odinsgrandson

Medusa is easily among the most beautiful sculpts I've ever painted. My hat is off to Sebastian Archer, he really outdid himself with this one. After I posted the first one, another client asked me to paint her up for him. I mostly followed my original color scheme, except this time I used true metallics in place of the non-metallic metals I used the first time around. I'll need to paint one up for myself sometime. She really just screams to be in a competition. I've posted her to coolmini for anyone who cares to vote.

For Thanksgiving, we finished off our Kingdom Death Monster campaign with an epic battle against the Watcher. It was pretty glorious. We played with all the Chibi conversions of KDM minis I've made, and the survivors were all heroes from Super Dungeon Explore. Princess Ruby was pretty awesome with her bone darts and monster tooth necklace. Now that I've admitted to finishing off more Kingdom Death Chibis than I've shown off, I figure I'd better get to posting them. Here's the Butcher: And if you don't know what Kingdom Death: Monster is, you should probably have a look at the outstanding Kickstarter that they're running right now. The fact that it got to 3.5 million overnight is not overstating the quality of the game- it is fantastic on pretty much every level- brilliant minis, fantastic rules set, terrific art, crazy loads of fun.

Here's a fun little set of dragons that I painted up. Both minis are Reaper Bones plastic. I believe I made the base from a mini CD (they're exactly 80mm wide, so they work really well at this size). I had a lot of fun with this dragon- I'm always fond of painting dragons in non-standard chromatic colors.

Continuing my project to create a set of Kingdom Death: Monsters using chibi minis, here is my Screaming Antelope. I find that I really enjoy mixing the brutal nightmare setting of Kingdom Death with the cuteness of chibi minis. He was created using mostly parts from Impact! Miniatures- the head started out as a chibi beastman, and the body came from a nightmare (one of the largest of their chibi pony miniatures). I sculpted the mouth and teeth in the belly, and moved the legs around to turn it into an antelope (and sculpted most of details to make up the difference). I'll be posting up some of the nemesis monsters soon.

Among the Kingdom Death's great lineup of minis, one set that I'll always be fond of is the four starting survivors. They're all beautiful sculpts that really grant an opportunity to do nice skintones. For these four, my client wanted something similar to what is suggested in the Kingdom Death artwork- except that Erza was definitely not to have blue hair. Here they are in all their glory: Zachery and Erza Lucy and Alister

Here’s a couple that had a very clear idea for me to work with. He’s a painter, and her occupation involves wine- and here they are in their glorious combat pose. This pose is more ‘three dimensional’ than most that I do. The design suits a cake that is displayed in the center of a room, rather than to one side. As such, they need several angles to really show them off.

Kingdom Death has a truly remarkable line of miniatures. The resins are among the very top tier of what is available in minis, and the plastics are crisp as Wyrd's. This is one of their plastic minis that I got to paint up for a client- so far as I know, he's one of the few Kingdom Death monsters that has never been released in resin. I really love the pride the sculpt presents- his Apathy and condescension really worked for me. I've also posted him to CMON along with a shot of his back, for anyone who is into voting and whatnot.

These are some trolls from Super Dungeon Explore (the Mistmourn Coast Warband). As with most of my own Super Dungeon set, I painted each one in its own color scheme. The yellow troll colors I chose because they match the trolls from Fantasy Forest. Fantasy Forest is an old TSR game I played when I was five- it is basically like Candy Land except that you get ambushed by orcs and kobolds along the way. The spawn point was just perfectly designed for an OSL effect, so I had to go that direction with it:

This was my entry for the P3 Grandmasters this year. I didn't want to push myself as hard to improve my painting this year- mostly because I was dealing with the sleep deprivation that comes with having a newborn. I did, however, want to push myself in terms of basing, and I think that I succeeded there. I went with a very battle damaged look. I think that if I were to do it again, I'd go for a bit cleaner look- still add some damage, but not nearly so much. As is, there's hardly an area on him that isn't covered with some sort of nicks and scratches. I've posted him to CMON for anyone who cares to vote.

So I really like board games with cool minis. Two of the board games that I’ve spent the most time playing are Kingdom Death: Monster and Super Dungeon Explore! Both are great games with fantastic minis- although the tones each use could hardly be farther apart. The developers of these games know each other, and When both games went to Kickstarter, they took the opportunity to do a cool cross over. So means that we got a really cute chibi of the Twilight Knight. She makes a great mini, and I’d have been happy to leave it off there, but the fluff on her card implies that if those super cute Super Dungeon characters go into the Nether Rift in their seting, they end up in the brutal and bloody hell world of Kingdom Death. So I got to thinking about this, and decided that I really needed to expand on this idea of the cute little chibis on the Planes of Faces. Yes, these are all playable, and I'm going to continue to create Chibi versions of Kingdom Death monsters.

