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Post by tauster on Jan 1, 2019 20:49:56 GMT
A quick update... I didn't ahve much time between the year end parties, but a little got done anyways.
1) The packing bean insects are finished. I just gave them a drybrush with a metallic black and went lightly over the flesh parts as well, creating a surprisingly cool dirt effect.
2) The bone turtles are all based in black and drying.
3) ...aaaand. The prototype mimic is finally finished. Hurray! 
I really, really, really didn't look forward to painting the arms & weapons, so I postponed finishing this critter until not only the while bunch of mimics including the giant crate stack mimics were finished but also until the encounter was finished. So sadly, the poor guy missed all the action. We had several cinematic scenes, like the goblin pyromancer getting swallowed whole by a mimic and freeing himself by casrting a fireball from inside the hopping crate, causing a spray of mimic flesh and riding the shockwave, salto and all, landing on another mimic. Yes, the player had lucky dice that evening. I'll share a few pics soon-ish, but no longwinded game report this time. |
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Post by tauster on Jan 21, 2019 18:21:45 GMT
I made new molds from parts of Reaper Bones 1 creatures, namely the heads, hands and arms of two hill giants (?) and the lower half of the giant turtle shell. The upper half and the legs were already done months earlier.
I made one or two spikey shells without getting anywhere, so far. The hill giant appendages will see use as spellmarkers for various bigby's hands spells, and the turtle spontaneously stomped towards the upper end of my to-do list. It didn't take terribly long to make a fun critter out of the various parts waiting somwhere on my desk.
I used the 'head' of a carnivorous plant as the head...
...and a small tyranid brood hill (no idea if that's the correct name for those things) as the ...other end of the digestive tract.
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Post by thedungeonmattster on Jan 27, 2019 11:49:00 GMT
I made new molds from parts of Reaper Bones 1 creatures, namely the heads, hands and arms of two hill giants (?) and the lower half of the giant turtle shell. The upper half and the legs were already done months earlier.
I made one or two spikey shells without getting anywhere, so far. The hill giant appendages will see use as spellmarkers for various bigby's hands spells, and the turtle spontaneously stomped towards the upper end of my to-do list. It didn't take terribly long to make a fun critter out of the various parts waiting somwhere on my desk.
I used the 'head' of a carnivorous plant as the head...
...and a small tyranid brood hill (no idea if that's the correct name for those things) as the ...other end of the digestive tract.
Oh man that's gonna be badass! Reminds me a lot of Tokka from the old TMNT sequel:  |
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Post by tauster on Jan 29, 2019 18:19:15 GMT
I want a few more minis for practising my airbrush skills, and I figured that zombies would be pretty easy to paint. I do have some unpainted zombie minis, but I want to practice on something more expendable first. My boy has a game with bunny pawns, and I was quite sure that if I made a mold, the ears would be pretty hard to get right with hotglue, leaving me with half-ear bunnies. Ideal for zombies, right? So I made a mold, deliberately not taking much care to get the silicone mass exactly around each figure so that the copies would have defects. I think I got exactly what I wanted. Even if the pic doesn't show it very well: There's only one bunny with both ears intact, the others all have nasty half-ears and other defects.
Now all I need is a zombie-painting tutorial and off we go! |
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Post by tauster on Jan 29, 2019 18:52:09 GMT
I didn't even waited for the end of the tutorial, and started priming them with different base colors. Since these guys will be, in effect, zombies with pelt, I can't paint them completely with skin tones.When the base colors have dried, I'll go over the 'wounds' with my skin tone, finishing with the usual dark pink wash for blood and high gloss for a nasty sheen. The eyes will glow red, naturally(?).
I gave some of them brown splashes; lets see if this was a good idea or not.
I highly recommend Sorastro's channel, btw. He's got one of the best tutorials explaining how to paint minis step by step,
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Post by sgtslag on Jan 30, 2019 15:02:47 GMT
LOL! Love it! Too funny... Looking forward to seeing this come to fruition! Cheers!
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Post by tauster on Mar 9, 2019 16:31:23 GMT
Not really a mini but more of a mini stand/base. I might use it as a fly marker of sorts, but it makes most sense for a dedicated mini: A cube-spell-themed wizard will probably appear in one of the next sessions...
The inspiration I found online somewhere:
I cut me a fistful of 10mm sized styrofoam cubes on the thermocut and hotglued them on a poker chip. Time required: approx. 30 min.
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Post by tauster on Mar 19, 2019 20:13:37 GMT
Just for fun, I made a mould from a kids toy crocodile a few months ago, with no intention of using crocs in my games anytime soon. And I finally, after years of searching, found some two-sided wing moulds. I always loved winged critters, but so far the best I could come up with for wings were two-sided petal moulds for cake decoration. So these wings with actual feathers were a real highlight for me.
