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.

Colour Balance Target

I have a pretty decent camera now, which is held back mainly by my own ignorance and incompetence. It is, in theory, highly configurable in terms of the images it spits out, but 99% of the time I rely on its automatic settings, as they generally do a good enough job for my purposes.

Wrestling with colour balance for photography under lights is something that has always been problematic. I know that its possible to get lights that are tunable — that is, the colour temperature is adjustable, so it's possible to get a reliable simulacrum of daylight from them. However, I can't afford that sort of thing, so I rely heavily on software colour adjustment and standard "cool white" LED lamps.

I put together this little colour and tone target, printed from my CMYK laser printer. It's not nearly good enough for scientific accuracy, but it gives me a repeatable reference to work from, which is an improvement over guessing.

I Like My Maxes Dickered

The 10.5 cm K gepanzerte Selbstfahrlafette ("10.5 gun on armoured self-propelled mount") was a prototype self-propelled gun used by Nazi Germany during World War II. Although it was originally designed as a Schartenbrecher ("bunker buster") for use against the French Maginot Line defences, following the defeat of France it was evaluated for use as a long-range heavy tank destroyer on the Eastern Front, but action reports were not encouraging and no more were built after the first two.

It was colloquially known as Dicker Max ("Fat Max").

This is a 1:100 scale FDM 3d print, from a model by Zac Kavulich. The figures are Battlefront 15mm German early war grenadiers.

Yet Another Robot

This 3d printed robot is a freebie from somebody's Kickstarter. I've printed it at 200% of it original size, which makes it roughly 34mm tall.

Monsters of the Psychedelic Era

These are Topps Monster sticker designs from 1965, the artist being (probably) Basil Wolverton.

I remember these sorts of things cropping up here and there in my youth; they were all part and parcel of the style that produced the Rat Fink hot-rod cartoons and the like.

Somewhere in the AD&D DMG there are some random generation tables for creating demonic critters from the infinite planes of the Abyss. These guys would suit quite well as pictorial resources for the sort of nonsense that results from those tables.

Sorcerer's Tower from Printable Scenery

I thought I'd try my hand at a larger piece of 28mm fantasy scenery, and went for this one: the Sorcerer's Tower from Printable Scenery.

I was unprepared for how large it would be, nor for how long it would take to print. It ended up taking me six days of more or less non-stop printing to get all the major components done (minus doors), and god knows how long it will take to paint it. When I get around to painting it, which might be a while, because I'm well and truly sick of it now.

Stage 1: I decided to print it from top to bottom, on the theory that if I got delayed for any reason, I could still use it as a smaller tower without needing any of the under-bits. As it happened, that wasn't an issue, but the theory was sound I think.

Stage 2: The first stone tower bit. Only the top two pieces are primed in this photo. You can see that I had some printing issues with the balusters around the top balcony; I'm vaguely considering cutting that whole section of the balustrade out and replacing it with a traditionally modelled "crappy DIY" repair of planks and things.

 Stage 3: more tower. It's all sitting on my modeling table. The blobby things around its base are Mushroom Men.

Stage 4: the last of the tower segments is complete.

There's a spiral staircase running right up through the whole height of the tower, which is nice I guess, but it's unlikely ever to be seen much.

The wizard in the doorway (for scale) is an old Grenadier figure; a Julie Guthrie sculpt I think. It came as one of a boxed set of 25mm wizards.

 Stage 5: the ground floor of the house part of the structure.

The figure up on the top balcony is a 28mm (more like 32mm really) monk, from Reaper.

Stage 6: the first floor of the house.

Stage 7: All the major components finished at last.

That main roof section was a 29 hour print, just on its own.

Fungus Folk

This is the test-paint piece, upon which I'll base all the others.
It's fairly quick and simple, so it shouldn't take forever to paint up the whole group.

For certain reasons I'm in the process of printing up a small army of Mushroom People (about a couple of dozen, in the end) and I need to start to consider how to paint them.

Fungi are remarkably diverse when it comes to coloration, but I've decided to stick with that old trope of the amanita muscaria, if for no other reason than that it's immediately identifiable as being mushroomish.
The models are
Mushroom Folk by Fat Dragon Games
— they're cheap. You should definitely buy them.

I intend to end up with a couple of dozen of them; this is just the first lot.