I love the tradition where I get minis that my daughter picked out. This is one that she described as "a Squid-Octopus." Also "He looks like he's gonna eat me." I believe he's supposed to be one of the stranger D&D creatures (a sort of stalagmite that eats the rare creature to walk into a cave- sort of like a carnivorous plant, except larger, deadlier, and living in environment that doesn't have plentiful creatures to support it. Naturally, we had to incorporate it into our Mouslings game, and I found this encounter was my favorite moment as a GM. - Mouslings are at sea GM: You hear singing. It sounds like children waying come and play with us. Make a will save. (4 Year old makes will save, fails. Her mother passes. GM considers saying something about being compelled to believe the voices, then thinks better of it). Yep, you hear children singing "Come play with us." 4yo: We need to go play with the children! Let's go right now! We get out of the boat to find the children. Mom: Maybe they aren't really... 4yo: We go play with the children! - The mouslings disembark, and are attacked by a strange tentacled monster that was impersonating children singing 4yo: (with astonishment) He lied! I went for a fleshy appearance, rather than making it look like an inorganic stalagmite. It just seemed more horrific a creature that way. The base I made for it was based on some Kingdom Death bases that I've made. For some reason, this creature just strikes me as so extremely strange that it fits right in in that hell dimension setting. Plus, I had made several of these Plains of Faces bases for clients, but I hadn't had a chance to paint one myself yet.

My wife took my four year old to the game store right before my birthday. This has become quite the tradition for us, and this time she came back with a pumkin golem. I guess she had been listening when I mentioned that my wife always seems to claim the pumpkin characters. He's already appeared in our weekly mouslings campaign- he was actually an ally npc who just happened to have an extremely creepy voice. And his name was John- he doesn't go by Jack. So here he is:

I make a lot of zombies for wedding cakes. A lot of them are simply zombies, and I get to decide the details. Many of them are designed to match specific people- most often the bridesmaids and groomsmen as zombies. One time, I even made the father of the bride as a zombie. This couple had an idea that was completely new to me- they wanted to be fighting off their pet dogs as zombies. Altogether, I think they turned out pretty awesome.

Here are a few Shattered Sword Paladins that I painted up a bit ago, but haven't gotten around to posting.

Here is one of my favorite sets of minis, of all time. They're the Fungal Growth Spawn point for Super Dungeon Explore, and I based the color schemes on the various colors of mushroom monsters from the Dragon Quest series.

I love classic minis. I don't know why exactly, but there's something charming about older miniatures that I'm really fond of. Often, when someone does a dashing job on a mini, we say "You've done justice to that mini." On that line of thinking, I feel like with older minis, the painter is doing them a favor. I hope I've done tremendous favors to these old Heroquest minis. Client chose the color schemes: Barbarian: Wizard: Fimir The littlest little Bloodthirster. Or gargoyle, since MB didn't want demons in their game:

Here's a ninja all stars character called Byakko. I decided he would look great as Wolverine, so I painted him up in the signature yellow and blue. I haven't done up the rest of the ninja team yet, but I'm pretty sure that the color scheme will work nicely on all of them. Anyway, here he is:

Thanks. Interestingly, the trick to the purple/blue color was that the first layer of shadow is pretty close to the same color value as the base dolor (ie, base in blue, shade in purple that isn't really darker than the blue). It made the color shift really strong.

Here's a ninja all stars character called Byakko. I decided he would look great as Wolverine, so I painted him up in the signature yellow and blue. I haven't done up the rest of the ninja team yet, but I'm pretty sure that the color scheme will work nicely on all of them. Anyway, here he is:

Here is a project that I really got to get into. My client wanted an Imperial Knight that had turned to Tzeentch. It was to be allied with his Chaos Daemons force, so it did not need to be a Thousand Sons Knight. There is only a little bit of conversion here- the head was swapped out for the head of a High Elf Phoenix. Otherwise, the alignment was all down to coloration. I wend with a blue to purple fade for most of the armor plating- I felt this was right for the god of change, and the bright pink contrasted nicely with that (and also matched a force composed largely of pink horrors). Of course, it isn't right to leave any Imperial Knight mini without freehand, so I made sure to get a lot of the Changing God's iconography all over him.

Here's a Twilight Knight that I got to paint up for a client. As some collectors will know, there are quite a few versions of the Twilight Knight for various games, and she is the most iconic hero from Kingdom Death. I love how, on her SDE card, the implication is that she is a human who has been surviving in the Nether Rift- implying that the hell dimension of Kingdom Death exists in chibi form inside the rift. Honestly, makes me want to convert an entire Chibi Kingdom Death set. Anyway, here she is:

The trick to getting straight lines in freehand is usually to go back and correct them with the background color afterwards. It helps with every sort of freehand, and you need a lot less brush control to pull it off.

Here's my rendition of the five headed dragon from Impact! Miniatures' chibi andventurers range. Not a whole lot to say about him past that, so here you go:

Thank you. I hadn't realized it when I painted him up, but I was matching a scheme I used on a client's Wyrmgear a little while back.

Here's an odd mini that I got to paint up. While he is a Monsterpocalypse mini, he really got painted for our Iron Kingdoms RPG. We had an eccentric mechanic who got to build her own warjack. I don't remember what rules the 'jack used, but it was extremely important that it look sort of like a dinosaur (or dragon spawn). Anyway, here it is: