WotC Displacer Beast

 

This is an old mini from the early 2000s, when WotC was newly the owner of D&D and had just published 3rd Edition. They also started producing a range of white metal miniatures to match the art in the Monster manual, of which this is one — the Displacer Beast.

I don't know who the sculptor was, but it does a decent job of replicating the skinny, almost skeletal aspect of the MM artwork. It was a hell of a thing to assemble though.

 

It originally came with a plastic "slotta" base, but I've mounted it on a bit of steel I ground to shape, and added some groundwork with superglue and baking soda. It's supposed to be blue-black, though my one is more blue than black. never mind.

Giant Bat Monster

 

This is a 3d printed giant bat critter that I picked up somewhere, quite a while ago, and printed on my Mars Pro.

It sat on my workbench unpainted for a long time, years in fact, until I finally decided to get it out of the way and slapped some speed-paint and inks on to it, and gave it a cardboard base to protect its delicate foot-claws. 

I'm not as impressed by the speed-paints as some seem to be. They're okay, as far as they go, but I don't know that they're any better than Ye Olde Inke-Washe. 

 Here's Sergeant Measureby with his trusty Spear of 5mm Increments to demonstrate how big this critter is. 

Big enough to be fairly fearsome, I would think. 

Rock Troll

 

This 3d printed rock troll I made in response to events in our ongoing D&D campaign, and as usual, mostly too late. Never mind, maybe next time.

I don't remember who designed the model, nor where I got it from. The internet is big.

It's about 65mm from the soles of its feet to the top of its hump. That would make it about 12' tall in 28mm world.  I printed it on my elderly Ender 3 FDM printer.

Front

Rear, with Sergeant Measuresby.

 

Old-Style Pig-Faced Orc

 

This is a figure that was inspired in style very heavily by the clunky old Minifigs pig-faced orcs of the 1970s. It's not an exact match to those old lead figures, but it's fairly close I think. The hardest things about the sculpting really was keeping its pose as stiff and awkward as the originals, and resisting the urge to add any more detail.

The only point at which I departed from the design of those old figures is in the shield. I used instead the shields as shown in the AD&D Monster Manual.

I rendered it as if it was an old soft plastic figure, the sort of toy you might have once got in a box of cereal. It seemed like an appropriate aesthetic for this thing.

The STL is on Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5173812

Evil Tree

 

This model came from a Humble Bundle I got some time ago. It's called Evil Tree, and that's about as much as I know about it.

I printed it on my Ender 3, the first print using Tom Tullis' printer profile for Cura 4.11.

Lurking in the background there is, as usual, Sergeant Measureby, for scale.

Umber Hulk

 

This is Miguel Zavala's redesigned Umber Hulk, printed on my Mars Pro and painted with Vallejo acrylics.

It's a monster I haven't used much, if at all, in my own campaign, but my favourite character of old, Sir Fnord the Pretty Neat died of them twice, both times by having his head ripped clean off.

Bulette

This is an old WotC pre-paint, one of the lucky-dip figures they were selling in boxes of about ten assorted minis way back when.

The poor unfortunate about to be gobbled up is a halfling from my D&D game, a character whose name I don't even remember now, who survived only just long enough for me to paint this mini for him, before being garroted and disembowelled by an assassin as a warning to others.

Modular Monster Model

I'm not completely sure where this model came from. It's called Ambush Maw, and I've had it sitting on my hard drive for a while now.

It could be quite a flexible miniature for tabletop use, as it could be used all together, as shown here, or the central mouth-thing could be used alone, or each of the graboid tentacles could be used as separate creatures. The tentacle-things are about 100mm tall.

I also printed eight of the graboids at 50% size, just because I thought they might come in handy. At that size they're closer to the scale of a character figure (a little taller) and might be usable as some kind of underground eel thingy. Maybe they could be bulette larvae?

Everything has been printed at quite low resolution (0.24mm layers) in grey eSun PLA+ filament. I could have printed it smoother at 0.1mm or 0.08mm, but it would have taken a couple of days, and I don't really see the point for something that is only ever going to be a tabletop toy.

Froggy the Froghemoth

This is the waterline remix I did of Miguel Zavala's froghemoth, along with an old Essex 28mm wargaming figure I call Sergeant Measureby (his spear is painted in 5mm increments).

The sculpting issues I had with it in Blender didn't really affect the FDM print, though they might be a bit more apparent in resin, I don't know.

I have not yet decided whether I'll put it on a water base. Maybe, some day.