Months later, I still hadn't done anything cool with either. I made a crocodile, just to see if the mould was OK, and I played around with the wings to get the hang of it. The cool thing with that moulds is that you can twist the mould so that the wings look like they were beating the air, enabling very dynamic poses on a mini. But so far, no mini. Both the crocodile and the pair of wings gathered dust on my craft desk, until today I finally had enough and glued the latter to the former, creating a ...Pegacroc? Aligasus? You decide! 
Painting was simple. I just went with three shades of greens and a brown wash and called it done.
...so, who'll be riding such an abomination? I think I'll make half a dozen of them and place them on some of the new worlds my spelljamming group will visit soon-ish. Nothing says 'new worlds' better than fighting monsters that no player has ever seen, or heard, or read in any monster manual before!  |
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Post by tauster on Apr 15, 2019 18:38:49 GMT
What's worse than winged alligators? Undead winged alligators of course! Some of the wings and crocs I had cast had defects and voids. At first I wanted to throw them away, or smelt them in again, but then I realized that these defects look like wounds. So I carefully abused the hotglue parts a bit more here and there - a few creative nicks and pushes with the hot nozzle of the gluegun work wonders - and got wonderfully gross zombified Pegadils. Or is it Crocosi? Crocosusses? I also gave them a weird outgrowth at the back of the skull. Not sure if this thing has a function or if it's just decorative (somehow I hesitate to use the term eye candy here...). It could be some weird intelligent parasite, or just a random outgrowth. Maybe the riders hold fast on this lump of flesh, or maybe they can use it to steer their mount?
All based in dark green. The two zombies got their wounds based with skin color.
Washed with a dark red/purple and cleaned up the runny wash with another layer of the green base color.
Next steps:
- gloss varnish over the wounds - the same drybrush & wash steps I did on the prototype.
What would have been cool: Add magnets or metal scraps when casting the crocodiles. I could have made a thin hotglue layer on the back, then add a neodym, or better a scrap metal piece and then continue to fill out the corcodile mould. Scrap metal would have been less strong, but cheaper and, most important: better for polarity reasons - I wouldn't have to care which of the neodym in the miniature's base I'd have to glue in side up or down. But now the crocs are cast. I could meld them open from the belly upwards, and maybe I'll do it in the end. But for now I concentrate on getting the paint job done.
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Post by margaret on Apr 17, 2019 2:05:20 GMT
Ick! And I bet that's what your players will say.
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Post by Credo DM on Apr 17, 2019 3:31:55 GMT
"Pegagators"! Or, shortened to just "Pegators" maybe?
Certainly, there must be magic at play to get the demonstrably un-aerodynamic physiology of alligators or crocodiles to work with wings... Oops, nerding out here...😋🤓 ...but, obviously there is since we'd have to go a-spelljamming across the multiverse to see these creatures.
Awesome kit bashing. Any homebrew lore or backstory you can share on these Pegators, perhaps after your players have encountered them?
Pax ✌️
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Post by tauster on Jul 12, 2019 20:42:51 GMT
Just re-watched Thor 3 with my oldest (7 yrs and an avid Marvel fan. Guess I've done that part of parenting right *g*). Really loved the look of Surtur...
Mothers Children are heading towards a realm of lava and fire, an elemental pocket on the shores of the Glimmersea. Yes, I haven't posted some of the latest session reports, will do asap... Two of the party are pyromancers, an eladrin and a goblin, both hailing from the Feydark, so they lost a good deal of their power in Faeruns Underdark. They hope to regain that power somehow through that poket of elemental fire.
And that's where Surtur comes into play: The Mother campaign is a parallel story arc of our oldest campaign, Night Below. There, the fire region in the underdark has a temple/shrine of Surtur, defended by fire giants. They will be encountered by the Night Below party, some undefined time in the future of Mothers Children, so we're about to play a prequel that really isn't one, because the Night Below group is not yet that far advanced in the story arc... Still with me? Sorry for rambling.
Long story short: I want a giant fire miniature bigature!
I made a giant rock golem in 2016 (see here), which I don't really like after the years. Never had it on the table, so my players don't know that guy. Which is great because I intend to se it as the base for a fire/lava giant elemental kind of monster. The general plan is to add some more rocks (PVA + pebbles), spraypaint the thing in white, followed by drybrush layers of yelow, orange, light & dark reds. Then a heavy layer of crackle paint, which will get heavily drybrushed in black + metallic black.
