The Other One's Vault of the Undead

Minion Miniatures Flesh Golem

Feeling a bit rough today, sore throat, sniffles, helluva cold no doubt on the way, but something arrived in the post to cheer me up.

Last November I backed Minion Miniature’s ‘Monsters of the Underdeep’ Kickstarter campaign. This resulted in several great large miniatures – a Troll Patriarch, Lizardkin Deathscale (big nasty lizardman!) Bugbear Ironshield and the gribbly undead beastie I was interested in; the Flesh Golem.

The Bugbear and Flesh Golem each have several optional parts. With the Flesh Golem there’s a variety of heads, arms and shoulder pieces to choose from. I opted for a wicked claw arm, a wonderfully yucky tentacle arm, spikey bone shoulder piece and the best of all ; a truly lovely (by which I mean gruesome) head with a split/slipped face, inspired by the 1982 film The Thing (one of my top 3 all time favourite films).

Here’s the individual components:

Flesh Golem 001 — How to Build a Monster…

Hard to see the detail I know, especially on the head, as it’s cast in a paler resin than the other components.

Which brings me to the nitty gritty. This is a resin kit, manufactured IIRC by Zealot Miniatures on behalf of the creator, Minion Miniatures. The model is top quality, very nicely detailed and a very, very crisp sculpt, with little to no flash that required removing. Took me less than five minutes to clean the model up and about the same to glue all six pieces together:

Here’s a (blurry, sorry) photo of the Golem next to a troop of 28mm Mantic Games Revenants to give you a sense of how big the Golem is:

I love that tentacle arm. Very icky:

I’m planning on having the Golem as the centrepiece/unit filler for a regiment of Zombies for use with my Undead army for Kings of War. Should look pretty striking.

I also bought this shield from Minion’s Bugbear kit:

This is big, almost as tall as the Golem. Not going to tell you what I’m planning on using it for just yet. 😉

Go and take a look at the other arm and head options for the Golem on the Kickstarter pages and the other kits that Minion Miniatures funded through their campaign. A second Kickstarter is planned to begin in the coming weeks, with a superb Zombie Hulk as the main attraction. Guess I’ll be backing that too!

Minion Minatures Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/minionminiatures

Original (now closed) Kickstarter Campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1629942774/minion-miniatures-the-monsters-of-underdeep?ref=discovery

Flesh Golem — Time to Put Your Head Between Your Legs and Kiss Your @ss Goodbye..?

The Hills Are Alive, Er Undead..? Painted Citadel Games Workshop Modular Hills

My set of Citadel / Games Workshop modular hills are 99.9% finished now and ready to give my Undead some better sightlines to some tasty brains (or cover from pesky cannon fire).

I finished them by drybrushing them all over with a sandy colour, using a one inch emulsion paintbrush, then drybrushing the more prominent rocks (using a standard drybrush) with a bone colour to help make them pop.

Two colours of flock were then added. Firstly PVA glue was then daubed over where I wanted the flock to go and the mid green colour added using a puffer bottle. This was allowed to dry for a minute, before the excess flock was tapped off and retrieved. A dark green flock was then added here and there by hand, pressed down using a piece of kitchen roll and allowed to dry for a minute before again; the excess flock was removed and retrieved.

I added tufts here and there for a bit of extra effect, mainly in nooks and crannies between rocks.

The hills were then left for a couple of hours until the glue had dried and the flock fixed into place with a good coat of hairspray. Yes, you read that right; hairspray.

It’s a tip i read on a forum somewhere a year or so ago and it’s the method I’ve used to fix the flock on my Secret Weapon Rolling Fields gaming boards – which has worked so far. And hairspray is a heckuva lot cheaper then spray varnish.

The only slight downside with using hairspray is that the unflocked, painted areas end up with a glossy sheen to them , but this is easily fixed by brushing on a quick coat of matt varnish, which is the 0.01% of the job left to do. I would never try to use hairspray as a replacement for varnish on my actual miniatures, but it does a good job of fixing flock into place.

I’m happy with how these have turned out and pleased to have achieved a different effect to the usual ‘gray drybrushed over black’ rocks. Looking forward to my next game of Kings of War and giving (at least some of) these hills their first outing on the tabletop.

Thanks for reading!

The Hills Have Eyes (Painting Games Workshop Modular Hills)

I’ve acquired two sets of Games Workshop’s modular hills over the last couple of year (one bought at retail and another second hand) and one of GW’s ‘standard’ hills (also second hand).

Today I finally got around to removing the flock from the second hand pieces, so that I can get them painted up and flocked to match my Secret Weapon Rolling Fields gaming boards .

