In the darkness of the night

Hello everyone, 

I know I'm posting in rapid succession now, this has nothing to do with a lock down or quarantaine, but simply because I had been putting it off to take pictures of all the models I painted. Like I said in the comments of my previous post, photography isn't really my strong suit and I lack the soft- and hardware to do it properly. 

The post for today is about me trying something new, so please don't judge me too harshly on the quality of painting this time 😁, it's just me having some fun. Though I think you can see some progression towards the end.

I've always had a soft spot for these old black and white movies from the early 1900's up to halfway the century, and horror movies in particular at that. 

Blue Moon has a great set for this, which I bought a few years back when I wanted to play Dracula's America. Maybe I'll do some vampire hunters and townsfolk in the future as well. 

So, without further ado, here are my vampires:

First tryout model, a vampire knight in full armour. Not happy about the skin colour, but that's part of the journey. Model is from Alternative Armies.

Bound for eternity, a Duke and Duchess.

Buttons on the Duke's jacket were a bit too small to paint, which is why they look a bit messy. 

Poor Duchess gets lonely when her husband is out hunting, so she has gotten herself some toy boys (sorry couldn't resist). 

I'd love to hear your ideas on these ones and painting in black, white and grey tones. Especially if you have tried this out yourself. 

I know the sand is out of tone, I considered doing a cobblestone pattern on the base but then they probably would never be used in a game. 

That's why I decided to give them the same brown base as all of the rest of my fantasy models.

Finally, I decided to throw this miniature in. She's another vampire from Blue Moon, but I thought she looked more like a banshee so I painted her up in the same way as my tortured soul.

Again, thank you all for reading and leave a comment if you feel like it. 

Next post will be up in a few days. 

Regards,

Wouter

Edit: Javi asked me about how tall the models are in the comments and I remember seeing a comment in a previous post with the same question. I'm going to try and think about adding a picture with some kind of reference in my next post. Hope the picture is clear enough. 

Summoned at will

Hello everyone,

Having a bit of fun with some mutated critters this time.
Nothing major and they painted up rather quickly. I do have a plan to use them, but all will be unveiled in due time. The colour schemes may be a bit of a hint though.

I have a lot more painted models ready to go, but it took me a long time to take photographs of them. Been experimenting with a background this time. 

Electro-kitten: I tried to paint lightning bolts in it's eyes, but it was a bit too small for my skills with the brushes.

Drooler: Just a bit of sillyness but it might be poisonous

Medushark: A mutated critter or a being from outer space? 

Flamuppy: I envisioned this puppy as some kind of hell hound offspring. My first intention was to paint a molten earth pattern on him, but in the end I went for quick and easy.

                                              

Terrokin: Probably capable of shooting exploding seeds.

                                              

Thank you for reading, stay safe and healthy!

Wouter

A merry band of adventurers

Hello everyone,

Hope you all manage to stay safe and healthy!
No quarantaine here in Australia, but a lot of do's and don'ts. Also, the restaurants are closed and people stay indoors because many of them are scared. For example, before the extended Term 1 holiday there were less than 40 children still attending the school, including my three boys.
One of the reasons I decided to keep my kids at school is the fact I know my own limits. Homeschooling is all fine and dandy, but I'm no teacher and can never give them the same level of education they receive at school.
Luckily, the shops we go to for groceries are slowly getting the 'essentials', like toilet paper, back in stock now many people have locked themselves in at home with they're 100 TP rolls and 50kg of pasta and rice.

I did a few courses over the past few weeks and had far less time to paint. Nevertheless did I manage to finish of a few models, I'll share them over the next few posts.
Another thing that happened is the fact I got on Instagram, which is a lot quicker and easier to use than blogger. There is a big BUT though, one of the things social media doesn't allow you to do is actually tell a story and give your post a title; which I think is one of the main selling points for blogger at the moment. My biggest problem with the platform seems to be the fact I'm following way too many blogs and find myself drowning in posts I want to read but just haven't got enough time for. Another issue is the fact it just doesn't seem to work so well to create a post on my phone.
I decided to keep on blogging, but I have to go through my readers list and make some hard decisions to stop following some other blogs, just to keep it manageable.

Anyway, welcome to a new post about my progress on getting enough 15mm fantasy miniatures painted to start playing the actual Rangers of Shadow Deep campaign.
The models below would also be perfect for some 15mm Dungeon crawling, something I'm considering of doing somewhere in the far future.
I didn't spend a lot of time on these because the holiday was almost over and I knew I was going to have far less time once school and my courses started.

There's a couple of Rogues, a fighter and a Wizard of sorts, which is still the traditional make-up for many fantasy roleplaying games.
But let's start with the best companion for any group of adventurers.

