Turd polishing I: Dollar Tree dragons

I picked up a pair of plastic dragons at a “Dollar Tree” store several years ago.  They were packaged in a small plastic tower about the size of a small thermos mug, and there were also knights in the same sort of towers, but I passed on the mas they were six inches or so tall and didn’t seem useful in the scales I model.  The dragons and knights came disassembled; in the case of the dragons each leg, the tail, wings, and head were all separate pieces that fit together with pegs and holes.  The joints were pretty loose and I filled them in with liquid nails, but couldn’t get them to look very good.  I later tried spackling the joints with some epoxy putty (the blue and grey kind plumbers use; that did not work out too well either because it sets very fast.  I need to find some of the green stuff.

Anyway I primed them with Rustolem plastic primer and went to work with a few coats of watered down craft paints, and then did some detailing with full-strength paint.  Both dragons were done in about and hour and a half of painting, total.  They were black and green originally but I figured red and green would be more useful, since I already have dragons of similar size from Descent that I painted black and blue, and I have metal white dragon.  I based them on plain old matte board, some 60 x 80 mm rectangles I probably cut for chariots or elephants for wargaming.

They still look kind of unfinished, but they are good enough for now.  I’ll seal them and add more details, and maybe paint their bellies another color, later.  but for now with so much unpainted lead, I’m willing to let the plastics slide.

The neck joint looks a little better from this side, but it’s still visible, between the seventh and eighth ventral scale:

I suppose painting up cheap plastic dragons like this qualifies as polishing turds, but I don’t care.  They have a fairly classic design, even if they are not very “animated,” and just the right size at mini scale to inspire fear but not hopelessness!

Eye-bats

Besides the large Flying Eyeballs, I made some smaller Eye-bats.

My daughter looked at these and said "Those aren't creepy, they're goofy."

These are bats from Halloween giveaway rings, with a tiny googly eye replacing the face and a little grey paint adding some definition and fur.  They took a ridiculously short time to make — drilling holes for the wire stands was the most time-consuming part.  I used florist wire, with one end looped around under the base and metal washer glued over it to add weight and level the base.

In the Panopticon, I envision these guys doing nothing but fluttering around watching.  Anyone caught in their critical gaze must save vs. Petrification (or Will) or act at -1 on everything requiring a roll (to-hit, saves, ability checks or skills, etc.)  They are terribly fragile (d3 hp) but hard to hit — as plate & shield.  They fly like bats.

Goofy, yes.  A nuisance by themselves. But they also accompany patrols.

What has eight eyes, six wings, and ten legs?

I’ve got one word for you: plastics

Michael Curtis rounds up some posts from around the blogosphere on some of the cool plastic toys that were made to cash in on the sci-fi/fantasy explosion of the 70s/80s.  I remember the Star Wars knock-offs, and a couple of my friends had the Dragonriders of Styx playset — somehow I managed to beg, borrow, or steal one of their ogres, and he’s still in my collection, painted and based.

I’d love to find more figures from these sets some time.  The orcs were pig-faced, the gargoyles/demons were kind of neat, and the ‘vikings’ would make wonderful frost giants.

There used to be great coverage of this kind of thing on the now defunct blog “Geek Orthodox.”  But that one’s been mostly deleted, lost like tears in the rain… the Archive.org “Wayback Machine” is not as good at recovering blogs as it is at plain web pages, and anyway the photos were mostly hotlinked to a deleted Flickr account. Bummer.

On a somewhat related note I just read a a neat little book called Mail order mysteries (ISBN 9781608870264),  which is a catalog of the junk, trinkets, and treasures offered in the old ‘full page ads’ of comic books.  It explains how some of the companies that ran the ads got into the business, and the bulk of the book juxtaposes the ads with the actual items you’d get if you replied to them.  The items are mostly from one ,man’s collection, and he has taken his love of these curiosities to the next level, creating his own ‘mail order mystery’ style business, selling classic pranks, gags, and magic tricks at The House of the Unusual.

There’s a store in Cleveland that caters to both tastes — retro toys and gag items — called “Big Fun,” and although I only seem to get up that way once a year, I recommend it highly.  I go to the one in Cleveland Heights, which is in the “Coventry” district with an excellent book store and good restaurants.

Saturday craft time!

