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From the painting desk #80 – I came, I saw, I was inspired

July 28, 2025

For the first time in my life, I took part in a painting competition! I’ve been going to Ropecon, Finland’s main gaming convention (well, I say gaming, but it’s just a big overall geek fest) yearly since the mid-90s, and finally decided to put in an entry in the painting competition, Cold North Open. We threw the idea around with some friends – mostly non-painters – last year, thinking that it might be fun to participate just because. We did!

I was going to go all-in, but then my initial plans didn’t work and time ran out, and I was going to call it quits as a result. In the end, I decided to go for it anyway; life is short and there was nothing to lose. Enter three days/evenings/nights of merciless painting and a very sore neck, and I had this:

Click for a larger version

The model, which I entered in the Trench Crusade theme category, is a lovely, lovely model from Lost Heresy Miniatures. I’d seen the model a while ago, but since I’m not particularly into Trench Crusade, I’d kind of passed on it. Now that I was painting for a competition, I figured it would be a good opportunity to paint something for the fun of it.

In the end, I didn’t have success in the competition (should’ve probably gone a bit more grimdark for the setting), but apart from a moment of disappointment, it didn’t really bother me all that much. I’m happy with how the model turned out, and received some great feedback from the judges to improve further – essentially, all the skills are there but I need to think things a little differently for competition painting. I listened to a couple of great lectures – given by excellent Finnish miniatures painters – on competition painting and colour theory, and rather than intimidated, I felt really inspired!

While I’m not thinking of going all-in on competition painting or becoming a stellar painter, it also did feel really nice to push my skills a bit. Actively learning new things and pushing your skills can be really fun if done without pressure, and to be honest, I’ve been painting for such a long time that a sort of stagnation and routine has set in. It’s not a bad thing as such, and I’m really happy with how I paint, but I also really enjoyed focusing intensely on making a single model really nice. Also, as I don’t play a lot of miniature games, painting and storytelling are my main ways of engaging with the hobby, so improving my painting can and hopefully will increase my enjoyment as a whole, I think!

Posted in Miniatures | Tagged , , | 9 Comments »

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Making a game

July 13, 2025

This year, I’ve gotten started on a miniatures game of my own and it’s been a fun project so far! This post is an introduction to what I’m doing, and might even develop into a series – although with my waxing and waning blogging enthusiasm, I’m making no promises. Anyway, it’s nice to get some ideas into writing and to an audience, no matter how small (quality over quantity etc). I’ll start with some key questions, maybe to prompt myself to some reflection as well.

What’s the game about?

Tying together a bunch of my interests, Containment (working title) is a solo game about private military contractors – mercenaries – clearing out space colonies after a disastrous rage zombie virus outbreak, inspired by films like Aliens and 28 Weeks Later, the comic Planet of the Living Dead, digital games like Jagged Alliance, XCOM, and Aliens: Dark Descent as well as (mechanics-wise) tabletop games like Five Parsecs from Home and FREAKZ!

A group of running infected from 28 Days Later

It’s these guys vs. mercenaries, essentially.

The tone I’m looking for is kind of a darkly humorous anti-corporate satire: cleaning up the colonies has been outsourced to a bunch of more or less shady market operators that are in it mainly for lucrative government contracts and PR. The job is high-risk and pays well, and mostly attracts either the kind of person interested in killing for profit or those just desperate enough to sign up.

Close-up of Carter J. Burke from the movie Aliens.

“I work for the company. But don’t let that fool you. I’m really an okay guy.”

The game is designed with emergent narrative in mind. The characters have names, personalities, and some background – not a lot, but enough to maybe latch on to if you’re that sort of player – which influence things that happen both during and between missions. There are tables that hopefully bring up interesting and relevant things and nudge the player towards constructing some kind of coherent-ish narrative of the game events.

There might be a light company management element in there as well, but for now the emphasis is on developing solid and entertaining mechanics for the core gameplay.

Why make a game?

There are a couple of reasons and a fair few other things that have fed into this.

First of all, there isn’t a game out there that’s currently doing what I want, but there are many games that do a part of it. Five Parsecs from Home does a wonderful job of emergent narrative, and is a huge inspiration, but doesn’t quite capture what I’m trying to do here. The game’s Bug Hunt alternative/expansion, in turn, is similar to what I’m doing (smaller teams vs. horde), but I’ve found the narrative part too thin compared to the main game. In fact, this whole game creation process started from an attempt to expand on Bug Hunt. First and foremost, I wanted a game for me. I’ve written on the blog a couple of times (here and here) on the topic RPG elements in wargames, and a lot of that thinking is going into this game as well.

What do I want then? A fast playing, light solo game that is quick to pick up a play a few missions of, with light cognitive load: I hate memorising a million special rules and exceptions to those special rules, combined with a ton of variables based on, for example, different weapons and skills. This said, it’s a balancing act! The first version of Containment was essentially a game of luck with very few tactical elements. Boring, in other words.

Second, designing and developing a game is pretty fun in itself. I know several professional and semi-professional game designers, and we’ve often had a lot of interesting talks.  Having played games for a long time now, I definitely have my own particular likes and dislikes when it comes to game mechanics, and being a game scholar, I do spend quite a bit of time thinking why people enjoy playing games. Through both my work and 30+ years experience of RPGs, I’m not a stranger to the creative process either. So…why not try my hand at creating a game?

Third, as an adult, I’ve realised that it’s possibly to just…do things. There’s no magic to it, no-one you need to ask for permission, and so on. If you feel like creating a game, you can just create a game! Furthermore, it doesn’t have to be just a document in a cloud somewhere, but it can be an actual thing with a professional layout, illustrations, even dedicated miniatures. It might even be published, who knows! Sure, these things are not free, but in the grand scheme of things and compared with stuff like house renovation, they’re not crazy expensive either.

What’s going on at the moment?

The game’s rules are currently at a stage where I can play a pretty fun session or two. That said, there’s only a single mission at the moment, a traditional “you need to search these bodies for intel” thing or creeping in the midst of dormant infected who are waking up – slowly, unless you start shooting. New ideas for rules tend to pop up during gameplay, and they need to be tested, modified, and then accepted or discarded while trying to avoid a complexity creep. There are rules for dormant infected and when they wake up, evacuations (for ending missions), flashbangs (to momentarily distract and slow down the infected), and first aid injections (to give your poor bitten operative a few more rounds before they turn).

I’ll do some playtesting next week with a few regular gaming friends to see what they think of it, and I’m assuming there are more changes incoming after that. That’s really welcome though, as at some point you just become blind to your own work. I’m looking to release a version of the rules for playtesting “sometime in the future”, so drop a comment if you’re interested!

Posted in Miniatures, Sci-Fi, Zombies | Tagged | 4 Comments »

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What’s going on?

July 11, 2025

For the first time in a long while, I felt like posting on this blog! We’re in the summer holiday season here in Finland, so with work stress decreasing, free time increasing, and overall more (limited) sunshine and general fun, I find myself somewhat more energetic. Got to strike when the iron is hot and so on!

What’s up over here? Nothing much, which seems to be the usual middle-aged thing to say – work is good, eyesight getting worse (just bought my first reading glasses), hair thinning (which I’m not yet ready to accept), marriage still great. Being this old (well, not old-old but you get the point) feels odd in the context of this blog. I started this blog in 2009, at the age of 27, and I’m soon to be 43. Quite a lot has happened since then, both personally and globally!

Linking to the starter post of the blog from way back, I ended up reading it too! Seems like I’ve come full circle – or at least I’m at that point of a loop again. I’m currently working on my own gaming ruleset about zombies. What else could it be, right? Combining my key interests from past years, it’s a solo miniature game about zombies in a scifi setting with a seasoning of  corporate satire, as you manage a private military company – i.e. mercenaries – tasked with cleaning up infected colonies somewhere in the outer reaches of civilisation. The crew consists of more or less unsavoury types, with each character having their own (randomly generated) personality, which in turn affects their gameplay: a callous operative will have no qualms about putting down a bitten comrade, whereas a sensitive one might hesitate for a fatal moment, that kind of thing. The game is geared towards emergent narrative, the main inspiration being games like Jagged Alliance, XCOM, and Aliens: Dark Descent on the digital side, and Five Parsecs from Home and FREAKZ! on the miniatures side of things.

The design process and playtesting has given me a great reason to dig out a bunch of miniatures I painted years back, such as the zombies I was working on when this blog kicked off. In addition, I’ve obviously been printing and painting lots more zombies – fast ones this time. On the list are also some private military operatives as well as scifi civilians, all the usual suspects for a game like this. I’ve had a lot of fun doing some headswaps etc, both digitally and physically. For making a horde (well, 20+ minis) and working with a limited number of suitable models, the option to mirror models before printing is pretty useful. It doesn’t really add a ton of variety, but it’s something! So, here’s a bunch of painted models, they are mostly from Lost Heresy with a bunch of Knight Soul Studio heads thrown in. They’re overall lovely to paint, as they’re nice clean sculpts withouth excessive detail.

Click for a larger version

Click for a larger version

Click for a larger version

Glad to be back to blogging! No idea how regularly I’ll be posting, but it’s nice to resurrect this old thing every once in a while.

Posted in Miniatures, Sci-Fi, Zombies | Tagged , | 9 Comments »

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Salute and the Pennine Way 2024

May 11, 2024

Life goes on, and occasionally the blog as well! For the first time in a long while I felt like typing something here, so here goes. Nothing dramatic as usual, busy with life things and all that. What follows is a description of my latest trip!

Salute 2024

I went, I helped BunnyBadger games put on participation games (and painted up a zombiefied Joe Biden and a glittery Taylor Swift for the Trumpocalypse game), I enjoyed the atmosphere, walked with Emmi around the show, met friends…the usual! My Salute purchases have been dwindling year after year, this year I got a bunch of brushes for both myself and Emmi for her craft hobbies. Ironically, some years after my long “only pirates for me thanks” miniaturing period has come to a close (for now at least), the theme of Salute was pirates. Oh well!

In addition to the brushes, I picked up some lovely, characterful futuristic law enforcers from Die Hard Miniatures. I put these together and cleaned them up last night, and I remembered how much work there is working with metal compared to resin casts and prints.

Photo of five painted futuristic law enforcement miniatures on a blue background.

Photo © Die Hard Miniatures

In addition to the miniatures, I bought the Sci-fi Backdrops picture book by Jon Hodgson, published by Handiwork Games. I was silly enough not to get in on the Kickstarter, but conveniently got this through Bad Squiddo. I had to quickly try it out, and I can safely say this is one of the must fun miniature-related things I have bought in years! As you probably know from reading this book, I game very little, but I do enjoy the storytelling aspect of miniaturing, so this is perfect stuff for me. I lined up a few scifi models for demonstration purposes.

Two miniatures posed against a science fiction background.

Click for a larger version

Two miniatures posed against a science fiction background.

Click for a larger version

The Pennine Way

If you’re a long-time reader of the blog, you might remember that five years ago Emmi and I did about a hundred miles of the Pennine Way national trail in the UK as our honeymoon. The trip was excellent and left us hungry for more, so we decided to do the whole thing of 268 miles. What followed was three weeks of beautiful views, bog (and more and more bog), quaint villages, friendly people, tiny lambs, and an amazing feeling of freedom in the walking bubble. While it was a physically strenuous trip, I guess getting to the blog after a long, long break is evidence that it was a welcome recharge of energy, creative included. I have about a million photos, but I’ll just share some choice ones below. If this feels tempting, I’m happy to provide advice!

It genuinely feels nice to be writing the blog after such a long break! Who knows, this might become a thing again. Anyway, I’m still alive and well and playing with my toy soldiers! How is everyone else doing?

Posted in Miniatures, Miscellaneous, Sci-Fi | Tagged , , | 9 Comments »

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The sweetest imperfection

May 15, 2022

Wow, really hasn’t been an active year for blogging, has it? While DotL has been very quiet, I’ve been busy with hobby stuff – and I’ll hopefully eventually post about it.

Much of this year’s gaming has been Five Parsecs from Home, a solo game that I’m happy to recommend, which I have been printing and painting models and scenery for. However, this is more of an editorial style post than a regular From the painting desk one. Why is this? Because I’m doing something profoundly different!

By “profoundly different” I don’t mean a new technique or a fancy new tool, but a fundamentally different approach to what I usually do. I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to miniatures stuff (and various other minor things in life). Very small things can bug me far too much. An irritating mote of dust stuck to a miniature’s varnish. A slightly off painted eye. A mould line that I didn’t clean up neatly enough. Support marks on prints. A slightly different colour tone on two miniatures’ bases when they should be the same…you get the idea.

In general I don’t mind this, it’s just who I am after all, but it can cause some practical issues now and then, such as when you’re in need of a table full of new terrain. Sticking to my usual working habits, a table full of scifi terrain would probably take me months, and even that would involve compromises. That’s really not good for actually getting a game in – a couple of months is plenty of time for a budding project to run out of steam and result in half-finished reminders of that one cool idea you had.

Solution? Live with these minor imperfections. This is obviously nothing groundbreaking, and I’m sure it’s something every miniaturist thinks about at some stage. Sometimes you’ve done something as well as you can no matter if you’re happy with it or not, sometimes you just want to finish something so you can do something else that’s more inspiring or interesting. I’ve done this in the past too, and obviously I don’t put 110% into everything I do, sometimes I just want stuff that’s finished. This time, however, I’ve been doing it to a different extent than usual.

With this scifi scenery, I went for terrain that looks good on the table. I wanted it to look nice for gaming, but it does not have to stand up to close scrutiny or close-up photos – which this post will feature to illustrate a point. What this means in practice is that I printed at a much higher layer height than usual (0.2mm compared to my usual 0.12mm), only bothered to do minimal clean-up, and no imperfections such as failed or rough bits have been fixed. As I don’t want to bin things that can be used, these are basically stuff that I’d normally label “test prints” and give away for someone who can stand them being a bit crappy, or spend a lot of time fixing them with putties, sanding, and things like that.

The same goes for painting. These models have been hit with spray primers (one of which completely malfunctioned, covering the model and my spray booth in dry paint powder – no matter, still used the model), lathered in quickly made washes, and given a couple of coats of drybrushing using large brushes and craft store paints. Some very basic detailing and weathering, and that’s it, done!

You can click on the photos below to enlarge them.

Wrong printer settings resulted in funky random lines on the surface. Also, the windows are just blotches of paint.

Layer line central! Printers aren’t good at shapes like the pipes here.

These buildings have detachable roofs…

…that warped horribly after painting.

My printer had a rough day with this file, resulting in some gnarly texture and print artifacts.

Spray can malfunction left the inside gritty and chalky. I decided not to do anything to it, as I don’t usually play inside buildings anyway.

At first this felt horrible, but as it was a very conscious experiment, I decided to plough through and just live with it. What do you know, at some point I started to be more and more happy about them! Are they perfect? No! Do they need to be? Also no! Placed on they table they look really nice actually, and of course everything is subjective – I would’ve died for terrain this cool as a kid! This isn’t an “oh, woe is me, my super high standards are simply unbearable” kind of thing, but more an issue of my own personal flaws features and idiosyncracies and dealing with them in a healthy and beneficial way. I know this may not seem like a big thing, but believe me, it is!

Local planetery enforcers about to get destroyed by a genestealer. Doesn’t look at all bad to me.

I’m sure most of us have feelings of inadequacy at one point or another in this hobby: with the internet full of amazingly skilled people, while inspiring, it can also be disheartening at times. Learning to let go of excessive perfectionism or self-criticism that needlessly holds back hobby enjoyment is, I think, a great way of getting more out of our toys. For me, it meant putting together a bunch of very adequate terrain in a fraction of the time it usually would’ve taken, which means more time left for other things, more terrain to actually use in games, and more joy from completing things. Most of all, it allowed me to enjoy this awesome hobby even more than before. Importantly, this isn’t a “you should do this as well” post. Lavish attention on your models to your heart’s content if that is what makes you happy!

As an interesting final note, I started this post months ago but haven’t gotten around to finishing it. After digging the models out of storage, I found myself thinking that they actually look pretty nice and much better than I remembered. This made me happy – it seems there’s been an actual shift in how I view these things now, so…go me, I guess?

The hut in the first few pictures is a micro hab unit by Saucermen Studios, available for free on Thingiverse.

The buildings with the detachable roofs are stackable buildings by Rocketship Games, also available for free on Thingiverse. 

Posted in 3d printing, Editorial, Miniatures, Scenics, Sci-Fi, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 26 Comments »

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From the painting desk #79 – Fembruary 2022

February 27, 2022

Wow, late February and it’s the first post this year. Better late than never!

The Fembruary challenge, a brainchild of Alex from over on Leadballoony, is one of my favourite things in the online miniatures scene – heaven knows our little corner of the hobby world benefits from more representation.