The look I'm aiming at is somewhere along those lines:
Not sure this will work, but I'll give it a try, soon-ish. Tips, advice and suggestions are welcome, as usual!
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Post by sgtslag on Jul 13, 2019 1:56:34 GMT
Sounds brilliant! I recently filled in some gaping holes in my game world's mythology, which involves Surtur... I have discussed, since 1990, that there are gods, and there are Elemental Lords, and the two are separate, and distinct from each other, even though the Water Elemental Lord, Fastitocalon, is widely worshiped, as a god. The different player groups, over the past 30 years, understood that one god, is apparently the father of the others, and he is far superior to all of them. Then there is the Water Elemental Lord, but they never knew, and neither did I, who the other three Elemental Lords were. It had to simmer in my subconscious mind for 29 years before I finally figured it out. My mythology is loosely based on the Greek Titans, and the Greek gods, who were born of the Titans. The similarities are superficial, but there. In my mythology, the Elemental Lords (Titans) were never defeated, per se. The players have always understood that Fastitocalon, and the Earth Elemental Lord/Father of the gods, Aldoran, are vastly more powerful than the gods. They don't understand it, and neither did I -- until it finally gelled in my mind, after 30 years...
I made the father of the gods, Aldoran, the Earth Elemental Lord. I named Surtur, as the Fire Elemental Lord, and there has always been the Water Elemental Lord, Fastitocalon. The final one to fall into place, was the Air Elemental Lord. I decided that the creators of the Dragon races, Bahamut and Tiamat, were two sides of the same coin -- together, they were the Air Elemental Lord.
Tiamat, however, was killed during the first war of the gods, and she was later resurrected, as an undead 'god', so the Chromatic Dragons became evil, because of this. The fun twist to this mythology, is that Bahamut, and all of the Metallic Dragons, absolutely hate Paladins: for it was their god who sent Tiamat to her death, in the first war of the gods, so they loathe all Paladins who serve she who killed the female half of their Air Elemental Lord, Bahamut. Bahamut is like a soul torn in half, which can never be restored, so his hatred is deep, and eternal, towards one particular living god...
The Metallic Dragon's alignment prevents them from simply killing Paladins on sight, but given the chance, they will kill them, if they can only find a reason. Only one PC knows this, as it is part of forbidden knowledge of the ancient past (the living gods have kept this a secret for nearly 4,000 years, until recently, and they don't want anyone to know this part of their history...). The player has to dance a delicate dance with this information, because sharing it, could kill him, and a lot of other innocent people, if the gods find out he shared his forbidden knowledge with anyone. "Religion is complicated..."
Anyway, I can see a need for Surtur to make an appearance in the campaign, in the future. Having your Surtur figure as a guide, I just might build my own version, weaving him, and his figure, into the game. Looking forward to seeing it! Cheers!
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Post by tauster on Jul 16, 2019 18:16:58 GMT
The Giant Purple Worm I started back in Dec 2018 (see here and here) finally sees some progress. I don't dare say it is nearly finished as I know those ' spontaneous project breaks' only too well. That beast had been sitting on the back of my craft desk for over half a year!  I didn't take pics of the beast during the 'primed in black' and 'metallic black applied' stages, but here's what happend after that. Not much really, but it makes a huge difference. After the metallic black (which was applied as a heavy drybrush over the black acrylic basepaint) had dried, I spraypainted the body halves from the fronts with metallic copper, trying to dst over them, giving them only a light coat. Light coats are difficult to achieve with spraycans, but I haven't made progress with the airbrush so far. The effect is similar to drybrushing, but with much finer gradients. When the copper was dry, I drybrushed Gehenna Gold over everything, giving the scales a much warmer tone. I took care not to make it an even drybrush so that some parts of the body still have that copper tone. The part in the background already has the gold applied, the front piece not:
Daylight shot with the Gold applied to both parts: Glamour shot. I'm not really sure what to do with the maw. Glowing lava/fire and some OSL effects are tempting, but I'm not sure I can pull that off without ruining the thing...
So what's left? Giving them some heavyweight byses (large washers) and texturing them, preferrably as cracked lava. I see another spontaneous project break looming ahead, as I don't really like that part - but I need that beast in one of the coming sessions, so time pressure should motivate me enough to get it done.
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Post by sgtslag on Jul 16, 2019 20:25:06 GMT
Wow... Wow... I'd hold my breath, but I might pass out before you finish it. Impatiently waiting... Cheers!