We did nothing today — nothing ‘productive’ anyway.  My wife did some sewing; my daughter did some painting, math workbooks, knitting, and watched an episode of Scooby Doo; I painted some minis.  We try to have ‘family craft time’ once a week, especially in the winter when we’re stuck inside anyway. Since my wife was a little under the weather we scrapped some major housecleaning plans and took it easy.  Craft time sprawled on and on, with breaks for lunch, laundry, and making pizza for dinner. Nothing recharges the batteries like spending time together making stuff.  Here’s what I painted:

Two Heritage “Knights & Magick” knights.

These two were painted fairly simply back about 1983.  The one with the sword my brother & I thought of as ‘Lancelot’ for reasons I can no longer place.  I was terribly frustrated with how I painted him, and tossed this mini in the brush water (I was about 11 then!) and when I remembered him later and took him out, somehow the ambient paint left him ‘stained’ with a very heavy black/green wash, that actually looked pretty good.  But not good enough that I didn’t strip him, like most of the K&M knights. The mace-man would make a good cleric if you overlook the sword hanging from his belt.

I also took some cheapo plastics and made some monsters.  One is a knight from a ‘Dollar Store’ set (the same one that provided the statues in a prior post).  This guy had a shield on a deformed, short arm, and I cut that off and transplanted a second mace.  As his helm has no eye slits, I thought he might make a good automaton or Iron Golem.  A knight is next to him for scale.  He’s mounted on a big washer for stability.

Lastly, I picked up a bag of skeleton warriors on Amazon to round out a purchase.  They are not great but are a step up from the Dollar Store crap.  There were six poses, and I did not use the ‘archer’.  I just painted one of each of four poses; I made do more some time, or save them to fight those dollar store knights.  A wash of burnt umber is practically all they need, but I went a few steps further and painted them completely.  Here are three of the poses:

The axeman and spearman both look very Egyptian, in terms of their weapons and shield, although all of the figures have a lot of extraneous skulls decorating them.  Here’s the spearman from the back:

The other two poses I used are more medieval:

The only conversion I did was to bend the flailman’s hand so that his flail is in a more natural position.  I did this by heating the arm with a lighter and bending when the plastic looked a little shiny (before it actually melts or bursts into flame!).  You can also submerge plastics in boiling water and then reposition them, but this was easier for just one figure.  For scale, here’s the flailman about to smash a knight:

Lastly here’s a skeleon, before and after:

These skeletons would be undead giants, obviously.  I like that some look kind of Egyptian…they will fit in as guardians of ancient tombs or ruins, and provide an option other than mummies as the big bads in a pyramid.

I also began work on repainting 30 or so Citadel snotlings.  They’ll see action in Telengard soon, I think.

More statues

Making statues is an easy project, and kind of recharges my batteries when I’m not sure what I feel like painting or only have a few minutes here and there to spend painting.

This set is three large and three small statues.  The two guys with swords are from a bag of 54mm or so knights & soldiers I picked up at the Dollar Tree back when I was into buying super cheap stuff.  I try not to patronize ‘dollar stores’ any more since it is almost always nothing but cheap plastic crap from China.  I can get all of that kind of stuff that want on the secondary market (Goodwill, garage sales) without contributing directly to that trade.  Anyway these two guys appear to be lamenting, or maybe they are exultant … it’s kind of hard to say what the expression was supposed to be.  Which is OK — they look weather-beaten and cryptic, which is what I want for dungeon dressing.  The middle guy is a slightly mis-cast chess piece.  Ironically I was saving him to be a giant, and also meant to convert the plastics into giants, for a ‘Hordes of the Things’ army of Ragnarok.  But on closer inspection, they did not seem quite good enough to bother with, and if i ever pursue that I’d be better off getting 54mm Gauls or Vikings, which companies like HaT are producing.  All these guys got was a grey undercoat and white drybrushing.  I thought about adding a green wash in patches to suggest moss but decided to keep it simple.  In hindsight I should have painted the bases white too instead of black, to represent a stand/podium.  Doh.

The middle guy is mounted on a "Heroscape" base (they are kind of big ... maybe 1.5 inches so I don't keep medium minis on them). The other two are on washers, which also adds some heft and balance to them so they don't fall over.

The next three are 1/72 plastics (a Nexus reissue of an Atlantic Greek civilian; a Strelets figure of Charlemange; an Imex Viking).  They are mounted on wooden ‘spool’ beads that I found clearanced at a Michael’s craft/art store.  So much for avoiding ‘cheap crap from China’.  Spools make great pedestals.