I’ve been painting a lot this year (apparently instead of blogging), and these three models are my entry to this year’s Fembruary:

First up is a rogue trader type character, the leader of my Five Parsecs from Home gang. Dubbed Nura Aleh by the wonderful Realm of Plastic 40k name generator, the mini is a 3d printable one from Studio Sol Union, kitbashed with a printed head from Knight Soul Studio. I think the combination makes for a pretty cool whole. My vague background story, based on the Five Parsecs random background generator for the character is that she’s a former or renegade inquisitor. For the clothes I went for a gold/purple combination – a tried and true combination and nicely a bit flamboyant.

Photo of miniature with long coat and pistol, views from the front and the back

Click for a larger version

The second model is another member of the Five Parsecs gang, the wasteland nomad mercenary Esma. The model is an old, OOP Infinity Ariadna scout sniper by Corvus Belli that I picked up years back at the local RPG convention if I recall correctly. I’d always considered the character to represent a woman, yet when I started to paint it, I realized that there were no gender identifiers there – which is actually kinda cool. A female model does not have to be super strongly (and stereotypically) coded as a woman with breasts, high heels or the like. For the paintjob I drew inspiration from the background, a wasteland nomad didn’t really speak to me of ostentatious clothing, so I went with very muted tones.

Photo of miniature with assault rifle, dressed in a cloak. Front and back views.

Click for a larger version

The third and final mini is my rendition of a Vindicare Assassin for my 40k army. Originally a Tempest guardsman sniper by Velrock Art, I removed the cloak before printing. The sculptor has intentionally made modifications to the minis wonderfully easy, as the cloak was simply a single element that could be removed using Meshmixer. This was a bit of a tricky model to paint, as it’s very, very black. I went for a few different tones, painted some sharp highlights on the bodysuit and made the armour and knee and elbow pads a bit more dull. I gave the hair an auburn look for a spot of colour, and painted the eye lenses red for a bit of extra contrast and menace. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it!

Photo of assassin miniature with rifle, dressed in all black. Front and back views.

Click for a larger version

To wrap up this post, a shot of the trio in more fitting surroundings.

Photo of three miniatures, an assassin, a rogue trader, and a mercenary standing on a metal walkway with scifi scenery in the background.

Click for a larger version

Posted in Miniatures, Sci-Fi | Tagged , , , , , | 14 Comments »

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Azadi Death Front #1 – Getting into 40k

December 19, 2021

This might sound like an April Fools’ thing, but I’ve started a small project for…Warhammer 40k. Wait, what? After not having touched the game since the 90s, I tried a small scenario with some close friends a while back (using my Colonial Marines as Imperial Guard), and realized that it was actually pretty fun! This, combined with the fact that I had long been eyeing the Azadi Death Front models from 40 Emperor, and the realization that a 40k army doesn’t have to be an ultra massive endeavour, have led to me starting a small 40k force. While I haven’t played the game, I have enjoyed many of the different 40k digital games, and quite like the fiction too. The Imperial Guard (or Astra Militarum in silly trademarkable lingo) has always been my favourite. This shouldn’t be a surprise, given my love for Aliens, Starship Troopers and the like. They’re the underdogs, the meat that gets fed into the grinder – albeit meat with pretty sweet tanks.

The ADF models are a really cool force of all-female troopers, inspired by Kurdish YPJ soldiers. I don’t really want to mix real-world politics with my toy soldiers too much, but I love both the look of the minis and appreciate their real-world counterparts. Headscarves, sneakers, harem pants – what’s not to like. A bit of extra representation in the grim darkness of the far future isn’t a bad thing either.

Illustration by Alberto Luna, ©40Emperor

Now, I’m not a fan of batch painting, which has been a major detriment to any army-based miniature gaming thing since my WHFB days. However, I happened to have a very free weekend – back in October when I started this post(!) – so I printed out a whole squad of troopers, gave them a blast of black primer, and got to work. It was a fun weekend’s work, and I watched a bunch of films and series from my backlog (Wandavision is fun, What if…? is fun, Predators is still fun, AvP and AvP: Requiem were still not good but better than I remembered, and I quite enjoyed Alien: Resurrection much to my surprise). At the end of it I had an actual squad to be used in 40k, with even a few extra models thrown in. For me, finishing 12 models over a couple of days is a huge thing!

