the end, I changed my mind about the army and they've sat around waiting to be useful. Now, their moment has arrived.

I decided to keep to my red colour scheme for my daemonic entities with these guys, but vary it slightly by adding orange to the palette.

As you can see in this shot, they are basically just giant mouths on legs, which seems pretty daemonic to me and are the kind of thing that are best left in a different dimension, not being summoned by accidentally reading a spell in a hoary old tome found in a dusty and forgotten corner of a library in an old house with a bad reputation.

Here you can see them from above, showing how I brought out the scaly plates on their backs in orange.

I am going to use this gravelly base concept for the whole army and I decided to use this yellow. orange and red foam stuff to suggest some weird alien fungus thing.

The next part of this army project depends on me glueing North Star Snakemen and Cultists together, so I'll have to get on with that next week, as I have some other odds and ends to finish off first.