I was going to look for some metal minis in my collection to make into statues, but these three are so static and ‘posed’ that they were perfect.  Also, 1/72s tend to have pretty crisp detail that responds well to drybrushing.  I have a box of minis I’d like to sell, trade, or give away at some point and since a lot of them are newer figures, they are a little too ‘actiony’ to make good statues.  (Well, maybe they’d be good for a medusa or basilisk’s lair, come to think of it, or as living statues…)

Reuse CDs as paint pallettes

If you’re a hoarder ecologically conscious like me, you feel bad about throwing away CDs that you don’t need and noone wants — AOL junkmail, old driver software for equipment you don’t use or even have any more, freebies from magazines, that sort of thing.  One way I get a lot of extra uses out old CDs is to use them paint palettes.

I paint mostly with craft paints and mix a lot when I’m doing minis so a small palette is great to have.  You could buy something to use as a palette, or use foil, wax paper, or other disposable things.  But I think you should use what you have and avoid creating waste that will go to a landfill.

Step 1. Have a CD you were going to throw away

Step 2. Turn it over and use as a palette.  Remove dry paint every few painting sessions by peeling or scraping off dry paint.  Once in a while a CD will be so heavily coated with paint and glue that I finally tossed it.  But I have found that CDs make good terrain bases too, since they will not warp from exposure to dampness or glue.

My daughter also uses CDs in craft projects.  This is one incorporates a quarter of a chestnut shell, a synthetic cork with an animal print on it, and a bunch of glass beads.

I could probably work this into D&D.  Ley node, alien monolith, something like that.

That dwarf is plastic; he’s from the Milton Bradley HeroQuest game.

Been on a monster tear lately

That makes 1819!

So there’s the scorpion men I already covered; a black pudding made from Sculpy:

Just Sculpy that had a couple of pens pressed against it, baked, glued to a washer, and painted.

A MegaMinis harpy (originally Metal Magic?)

And a flesh golem — a repainted MageKnight mini:

As much as I love some of the henchmen and men-at-arms I’ve started, I’ve been motivated to paint monster lately, under the assumption that I could conceivably finish them all this year.  Monsters are A LOT easier to paint than people & humanoids, IMO, since they have less stuff.  Also, I find that about 5% of the adventurer minis ever get used; everyone always likes the same bitchin’ elf or fighter.  I should post my favorite “benchwarmers” some time — the minis I love but who always sit out on game night.

But monsters pretty much always get a chance to shine, at least once.

Scorpion man, scorpion man, doing the things a scorpion can

So I painted up these scorpion-man figures from the Age of Mythology board game (I just bought a few sprues of the pieces for a project a couple years ago) and of course they need to go into the Telengard setting.

I’m willing to overlook the fact that they are from Akkadian/Sumerian/whatever Near Eastern mythology, and assume they are in Telengard for one of the usual reasons you have monsters in D&D — magical experiment gone awry, interdimensional invasion, alien life form, etc. But I’d like to keep some of their original flavor, making them guardians of some kind, and give them powers similar to their mythological forebears.

Who knew scorpion-men wear pantaloons?

My old standby Wikipedia doesn’t have a lot of information, apart from a couple of references to their vernacular names and the fact that they also appear in Enuma Elish (I was familiar with them only from the epic of Gilgamesh and various works based on it).

In the translation of Gilgamesh I read (the Penguin Classics edition) they appear very briefly and mainly serve as harbingers of worse to come.

In Robert Silverberg’s adaptation of the Gilgamesh myth (Gilgamesh the king, a decent read and reasonable attempt to de-mythologize the story), the scorpion people appear to be suffering from leprosy and/or ectrodactyly, and posed no physcial threat.

I understand from Wikipedia that there was a D&D monster called a “Stinger” that was basically a scorpion man, but they must have been 2nd edition or later; there is nothing in my MM, MMII, or Fiend Folio on that. I remember a man-scorpion in the DragonStrike! game and the accompanying video, so maybe they made it into the Monstrous Manual. I think they could have been in the basic D&D Creature Catalog but I don’t have that. I also know they were prominent monster in RuneQuest, although I don’t have that either.

My guys have the claw hands so they can’t very well be archers like the illustration above. A poisonous sting is obvious but that doesn’t really set them apart from a million other poisonous monsters…like, for instance, giant scorpions. Also, although I think D&D scorpions are save-or-die poison, real scorpions just paralyze their prey with poison so they can eat them slowly.