I wanted to try some new techniques, so I did a bit of OSL on the plasma gunner, and some heated metal effects on the support weapons – which I think turned out pretty nice! All of the scarves are different, and allowed me to break up the uniformity of the squad. I want them to look more like a a militia/rebel force than a super uniform military unit, and I think that works decently well too. With the bases I went for a kind of a rocky, sandy Afghanistan look – not quite desert, but dry, dusty and barren.

Photo of female imperial guard squad

Click for a larger version

Photo of four female imperial guard troopers

Click for a larger version

Photo of four female imperial guard troopers

Click for a larger version

Photo of four female imperial guard troopers

Click for a larger version

After the squad, I’ve painted a Sisirk war walker, the ADF’s equivalent of a Sentinel, some Heresy scifi troopers with 3d printed female heads (to represent Tempestus Scions), a custom Hero Forge Astropath, and I’m nearly done with a Chimera alternative too! This doesn’t mean that I’ve neglected all my other projects: I’ve painted a bunch of gothic horror monsters, some graveyard pieces and monster hunters, too! I’ll show those off too, possibly, eventually, maybe.

As regulars have probably noticed, the blog has been very quiet for the past few months. As usual, there’s nothing dramatic involved, luckily! I’ve been really busy with work, took some time off to go to London for Salute 2021 (happy I did, as next year’s event is cancelled), and so on – “the uze”, as Cheetor would say. As I’ve mentioned approximately a hundred times by now, as a lot of my daily work is writing, whether research articles or grant applications or professional communications, there’s not usually a lot of energy for spare time writing. I’m thoroughly enjoying reading your blogs, though, and I’m not about to leave this wonderful little community! I’m on holiday for the next three weeks, so I ‘m fairly certain the blog will pick up a bit again – it usually does towards the end of the year!

Posted in 3d printing, Miniatures, Sci-Fi | Tagged , , | 14 Comments »

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Projects, projects, projects

August 22, 2021

Most of the miniatures stuff I post on this blog relates to my pirate project, which has been ongoing now since 2015. However, there are more projects going on, so I figured I’d write a post detailing all the stuff going on. Before I get to what I’m working on at the moment, a few words for context.

After doing pirates for so many years and investing a lot of time and effort into them, I find myself in need of diversions every now and then, and obviously pirates aren’t the only thing that interest me. However, I’ve had enough projects stall in my lifetime to know pretty well how my head functions with these things: push something too far in the back, and it might be a loooooong time before it gets back into the spotlight. Unless you’re a very long-time reader, you probably don’t know about my Underworld project (2009–), or my Aliens board game project (2012–). You might have seen my Pacific Rim project (2014–), although I don’t blame you if you haven’t. These three projects have been sitting quiet for twelve, nine, and seven years now, respectively. I’ll eventually get to them, I’m (genuinely) sure, but once the momentum is gone it can take a lot of time to build it up again. The Underworld project just kind of drifted away, the Aliens thing stalled – I think – because Prometheus killed a lot of my fanboy enthusiasm for the setting and it hasn’t fully recovered to date. With the Pacific Rim thing, I wasn’t happy with the board, ended up binning it, and also found that I’m not a big fan of painting machines, which is a bit of a drawback in a project focusing on giant mechs. A huge backlog of miniatures doesn’t help here either: there’s always other stuff to paint, so a lack of enthusiasm can push stuff way back in the painting queue, and life is too short to paint too many things you’re not excited by.

I’ve solved the problem above by tying pretty much all of my current projects together! They all have more or less overlap potential, which obviously helps, as I don’t have to “abandon” a project to work on another, which reduces the risk of projects slipping into oblivion. With this preface, here’s what I’m currently working on and how they tie together. I’ve listed the main project branches with their subprojects.

Pirates are a bit obvious, aren’t they? However, while this is nominally about pirates, in actuality this project is more Hollywoodish 18th century in general. In addition to pirates, there are sailors, civilians, merchants, redcoats, highwaymen and so on. This sprawling thing forms the backbone of my projects. A lot of the buildings and other terrain are made with this in mind. There are several subprojects to this:

Undead pirates are exactly that. This subproject should probably be called something like Nautical horror or something along those lines, as in addition to pirates there are crabmen and other monstrosities.