My second knight, nothing special. One of the things I wanted was to have the royal symbol on at least one of the two knights so I can create a themed force for other skirmish games like Song of Blades and Heroes.

Some thieves/rogues I did real quick and with a limited palette.

My wizard in this post isn't necessarily meant for Rangers of Shadow Deep. I'm thinking of sculpting a lovely apprentice for him once my sculpting skills are up for it and use for Frostgrave. The snow/frost effect I did near the edge of the base is meant to represent a spell that originated from his wand. Despite the fact that I had a colour scheme in mind this didn't work out as I wanted and he looks a lot more blue than white.

I also created some more markers and started working on my terrain. For the wattle fence I used a technique I found online, didn't work out that well for 15mm terrain but it's still usable. 

The tokens are from a french game called Alkemy and are a kind of spirit well token if I remember correctly.

Despite my late post, I'm happy with the progress I made during the Christmas holiday and hope to keep a steady pace throughout the year. 

Thank you all for reading!

Wouter

I'm seeing double

Hello everyone,

No, no, I didn't drink too much; I rarely drink alcohol anyway to be honest .
It's just a way to show off some of the recent conversions I did.

Maybe I need to explain why I'm doing this:
When I decided to do a Rangers of Shadow Deep project in 15mm, I checked what I had already laying around. Turned out I had quite a bit of monsters and villains, most meant for sci-fi or 28mm, and barely any heroes. To remedy this I bought some adventurer packs from Alternative Armies. I
have to admit, it got a little bit out of hand after this first order. G
through my order,  I noticed a few doubles and many models with a similar role.
Quite a few Men-at-arms, enough Wizards to start a council and the beginnings of a decent Thieves Guild but no archers or models suitable to be used as rangers.
And like I already mentioned in my previous post, I really like to have two of every follower.
So, in order to get myself all the companions I needed, I knew I had to do a few conversions.

Now, the best conversions are the ones where it's almost impossible to spot the original from the one you changed. I'm far from that level but I'm still quite pleased with how some turned out and I feel like I did a decent job. Some are better than others, but that's just the way it is.
One word of warning though, a few of the models are a lot smaller than others. Many are close to 18mm, but others are actually closer to 15mm (barely). Which means you can paint eyes on some but it's near impossible to do on others.

First up are a Tracker and an Arcanist, both started out as some kind of Druid. Strange enough he was carrying around a shield which didn't like, so I removed the arm holding it on both of them and gave my Tracker a bow. The Arcanist also got a headswap with a head I removed from a Blighthaven Southern Death Cult model. As I noticed a severe shortage of female characters among my companions, I also gave the model a sex change. The book, made from some leftover putty, didn't work out as I wanted but decided to keep it anyway.

Second is a Men-at-Arms and his converted Guardsman version. The idea was to give him and helbard, only after glueing on the blade I noticed how overly large it was and changed it into an axe. After all, the description of the weapon only says: "Two-handed weapon", so it could be anything from a spear to a helbard or a large axe. These guys are pretty small compared to the rest which is why they look a bit wonky ;-).

The Templar on the left was the most extensive conversion I did on a 15mm model so far as I had to remove large parts of the Knight's body to change it. I cut the head from one of the models with the winged helmet (I got three of those) and put this in place. The arm holding the spear is a bit long but it doesn't really bother me that much.

That's it for this time, thank you for reading!

Music please!

Hello everyone and Happy New Year,


I'm not going to start by summing up new year's resolutions, because I know I probably would fail them all anyway ;-).
Looking back at 2019 I think I went through one of the hardest years of my life.
I'm consider myself as either a realist or an optimist and it takes a lot of me to get depressed, something that happened quite a few times during the last year. Hopefully I will find a job this year, but at the very least I'm going to do some courses that will give me an extra edge and it seems to be something that's more highly regarded than experience here.

On the hobby-front I have done a lot less than I actually hoped for and I played a lot less games with my kids than I had actually planned to do. True, we did quite a few games of Burning Sands and a Rangers of Shadow Deep try-out, as well as a short RPG campaign for Hero-kids and many board games (7th Continent still being my favourite). However, not as many as I would've liked.

During last week of the holidays I found myself spending a lot of time entertaining my kids.
In the little time they left me to spend at my hobby-table, I managed to finish these two.

When I first started reading the Rangers of shadow deep pdf, I found myself thinking on how to represent the recruit companions.
While looking at the lot of adventurer models I got from Alternative Armies I noticed one of rogues was carrying a lute and it occured to me that there's a bard class in many roleplaying games. They may not be the best in combat but they are useful in other ways.
Also, if brave sir Robin was allowed a whole troupe of minstrels then why wouldn't the Rangers that venture in the Shadow Deep be allowed at least one. At the very least the bard could try and keep the morale up and record all the heroic deeds as a poem.