Since real scorpions are fairly scared of light, we might give them light penalties and/or darkness spells. Real scorpions also do all of their digestion outside their bodies (like Brundlefly, secreting digestive juices and drinking the liquefied food). So maybe they spit acid? But the human torso would give them internal digestion, maybe. Also, fun facts: some scorpions can reproduce asexually (laying unfertilized eggs that develop anyway) and their slow metabolism lets some go up to a year between feedings before starving to death. More weird scorpion stuff here.

Wikipedia mentions that the in the myths, “their glance is death,” so adding a gaze attack would make an unexpected danger; I’m kind of thinking that they could charm, paralyze, hypnotize, or otherwise neutralize their prey with it.

Since my figures are very impressionistic, with tiny little legs, I don’t see them being very fast, although they might be good at hiding, like real scorpions.

I am also having trouble deciding if they use magic or even language. I imagine one origin for them to be something like a twisted use of the “universal combiner,” in which case they pretty upset about their current form. They could have been driven mad by the whole ordeal and gibber incoherently (I thought about making them mutter continuously in low tones, or maybe a demihuman language, pleading for mercy or release even while they viciously attack. I kind of like the image of them as monsters where the human parts are actually unwilling ‘passengers’, to add a little moral gray about slaying them.)

2386

Stayed home today as my kid has a fever and can’t go to school.  I’m really glad I can use sick time like this.  She’s watching a Wallace & Gromit video so I took a few minutes away from tending to her and chores to count my painted 1/72 minis.  This time I distinguished among infantry, cavalry, chariotry, and elephants.  A few camp followers and litter bearers got stuck in with the infantry.

Anyway:

Elephants: 8

Chariots: 43

Cavalry: 309

Infantry: 2026

Grand total: 2386.

This includes six Ral Partha Iroquois, three RP gendarmes, and three Minifigs Mamluks, all “true” 25mm and very close to 1/72 scale.  I did not count a few static diorama “camps” and some artillery and war wagons, but there is less than a dozen of those.

These guys range from Sumerians to Conquistadors, the bulk being Medieval (Europe, Crusades, Mongols, and Japanese), Classical (Greco-Roman-Celtic), and Biblicals (Egypt, Hebrew, Philistine, Lybian, Nubian, etc.).  I have a lot that are still unpainted, but will probably begin to cull them soon.

Anybody interested in 100  or so 1/72 scale Vikings?

Some time I’ll figure out exactly how many different DBA armies this represents.   Going by the rule of thumb that you need about 50 figures per army, that’s 47 armies.  But of course I make a lot of my chariots do double duty in various armies so I don’t think I could really field that many “legal” armies at once.  Still, sounds like I could run a tourney if I had enough table space and terrain.

I picked the wrong year to stop buying minis

Got the heads up from Scottsz that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) is dropping the pre-painted plastic D&D minis line.

Big deal, I thought. This has been a long time coming from what I could tell anyway.  Then I checked out the ol’ blogosphere and learned that Heroscape had been quietly dropped earlier.  Snikes. I was assuming the D&D minis were being dropped for the sake of Heroscape.  Now I guess the idea is that WotC will still sell a few “super collectibles” like the “Beholder collection” (I’m holding out for some official Flumph figures…I may have to make that my next Sculpy project…) and also have minis in the current & upcoming the boardgames (I almost resisted making a comment about 4e being a board game, but this parenthetical comment documents my failure).

I swore off all mini buying this year because of my painting backlog and general austerity measures we’re taking and now the few D&D plastics I figured I’d pick up “later” have become collectible.  Crap.  I picked the wrong year to stop buying minis.

I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue, too

Seriously, I thought the prepainted minis were, on the whole, a good thing, even if I could very rarely bring myself to swallow buying “random packs”.  The singles were great and I bought a passel from Noble Knight this year.  They save time and it’s nice to have a subset of minis I can throw into a bin and bring to someone else’s house or a con (after the Great Lead Drop of ’04, when I dropped a box full of giants and ogres and trolls on the sidewalk the eve of a snow storm which left me unable to even look for the missing bits for weeks, I am very protective of my minis!).

I hate to see them go but I am not entirely surprised.  People talk about “saturation” and how old grognards like me aren’t buying enough minis to keep it viable for WotC.  The fact is there would need to be new people getting into the hobby for the market for WotC’s minis to remain strong and apparently it just ain’t happening.  (Stunningly, I’ve even seen people comment they’d like to learn to play D&D but they have heard how the rules keep changing and you have to keep buying stuff and they aren’t interested in that.  Not OSR shills, real comments on mainstream sites.  Mission deccomplished, WotC!)    Skip the rest if this post is already tiresome.