Click for a larger version

Barbary corsairs are historical pirates with an Arabian/North African feel. As with my other pirates, I’m playing pretty fast and loose with history here.

Foundry 28mm barbary pirates

Click for a larger version

Pirate hunters is a finished subproject! It’s a trope-laden group of special characters, fit for all sorts of hunting duties.

Group shot of pirate hunter miniatures

Click for a larger version

Blackpowder horror has obvious overlap with the stuff above, yet it’s still a theme of its own. It’s the Headless horseman and all sorts of other things that go bump in the very dark nights of the 17th and 18th centuries. All of the humans and terrain are perfectly compatible with the pirate stuff, and vice versa. The undead and other monster pirates are a perfect fit here as well. Whereas my pirates are situated somewhere in the Caribbean, this project has a more haunted New England vibe.

Picture of headless horseman miniature

Click for a larger version

Monster hunters is a subproject, although currently the main focus of this theme. I already have some vampires and werewolves, but more are included in this subproject. The main focus, however, are the gritty humans who hunt these monsters. Pretty much any of the pirate hunter characters fit in here as well. Some of the minis I bought way back in 2009 for my Underworld project will find new use here.

Click for a larger version. Picture © Velrock Miniatures

Lost World stems from our upcoming Ghost Archipelago game. Dinosaurs, giant gorillas, ruined temples, jungle beasts, mysterious tribes – the works. This theme has a jungle vibe to it, and is kind of a catch-all project, what can’t you find on a mysterious island? Pirates are a no-brainer here, with their tendency to end up on mysterious islands and get eaten. Switching the regular pirates to Barbary corsairs brings this more towards an Adventures of Sinbad kind of thing.

Photo of painted lizard miniature

Click for a larger version

Arabian nights is my early stages project of Persian and Arabian mythology viewed through a pop culture lens. It’s flying carpets, mysterious spirits, and evil sultans galore. This project is very much fantasy. While quite timeless, it’s still much more swords and shields than gunpowder. The buildings and other terrain for this project are a perfect fit for my Barbary corsairs, and many of the human characters work nicely in either setting.

Photo of painted miniature genie

Click for a larger version

As you can see, these different but connected projects allow me to paint a lot of different miniatures as the mood strikes me, without really abandoning any of them. Want to do something bright and cheery? I can paint some colourful jungle creatures or maybe a djinni. Dark and moody? Undead and hunters, maybe some graveyard terrain. Historical? Covered. Fantasy? Covered. High adventure? Covered. Horror? Covered.

With these projects and subprojects occupying my time, I have zero fear of running out of steam in the foreseeable future. I hope this post illuminates how I organize my different projects! It also serves as a pretty good guide for what you can expect to see on this blog.

Posted in 18th century, Fantasy, Miniatures, Pirates, Vampires/Werewolves | 19 Comments »

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From the painting desk #78 – A ship of sorts

August 15, 2021

During the summer holidays, I mostly worked on a new(ish) side project – undead pirates. Having painted a bunch of crewmen, that I’m sure to post at some point during the next few years, I realized that obviously my crew needs a ship. None of the offerings on the market really struck a chord though, as they were a little too over the top for me. Cool as ships built of huge bones are, I was more in search of a traditional Flying Dutchman look, or something resembling the Black Pearl from Pirates of the Caribbean. In other words, a pretty regular ship, but tattered, like a zombie of a ship. In fact, the search for such a ship still continues!

During my search, I came across something that I had eyed in the past, a wonderfully crazy model of a small ship carried on back of a huge monstrous crab, produced by Print Your Monsters. The model is pretty much a definition of “over the top”, but who cares, I wanted it! I bought the STL files for it, printed it out and got to work.

Now, in all honesty, resin 3d prints are shit challenging in terms of multi-part kits. Resin printing can be surprisingly inaccurate, which leads to all sorts of alignment issues and so on. Very much so with this pretty complex kit as well. Out came some Green Putty though, and I had a decent looking completed model. There’s still a small visible gap that I missed, but on a model like this, I don’t mind all that much. I decided to save resin and printed the base on my FDM printer, using thinned down putty to mostly eliminate visible layer lines on the rocks.