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Post by tauster on Jul 18, 2019 21:55:54 GMT
Wow... Wow... I'd hold my breath, but I might pass out before you finish it. Impatiently waiting... Cheers! Hope you're still with us! I finished the beast, just in time. We're doing the session featuring the Lava Worm on sunday. Friday and saturday will be filled with other roleplaying campaigns, so no time for crafting. Heck, three days of roleplaying in a row - I haven't done that in more than a decade! I was able to magnetize the rear end, but the lower part of the worm front* was angled in such a way that I just couldn't use a flexible way of fasten it AND hide from view. So I had to glue that front worm to the hole**. * worm front, front worm... In case those terms didn't exist before, I hereby officially claim to be the inventor of the front worm and the worm front. Gods, the adventure hooks... 
** Another sentence worth being chisseled in stone so it can be savoured in eons to come.
The rear end of the worm is detachable. I needed three neodyms on the worm AND the base each, as this thing is quite heavy and angled.
The holes were made years ago, I made half a dozen of them and took the largest two for this beastie. The magnets were painted over so they are a bit camouflaged. I'm sure I'll find uses for a magnetized hole in the future...
The sting. I'm still looking for a cool poison effect - ideas welcome!
The maw. I didn't add any heat effect. For once I don't really have the time anymore and second, I really don't want to ruin this one. I think this will become one of my favourite bigatures.
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Post by sgtslag on Jul 19, 2019 1:52:36 GMT
Wow. Coining new phrases; demonstrating new, innovative designs with magnets; a new, metallic take on a classic monster; and more! Somebody stop him -- it's too much, too soon!... A body can only take so much crafting genius. 😆 LOL! Cheers!
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Post by tauster on Jul 23, 2019 16:10:21 GMT
Just realized I never shared the finished Flying Cubes project. Or the parts that are finished, as I made two bases and one is still blackbombed.
Painted in copper, then washed with thinned-down turquoise:
Finished:
Not sure how I'll paint the other one. Rusted iron would look good, and it'd be easier than the blue-ish OSL effect of the original, cool as it may look. Also, rusted iron is more generic and thus would see more use on the table.
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Post by deafnala on Jul 29, 2019 20:55:45 GMT
The floating cubes create a WONDERFULLY surrealistic scene. OUTSTANDING WORK!
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Post by tauster on Jul 31, 2019 18:53:13 GMT
The floating cubes create a WONDERFULLY surrealistic scene. OUTSTANDING WORK!Glad you like it. I hadn't seen that concept before, or anything even remotely similar. So I jst had to do something alike and see what it will look like, just for the heck of it. Turned out I like the idea so much that I'll have to expand on the idea. Guess a Magneto-like recurring NPC will start popping up in one of my campaigns, sometime soon-ish. Not sure he'll be a villain of an ally. Or both.
Here's something else I couldn't resist recently: DMScotty's Zombie Sharks. As written yesterday, our Underdark Campaign will soon reach the Glimmersea, an Underdark ocean below the Sea of Falen Stars. Before the party will tackle the campaign's main villain (a whole city of aboleth), they have been adviced to scout the area out, ' area' meaning not only the shore and some of the small islands but also what's below the waves. So I need several wildly different aquatic encounter sets. That means I need monsters whose level of weirdness will shock my players, who have seen some pretty weird shit ( literally) down the years as their characters traipsed explored ever deeper into the underdark. Their characters have been eaten by a deepspawn, killing each PC at the end of a single player session meant to introduce the character into an ongoing campaign. Now each player has a clone of his or her PC, completely identical to the original and totally loyal to Mother and her children. Now the children travel the underdark as some kind of a weird family, a half-derro-half-slime, a troll priest of Ghaunadaur, a quaggoth psion, a goblin riding a giant lizard and a pair of pyromancers from the Feydark, a goblin and an eladrin. They are travelling on the King's Highway where they have fought against Torog children, each more absurd and abominable than the last. Some of them were swallowed by a giant purple worm and, thanks to being resistant to acid, not only survived the experience but litterally rode it out, travelling inside the beast for days until they were ejected out of the worms rear end, finding themselves in a heap of worm shit that crawled with insects larger than themselves. [*]
The list goes on, but I trust you understand what level of weirdness I have to aim at when I want to hear earnest WOW!'s on the table again. [*] Wormshit session report here, and most of the other session reports are here, although the most recent few are still missing. Just in case someone is interested in weird campaigns...
Long story short, I ordered two dozen cheap plastic fishes ( this and this, shelling out 22€ for 22 creatures),... ...chose three sharks of this size... ...and happily started to maim them.
I cut large holes in two of them, so I can show more of their insides. After their initial encounter with the giant beasts, Fors and Cale were not discouraged. Indeed, I didn't expect them to have [drumroll] so much guts and explore further. It probably won't end well for them, but they have seen worse and survived it. Much worse.
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