winding down on miniature acquisition

I am finally feeling like I have an acceptable collection of RPG fantasy miniatures. I still have probably 50 or so to finish painting and I will likely need to make a few more foam trays to hold the ones I’ve made in the past month, but I think my three month obsession with acquiring or manufacturing minis is finally more or less at an end.

I will likely be focusing on terrain going forward with occasional mini posts. There will be a few more weeks where mini posts will be frequent, but eventually I will clear out the backlog of unpainted, unassembled or unfinished minis in my home office.

Lizard to dragon update

I’ve done a bit more work on the white dragon converted from a lizard from previous photos. It’s looking pretty dang nice really. I will post some photos tonight, I just wasn’t doing much with minis last night.

Update: Well, here are a couple of quick webcam photos. Man my webcam sucks!

Update2: I deleted those crummy webcam photos, here’s one from a decent camera. Still not finished with the paint job, but you can at least see the dragon in this one.

… and a photo from the backside..

Origami dragon

Here is an example of one of my origami dragons, I’ve got dozens of these of various colors and sizes. I’ve dipped a few of them into varnish/stain which sort of plasticizes them so they get pretty sturdy.

Thoughts on the playability of these? I am considering using the origami dragons for metallic dragons since they are much less commonly encountered than chromatic dragons, and when they are encountered, they are usually NPCs that only provide help or advice.

The cheap dragons…

Here are a few photos of the el cheapo dragons I’ve been making.

This is a group of dragons and a couple flying gorillas. All of them are simple miniatures bought literally for pennies to which I have added wings made of craft foam sheets, which I bought in huge packs for a buck at the dollar store. In a few cases I’ve added some epoxy putty which is by far the most expensive component in the miniatures, but they don’t need very much putty.

Here is a front detail view of one flying gorilla and one dragon. The flying gorilla has wing bones made of epoxy putty, and the dragon has had a long neck added using epoxy putty. The neck is too thick, I will make it thinner on future dragons.

And, here is the back of the flying gorilla and the dragon. In both cases I could use a bit of epoxy putty to smooth out the transition from body to wing and make them look more natural, but I was really doing these as prototypes and was just cutting and gluing without worrying much about looks.

Still, I think they are not bad for less than fifty cents each.

Uber cheap dragons…

So, I’ve been sort of messing around seeing how I can make minatures as cheaply as possible. Varnished origami is pretty tough to beat being only pennies per miniature, but there is only so much you can do with origami.

I’ve been converting lizards into dragons. The lizards came in a bag of one dozen lizards for less then $3 for one bag, and another dozen for $1 at a dollar general store. They are almost identical in size and shape, with a couple of variations including one with a nice horned crest.

To make wings I’m just cutting them out of foam sheets I purchased at the dollar store and then dipping them in hot water to shape them. Then I paint them. The end result is probably a large dragon miniature for less than a quarter.

And they don’t look bad.

There’s also a spidercrab there. I got some real cheap crawdad minis while in Louisiana, and the claws work just fine for spidercrabs…

Home from vacation

My family vacations are typically spent driving across country then seeing family and hanging out for a few days and then driving back across country again. Which is how things went for the past week.

Of course I checked out a number of dollar stores in the cities we visited when I had a chance, so I ended up adding yet more bugs, lizards and dragons. Plus my older brother who used to run a collectibles store gave me a bunch of miniatures from his “can’t sell on Amazon” stack. This included an entire space elf army for Warhammer complete with a Gamers Workshop carrying case. I feel bad, but I did take him, his wife and daughter out to dinner…

It’s nice to be home again, even if it does mean staring at this room full of half-baked miniatures and terrain in process….

Fire and ice…

So I’ve been working on stuff but not posting much the last few days. Right now I’ve got about two dozen “in progress” minis, which is pretty common for me actually. Here’s a short description of what’s on my desk right now:

Two lizard/dragons where I’ve just added some cheesy wings to a standard lizard miniature. They actually came out relatively decently so far, but I’m still painting. I’m trying to decide if I should grind off the dinosaur names on the wings or if trying to do that will just ruin the wings…

A rhino, a monkey, two apes and a prehistoric wingless bird.