Painting a large model like this is pretty daunting. It’s a centrepiece, so has to look pretty nice, but on the other hand there’s a ton of stuff to paint. The undead theme helped here! I’ve painted my zombies and the like pretty weathered, dark, and muted, so went for it here as well. I settled on a dark green and fleshy purple combination, and I think it works pretty well! The underside of the crab, not really all that visible, has a nasty, pale, pink-white look. The model was very much a drybrush/Contrast paint/wash affair, cutting down on time and resulting in exactly the look I wanted. It also helped hide some rough putty work!

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The model was bedecked with skulls, which posed a narrative challenge: were these actual skulls or decorations? I settled for painting the skulls on the ship a weathered bronze colour, while the skulls on the shell I painted as bone. They pop nicely, making the model more interesting. The crab’s limbs have a lot of flat coral, which I painted in muted yellows and reds, giving them very pale edges as I think that’s a very recognizable look!

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For the base, I went with my usual look for my nautical undead, black decorative sand with tea leaves and pizza seasoning. As it’s a large base, in addition to the sculpted-on detail I added some shipwreck-y planks and barrel halves from Renedra, and a brass model ship cannon barrel that I had kicking about. I had stuck a metal pin on the highest rock to support the model – otherwise only connected to the base by the small tips of the legs – and mostly hid that with some suitably underwater looking vegetation. As with my other undead, the idea here is of a kind of otherworldly sea bottom that they carry with them. Of course the black bases also provide a striking contrast with the bright sandy bases of my pirates and civilians, and are generic enough.

The banner was the thing I finished last. I sort of wanted some sort of cool pirate flag design on it, but after a single try, I realized that my freehand skills were not up to it. On a straight hanging flag maybe, but with the folds and the flag billowing to one side…nope. I decided to go for a simple black flag, which I think looks menacing enough.

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The monstrous ship actually only has space for four miniatures, but I don’t really mind. Rather than a proper ship, this is more a command vessel, likely for an undead pirate lord going “MWHAHAHAHAHAA!” While I’d love to show it off in full, the model is a nightmare to photograph, but hopefully the pictures at least give an idea of it – I hope to post some more in the future! I posed a Black Scorpion skeleton pirate and some Pariah Miniatures zombies on the model for a bit of added fun.

With this thing finally finished, I want something a lot less work-intensive. While it’s fun to do a big piece every now and then, I’m in no rush to start the next one!

Posted in 18th century, 3d printing, Giant monsters, Miniatures, Pirates | Tagged , , | 24 Comments »

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Hunting pirates #6 – All done!

July 8, 2021

It’s summer holiday time, and that means I finally have the time and energy to get to blogging, a little bit at least! This post is a special one though, as I rarely get to make one – it actually marks the end of a project, and this is because of actual completion, not dried-up interest.

With most of my projects usually being very much open-ended, it was a delight to actually take one to a clear, pre-defined finish. So here they are, my pirate hunters! A group of tropey types defined in my initial post, the bit of extra character made all the difference when painting them. For me, a little fantasy – thinking about the characters and their back stories – is a really good motivator, so I’ll have to do even more of that in the future.

In the end, I made one change in the cast, as I wasn’t completely happy with the Hero Forge duelist I’d made. However, as I drew inspiration for him from The Three Musketeers’ Comte de Rochefort, I realised that I actually had the good count as a miniature already. The model I have is by Redoubt Enterprises, and is actually a really nice piece. I think I originally skipped him as there was a fair bit of flash on the model and the sword was a little bent – the kind of things you “can’t be bothered with right now”. The model is very tall especially compared to my Foundry pirates, which also left him sitting in a box for years. Once cleaned up, painted, and based, he fit the crew just fine!

Group shot of pirate hunter miniatures

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So, from left to right, front row:  the second-in-command, one of the twins, the leader, the other twin, the sniper. Back row: the beastmaster and his dogs, the scholar, the veteran, the unhinged, and the heavy.

They’ve been based in a way that combines elements from my pirates and my civilians, so they can easily serve as either, should I ever actually play a game. At the same time it makes them a faction of their own. They may get a small ship of their own some day in the future, but for now I’m happy just to have the crew. While they’re pirate hunters, they would actually make for a super cool 18th century vampire/monster hunter team as well, à la John Carpenter’s (or rather, John Steakley’s) Vampires. New sub-subproject, maybe?

For the previous posts in this project featuring many of the individual characters, check out the Pirate hunters tag.

Posted in 18th century, Miniatures, Pirates | Tagged , , , , , | 17 Comments »

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