As I like to have at least two of every type of companion, so both my son and I can have our first choices when it comes to picking our followers. I decided to convert an excess Woman-at-Arms, from the adventurers pack mentioned above, into a musician. So the one on the right is a conversion I did.

I started painting some more models but these will have to wait until next time.
All the best for 2020, have a good year!

Meddling in forces unknown

Hello Everyone,

After a few weeks doing some commission painting, volunteering work and soliciting for new jobs I finally got some time to finish a project for myself. These cultists have been sitting on my desk for quite a while. Originally I bought them for Dracula’s America, but I abandoned the project shortly after I aqcuired a few forces, the main reason being the terrain.

While I consider them a part of my undead forces, they may find themselves summoning all kinds of eldritch horrors in the future too. In Rangers of Shadow Deep they’re going to represent my Gnolls. I’ve never been a huge fan of having an amalgamation of all kinds of fantasy creatures and I prefer to have one all-encompassing threat. For Rangers of Shadow Deep these are going to be my Death Cultists, who are dabbling in the arts of Necromancy, oblivious to the horror they’re unleashing upon the world and the ever-expanding miasma of undead energy (the shadow deep). As a result, most of my monsters are either going to be animals, changed by the shadow deep, or undead constructs the cultists created. 

I decided to give convert the models I got from RPE and give them similar hoods to the ones I got from Khurasan. A few of them were holding rifles, but luckily it wasn’t hard to transform these into crossbows. The ones with the candlesticks are going to be my sergeants.

You will probably notice that I used two different types of bases, this is mostly because the Khurasan models are a bit smaller than the ones from Demonworld and I wanted to reduce the difference in height this way. 

The paintjobs and conversions are a bit rushed, but they’re usable in my opinion, so I’m probably not going to make any changes. One thing I would like to add are some regular archers, once I found suitable models.

A Magister/Necromancer with his mummified pet rat

Initiated

Cutists with hand weapons

Crossbow wielding cultists

Groupshot

Thank you for reading! With another commission already waiting on my desk I'm probably going to be busy the next few weeks. So happy holidays to all of you!

Wouter

Local Wildlife

Hello Everyone,

Nothing really special this week, most of them are just some local animals and tokens for my Burning Sands games, though some of them may be featuring in other games in the future as well. One of the games I’m considering of doing is a Pulp exploration game and maybe even Ghost Archipelago.

Most of these have been on my painting list for a very long time and while they weren’t the most urgent, I’m still happy to finally call them done.

First up are the two animals that aren’t meant for Burning Sands.

• The giant maggot is a Burrow Worm for Rangers of Shadow Deep, however with the number of undead I’m gathering I’m considering of doing a skirmish version of Dragon Rampant and this maggot could be a great addition to my army. The model is from the Reaper Bones line and I discovered here how hard it is to remove mouldlines from the models. In fact I suppose I need to use a technique similar to the one used on the Mantic plastics, which is cutting them away. This technique worked fine on my tortured soul, but I’m not a big fan of it as there’s always the risk you’re destroying details while doing so. Unfortunately there are still quite a few mouldlines present on my maggot as other techniques didn’t work and I guess I gave up.

• Another game I’ve been considering is a 15mm version of the Relicblade game, I love the system and it could easily be played in other scales than 28mm, and I did this sabretooth with this in mind. For now it’s just going to feature in Rangers of Shadow Deep as a hound though. The model is a 10mm tiger model from Magister Militum where I sculpted some tusks on. I decided to use this smaller scale as the sabretooths in the 28mm version of the game are also a bit smaller than the human models.

My two ostriches are a bit tall for 15mm and I suspect that I once got them as a freebee or picked them up in a sale (although I can’t remember why). Despite their size and the fact that they’re a bit static, I decided to use them anyway and they’re actually not that bad as far as objectives go.

Not sure anymore where the lion comes from, he’s not the best sculpt and a bit shallow on the details (as if from a mould that’s been used for too long) but he will do. For now he’s on his own but I found two 25mm Hasslefree lionesses in my lead and resin pile which, despite a slight difference in size, will join his pride later.

The lizard is another 25mm model from Bad Squiddo games that I decided to use for 15mm anyway as it would otherwise sit in my lead pile like forever. And again the scale difference doesn’t really matter that much.

Finally, a bunch of tokens. I put some plastic stones on a washer to represent things like warp- or gemstones. The eggs I got, which actually are dinosaur nests from Magister Militum, came in a pack of three so I painted them all up.

That's it for this week, thank you for reading.