Three bizarre looking “dragons” from “How to Train Your Dragon” that I think might make interesting elementals such as magma or earth elementals.

A dire boar (added four tusks and a big crest along the back of a standard, if oversized, boar.

Fixing a goblin I had to remove from a mount I turned into a dragon. Fixing a human I had to remove from a mount to make a dragon.

Some bizarre dinosaur that looks like a prehistoric dog.

Two flame elementals, two wind elementals, five ice elementals and an earth elemental literally made from pebbles.

Other than that I’ve got some odds and ends I’m still working on as well as the major dragon project that still needs wings.

Slow night…

So, I spent most of the evening buying a new car, so no new miniature, terrain or gaming post tonight.

Instead I’ll discuss some idle thoughts I had while taking my lunch walk today.

1. Three new miniature ideas:
– Vine swarm. Pretty cool idea I think, a mass of animated vines which can squirm around like an ooze or knot together and form a solid plant-creature like thing. The miniature would be sort of like a “Man-Thing” made of knotted vines. Could be cool.
– Predatory flying fungazoid. This is a direct ripoff of the flying fungus from the novel “Ox, Orn and Omnivore” by Piers Anthony. I’ll have to spice up the mini though since in the novel it’s described as a sort of flying triangle with a single blobby foot. I’ll work on a compound sort of single eye in front of a B-2 bomber shaped fungus with a malleable “foot” and with tentacles coming out of the ends of the wings. Should be an interesting creature which will likely fly in packs.
– Chain golem. Yes I know that Wizards introduced chain golems, but theirs are pretty lame. My chain golems are more like animated spiked chains which can attack with reach and can trip, entangle and constrict targets. But the truth is I just think the large humanoid made out of chains sounds like an awesome miniature.

2. Bought some more materials for making miniatures. Found a box of “sparkling ice” on the wedding aisle at a Walmart, along with some flowers from the floral aisle. The flower petals look like they will make awesome fairy wings and the sparkling ice has already provided me with a collection of ice elementals of small and medium size. Plus I’m gluing some together to make some large ones. I also picked up some discounted plastic army soldiers which I can’t use as is, but I can cut off heads, arms or legs and use them in various ways…

3. I’m working on a colossal dragon (or is it gargantuan? I always get those two backwards…) which I am making from a very nicely detailed velociraptor miniature. I’ve already used some Apoxie sculpt material to add horns and bony ridges along the back, now I just have to make the wings. If it works out as I hope it will, it will be by far my most detailed and impressive dragon.

4. Bats, bats bats… I’ve been on a quest to find a cheap supply of bat miniatures of various sizes so I can have a steady supply of el cheapo dragon wings. If I can find some I could turn out a dozen dragons a day using dinosaur or lizard miniatures that are dirt cheap themselves. But everywhere I look I’m told that bat miniatures are only stocked during Halloween. So I suspect I’ll be raiding the local supermarkets on November 1 for discounted packs of plastic or rubber bats….

Anyone who has any ideas for how to make cheap miniatures, just let me know. I’m always open to clever ideas…

Lots of armies…

I was looking to increase my miniature collection and to specifically come up with some armies that were tied to some of the major geopolitical elements in my campaign, so I looked around and found this guy on eBay from Hong Kong who sold unpainted boxes of miniatures sets of early historical armies, plus some fantasy figures like orcs, elves and undead. So I spent about $70 plus shipping from Hong Kong and got 367 minis that I then had to remove from sprues, paint and mount on bases. It took me a solid week to do them all, and this is a photo of all of them.

Here is a closer view of the “adventurers” set.

The woodland cottage

I don’t do nearly as much terrain as I would like. This was a very short and simple experiment in using a can of nuts as a form to create a round woodland cottage. I basically got a big wad of Sculpey clay and coated the can, then used a stick to score the outline of stones, and then cut out the door and windows, then baked the clay to harden it, and then painted it. The roof is supposed to be a sod roof, it’s made of foam with a plastic insert to fit over the top of the walls. I thought it came out pretty nice and it looks like I’ll be using this sort of technique again.

After painting it I glued on some floral lichen to create the overgrown weeds/ivy look. It looks better in real life, the harsh lighting of the camera flash really exaggerates the paint job and shadows…