A quick soak in hot soapy water and some judicious scrubbing with wire wool turned this

into this:

The two sections on the left are the ones i’d bought at retail, undercoated in the same brown I used on my gaming table. The scrubbed hill looked like this:

So you can see I had three different colours of hill to crack on with. Some Vallejo chocolate brown and my airbrush soon sorted that out:

And after airbrushing on some stone colour (sandy brown, to match the general Yorkshire Stone feel i’m going for instead of the usual grey) and then shading it with two tones of darker colour, the hills ended up looking like this:

I’ve added a wash of army Painter soft tone ink over the stone sections, which is currently drying by the boiler, under the stairs.

Drybrushing to bring out detail and adding the flock is going to have to wait until tomorrow, as I’m off to Skipton for a friend’s 40th birthday bash tonight, so i’ll post another update when they’re finished.

Tabletop World Windmill, Painted

I’ve always liked windmills. I’m not sure why; maybe it’s the striking silhouette. I love the one in Sleepy Hollow by Tim Burton and for some time now, have thought it would be great to have a windmill as a piece of the scenery for my wargaming table.

I’d seen a couple of mdf kits which were okay, but which didn’t quite ‘speak’ to me, and a plastic kit at my local model shop that I very nearly bought, even though the scale wasn’t really right.

But then I saw this. Search over 🙂

This windmill is a resin kit by the outstanding Tabletop World, who produce the stone bridge I’ve already painted. Whilst it doesn’t have the gothic silhouette of the windmill in Sleepy Hollow, this is a superbly detailed piece and I absolutely love it. Each individual stone is detailed and the four sails are each unique, with lots of nice detail like frayed and torn fabric and loose ropes. The roof has nice touches like missing shingles.

Here’s the kit freshly unboxed:

And a shot of each elevation of the Windmill:

And some close ups showing off the superb detail Tabletop World have put into this kit:

The sails are quite fragile, so storage and transportation of the kit will require some care. I originally thought I may glue the top section to the tower and then magnetise the four sails so they could be removed for storage. However, there isn’t much surface area to drill into at the end of each sail, so I decided to glue everything together. You’ve just got to be careful when reaching for a unit close to the windmill, not to knock it and snap off one of the sails.

Thanks for reading! 🙂

Tabletop World Stone Bridge

This just arrived in the post today, about an hour after I made the first post on this new Blog (I’m taking it as a sign that this Blog is meant to be 😉 ). Look at this kit. Just look at it..! (and you can now see how I’ve painted it here)

I think that this is a stunning piece of scenery. You have to see the detail to believe it. It’s a resin kit by a company called Tabletop World. Their products are premium (and the price point reflects this), but I have to say that i think this was worth every last penny.

I backed Secret Weapon’s Kickstarter to get their Rolling Fields gaming boards (the Stone Bridge is at on one of these tiles in the photos). The Rolling Fields set gives you 24 one foot square injection-moulded hard plastic gaming boards, allowing you to have a six by four foot gaming table with a nearly endless variety of lay outs.

Eight of the boards are river sections, so I’ve been looking for over a year for a good stone bridge to use with them. I’d found some acceptable pieces, but none of them were wide enough to accommodate a troop or regiment in Kings of War (KOW) which are mostly have a 10cm wide frontage. I bought a mdf kit to get (reasonably) nice side panels for a bridge and made my own surface for it , wide enough to accommodate even a unit of cavalry in KOW. My kitbashed bridge would suffice, but I’ve never been too happy with how it looks and have never used it in a game.

Then I saw this kit by Tabletop World. I was blown away by it and given how expensive it is, I ‘ummed and ahhed’ for a while, thinking that it probably wouldn’t be as wide as I hoped. Then I found out from comments on Facebook that the bridge was 10cm wide at its narrowest point. Meaning I can fit a unit on it, as you can see.

Decision made. I just had to have one.

Okay, the bridge isn’t wide enough to accommodate cavalry (or a KOW unit on 25mm bases such as Orcs), but it looks so good – who cares!?

Here’s some more images to show you the detail. Even the interior of the building is fully detailed.

I’m going to give some careful thought as to how I paint this. I’ve got to do it justice. 🙂

The Other One’s Kings of War Undead Army

Welcome to my brand new Blog about my Kings of War Undead army and other tabletop minatures games which I enjoy.

This is the first time I’ve tried to keep a blog, so I’m learning the ropes as I go. If you like what you see, please check back in every few days, as I’ll be adding more content, images and categories as I figure out how to do it. There’s a button at the bottom of the page allowing you to follow my blog. Hope to see y’all around!