Wouter

Spooktober

Hello everyone, 

it's been a while since I last posted anything. Again, I can offer you plenty of excuses but in I'm not going to do that. I got a bit depressed because my job hunt is going poorly and immersed myself in Persona 5 to keep my mind from wandering. 

However, October is usually a month many painters use to paint in a kind of theme (Zomtober being a regular one). With the Halloween spirit in mind (not that I care about the holiday though) I started painting some creatures that are often considered creepy, disturbing or spooky after I got back from a family holiday in Western Australia.

While I still even haven't got an interview in sight, even though I’ve send over a 100 resumes already, I got the painting bug again so I'll hopefully feel well enough to post more regularly in the coming weeks. 

First up are a bunch of spiders I bought off from eBay. Given the price I paid for them I suspect they're recasts; the details are pretty good though but the resin's a bit brittle and a few legs broke off during transport.

Their size is similar to that of a medium sized animal, not too big or too small and close to what I was looking for.

Next is a converted Reaper Bones fire elemental, which I'm going to use as a tortured soul for the Rangers of Shadow Deep game.

A couple of skeletons and skeleton knights from Alternative Armies. I removed the turban on one of them as I thought it looked ridiculous, my repair work isn’t the best on him however and he looks a bit weird (you can probably spot him right away). There were a few more skeletons in the pack I bought, but these are wearing some more outlandish armour so I’m saving them as summons for my Burning Sands collection.

And finally a trio of Blood Bats from the Warhammer Vampire Bat Swarm range, especially the two smaller ones are great for 15mm.

After painting all of these I felt like doing more, so hopefully it won't be too long until my next update. Thank you for reading!

Best regards

Wouter

25 years later

Hello everyone,

I've gone through a week of hell with both my wife and three children suffering from a severe cold and high fever, leaving me, as the most resistant one, to nurse them all back to health.
Luckily I haven't fallen sick yet and my oldest son is also already going back to school.
This left me with little time for my hobby but I did manage to finish some things I was already working on.

First and foremost my stars of this post, some (infamous) old-school Games Workshop Snotlings.
These guys were some of the first miniatures I ever bought with the pocketmoney I had, some 25 years ago. Without the funds for some decent paints a few of them were given a thick craftstore paint layer so I could use them in an RPG I was mastering, the rest of them ended up in a box not to see the light of day for many, many years.
When I visited my home in Belgium earlier this year, I looked through my lead and plastic pile to see what I could use for the projects I had planned and came across these guys again.
While they were meant for 28mm, they're perfect for 15mm too.
On top of that they are some amazing sculpts, with a lot of different facial expressions and poses (I got 19 individual models). Whoever sculpted these did an amazing job.
So, back in Australia I started to base and paint them up for Burning Sands.
They're a race of cavedwelling Trogs which,  in typical 80's cartoon style, are going to represent the slightly clumsy followers of the main villain, an Efreet who controls them through a Djinn.

Four done, only 15 more to go!

I also layed the final hand at my World of Twilight Legends Empire militia and knights.
Not in time for the painting competition but ready to play with.

Here's a group shot of all the Legends models I've painted so far. 

That's it for this week, back to my sick children :D.

Thank you for reading!

Best regards,

Wouter

World of Twilight Legends and getting some more boring stuff done

Hello everyone,

These past few weeks I had very little time to do some painting as my wife was using my usual painting spot to do some studying for an exam.
Instead I focussed on getting something I've been putting off for a long time done: terrain!
While I love building terrain, painting can be a bit boring sometimes and though I wasn't happy with my dark reddish rocks colourscheme I kept it because I didn't want to spend more time on them.
Anyway, I took out my (cheap) airbrush and gave them a new coat, as well as some more scatter terrain and palmtrees for burning sands.
Here's the result, not special but it suits my needs. I might add an oasis and other smaller terrain pieces later but I've got enough to fill a 2' x 2' table for now.

The Egyptian style ruins are from a company called Scibor and are perfect for 15mm in my opinion. I could have done a far better job painting them, but the truth is they probably are only going to be used as objective markers or spawning points for scarab swarms and I think they look good enough after a drybrush. 

With another 'after the Kickstarter painting competition' currently going on and me starting late, I painted models at every free moment I got. 

They're certainly not my best work, a bit rushed even, and I'm probably not going to be able to finish the diorama I had planned.

One thing I had to do was convert the base sizes as World of Twilight has standarized bases. So small (30mm) bacame 20mm, Medium (40mm) became 25mm and so on.

My converted Devanu Matriarch

The (unfinished) tower, still waiting for some occupants.

In case you're wondering, the stripes on this fella's pants are irregular on purpose :D, I thought it would look better and be more appropriate this way. I also added some bits on him with greenstuff so he looks closer to his 25mm counterpart.

That's it for this time, thanks for reading!

Wouter