Great King Fex, Lord of All Poop

Behold, Great King Fex, Lord of All Poop!
Bow down and cower before him!
All hail his mighty stench!
Also behold one of his trusty PoopGuard!

These are two of DutchMogul's earth-people models, which can be found at https://www.thingiverse.com/dutchmogul/collections/army-of-the-earthenkind.

I, however, intend to use them not as earth-people, but as poop-people. I have a couple of dozen PoopGuard being painted right now, plus some others which I will keep in reserve until after they've had their evil (neutral, really) way with my players.

DragonLock Skeletons

Left to right: 0.04, 0.08, 0.16 mm

This is the DragonLock newsletter freebie skeleton STL  that I printed the other day in 0.04 mm, 0.08 mm, and 0.16 mm layer heights to see how the difference in quality affected them as playing pieces.

They've been painted very quickly, with just a black primer and white zenithal shading, followed by coloured ink glazes and an Agrax Earthshade wash. I picked out some of the bone highlights to finish. I wasn't keeping track of time, but I guess each one took about ten or twelve minutes to complete, not counting drying times.

Unsurprisingly, the finest layer heights suited the glaze and wash paint method the best, but even the coarsest will do fine as one of a large group of mooks — at tabletop distances, the difference in detail is insignificant, to my eyes at least. Though having said that, my eyesight is pretty shit.

Note: the wiggly points of the bardiches are not intentional, but the result of inadequate cooling of the filament.

Flail Snail

 The Flail Snail is one of the goofier monsters to be created for D&D. I think it came from the Fiend Folio, though I'm not 100% sure and I'm too lazy to look it up right now.

Here's a 3d-printed model of it, along with Scaley the Filthy Bartender (from Reaper) for scale.

The model was made by Miguel Zavala, and printed by me at 0.08mm layer height in PLA. I've tried to represent the iridescent shell by spraying random blobs of transparent inks over a silver base coat, and then applying liberal coats of gloss varnish; I think it turned out OK. The colour scheme is taken, more or less, from the D&D 5e illustration.

Ghastly Ghasts

77159 Ghast by James van Shaik

I got these four guys in the last Reaper Bones Kickstarter. They're ghasts — a sort of uber-ghoul, for those who don't know D&D monsters. Retail price is about $2.50 each.

I just wanted mooks, so I painted them up as quickly and simply as I could bear: black primer followed by white zenithal spray followed by white wet-brush followed by greeny ink-wash followed by ivory dry-brush followed by inks for clothes and ground, and that's it. Actual painting time, not including waiting for things to dry, was about twenty minutes I guess.

The only thing I don't like about Reaper's plastic Bones figures is the mould lines. They're a real pain to get rid of.

Plague Rat

Back to monster-painting, after a fairly long break.

This is one of the two nasty boil-ridden critters from the Reaper Bones 77198: Barrow Rats pack. They're pretty big rats; beside a regular human-sized figure they'd be about the size of a pony.

Critter: Jellybaby

Here's a critter I made for my campaign, a Jellybaby.

It's big, slimy, smelly, and only as humanoid as it needs to be. Jellybabies are basically Gelatinous Cube golems, but they don't share the Gelatinous Cube's transparency, and they're considerably more purposeful in hunting down their prey..

Sluggy the Slimy Slug-Monster (revisited)

Continuing with colouring in some old line drawings as a substitute for actual creativity, this is one I did a couple of years ago to try out a new brush pen I'd just bought.

Eyes, Mouths and Tentacles, a Winning Combination

I originally drew this in 2009 in a little A7 rice-paper notebook I made.

Now I've Photoshopped it all into glorious technicolour, because why the hell not.

Slicey Leggy Scuttly Buggy Critter

Now here's a little something that I happened upon when I was looking through some old drawings. I must have done this about 1983 or '84 I think, and I'm pretty sure it was heavily inspired by creatures from The Dark Crystal.

I can't think why I didn't finish it off, since it was so close to completion. Maybe I had to go somewhere or do something, and just never got back to it.

I don't know that I'm all that happy with the position of the unfinished claw.

Demon (collage)

There's a little bit of painting in this image, but for the most part it's digital collage, overlaying elements from various photographic images to end up with this.

Mara

Brought to you via the magic of insomnia.

There's a creature in Alan Garner's book The Weirdstone of Brisengamen called the Mara.

This is inspired by it to a certain extent, though it's not quite how I imagined the creature from the book, which would have been a lot less human-looking.