Bonesium Orc

Reaper Bones 77056: Orc Sniper (Archer) by Tre Manor

This is the figure from my Sculpey-baking experiment, all painted up and ready to go. It's a speed-paint with a very limited palette, since he's just going to be one among many orc-mooks, but I find it kind of suits him.

Super Sculpey and Bonesium

I like to mount my figures on steel washers, as I've mentioned before. That often means I have to extend the figure's base so that it doesn't look like it's just been plonked down on the washer.

Normally I use Green Stuff, but that takes an age to cure, and I don't really have as much patience as I ought. So I've been looking around for something that I can model easily and that cures quickly. Super Sculpey seems to fit the bill nicely.

It doesn't cure without being exposed to heat (130°C, 15 minutes per 6mm thickness), so I can take my time with modelling, unlike with fast-cure epoxy putties. I was a bit unsure whether the heat would be too much for a plastic miniature, but it seems to be fine: the Bonesium does get soft and wobbly, but the low temperature required to cure the Sculpey doesn't come close to melting it.

The only issue I've found with using Sculpey, as opposed to Green Stuff, is that it doesn't stick to the plastic very well at all. That's not a huge problem though, and I can see times when it would be a positive advantage.

New Toys

Yippee! New toys from Reaper!

• Back left: 77184 Spirit of the Forest (x 2) — ents. Or treants, if you don't want to anger the Tolkien machine.
• Back centre: 77103 Nor'Ock, Ettin — two heads good!
• Back right: 77183 Frost Worm — a remorrhaz, basically, except for licencing purposes.
• Front: 77185 Large Earth Elemental (x 3) — Grrg-nak! Grrg-nak!
• plus a sample bottle of paint of horrible hue.

These things are amazing hard to photograph due to being incredibly white and ever so slightly translucent; this photo required considerable post-processing to get any detail showing at all.

Once again, they've sent me a sample pot of their paint. It's a pretty lurid, horrible pink, and I don't know that I'll get a lot of use out of it. I will be interested to see if this bottle suffers from the same flow restriction as the first they sent me.

Terrible Sword Babe

I've had this figure sitting on my painting table for years. Many, many years, since the late '90s or thereabouts. I never got around to finishing it because frankly I think it's a pretty awful figure; today I painted it pretty much just to get it out of the way.

It's a Citadel figure, and far from one of their best. Her grip on her sword is weird — I wouldn't say impossible, but definitely improbable. The armour is mostly pointless. And she's wearing a fucking thong. Jesus.

Now that I look at the base, it looks to me like she's sliding around on Green Slime. That'll end well.

Leftover Putty Monster — painted

Here's my Leftover Putty Monster, all painted up and ready to horrify a party of staunch, stolid adventurers with its incessant complaining, whining, and self-pity.

I'm kind of tempted to take a silicon rubber mould of the thing and pump out about a dozen, but we shall see. The mouth-cavities could prove to be problematic; I'd probably have to fill them a bit.

Leftover Putty Monster

I always mix too much putty. Always. Mostly I just toss the surplus, but from time to time I make it into something not too challenging. This is one of those times.

Because I've never got my act together to put together an armature, blobs of various sorts seem to be my go-to sculpting projects.

This little guy is all eyes and mouths. His skin is supposed to be coarsely textured, like an elephant's. He's about 20mm x 17mm x 10mm tall.

One of these days I'd like to get some very small ball-bearings or something, in various sizes, that I can use for eyeballs.

Figure Scale Comparison

Some guy on some forum was asking about the comparative sizes of figures in various scales, so I thought this might be a useful guide.

Vibius

Here's another figure I painted for our current AD&D party. This one is Vibius, a Roman ex-soldier, the character of my friend Joff.

The figure is a late Republican Roman centurion, one of the plastic set from Warlord Games. They're excellent models, and extremely cheap too, compared with metal 28mm figures — these ones work out to about $1.33 each, which would actually make a whole 28mm wargames army feasible. They do a range of waterslide transfers for the shield designs too, which would make recreating them well much, much easier, though as of writing they're mostly out of stock.

My knowledge of Roman arms is fairly sketchy, so I don't know just how accurate this paint-job is. It will do for me though.

Catriona

This is another figure from my pile of swag from the Reaper Bones Kickstarter. Unfortunately I don't know what the model number is; I can't find it in Reaper's online catalogue, and I suspect it's one of the ones that has been withdrawn due to moulding issues. It has very poorly defined detail in the hands and face, both of which are moderately important areas when you're modelling the human form. I've done what I can with paint, and it looks OK as long as you're not looking at it from two inches away.

It's a figure destined to represent my friend Andrew's character, Catriona the druid. There's a remarkable paucity of druid-suitable figures available of either sex, and this is the closest we could come from amongst the figures I have.