Miniatures!!!

Ah... miniatures!  Little gobs 'o happy pewter!  I have a whole bin I've collected over time and gather up the ones for any particular project I might need as necessary. This is a fun hobby to get into.  After you invest in your initial supplies, a single project won't cost you more than $2 per figure... and you'll get hours, if not DAYS of enjoyment with them in RPG games... or maybe you'll just have a cool mini to sit on your desk or computer.  They're like tiny sculptures that you get to add personality to!

For starters, here's some supplies you'll probably need: An exacto/hobby knife - this will be your best friend.  It's a sculpting tool as well as a cutter,  Mind your fingers though! Files of various sizes.  You don't need anything superstrong as pewter is soft, but the more capable it is of handling details the better off you'll be. If all you intend to do is paint, these tools should serve your needs.  If you plan to kitbash and resculpt you'll need some more hardcore supplies. A pair of wire cutters - these are good for cutting off heads and other limbs for your minis.  I've found  this to be better than filing off the offending limb and much faster. A dremel - All purpose happy tool!  You can grind off logos, smooth our surfaces, and even cut and polish with one of these happy things!  downside is that they're expensive and one wrong move while you're working with one and you can shave off half a character's face accidentally. Two part epoxy putty, AKA kneaditite, aka green stuff - This is what they sculpt miniatures out of.  You might be able to find some from your local hobby shop... but your best bet might be to order directly from Game$ Work$hop. Sculpting tools - these can be toothpicks, dental tools, hobby knives, or just your fingers.  whatever  works best for you.  I have some tools for working in clay that serve me alright.

For painting you'll need a set of paints, and despite what people may say, a simple set of acrylic craft paints at wal-mart will do you just as fine as the expensive model paints  Be sure and buy an extra big bottle of black and a big bottle of white, you'll probably be needing these more than anything else.  You'll also need some non-gloss spraypaint; can of black, a can of white, and a can of gray.  And finally, a can of clearcoat spray to add your finishing protective layer when you're done. And if you really want to add that final little cool touch, go to a place  that sells supplies for model railroads.  Get yourself a bag of 'ballast' (very very fine gravel that comes in different colors) and a bag of 'foliage'.  Pick two colors what look good together and colors that you like.  If you have the money to spare you might wanna invest in multiple bags of various colors.  One bag goes a loooooooooong way though.  I've been dipping out of my ballast bag for two years now and it's over half full yet. Oh yes, you will also need glue.  Either some epoxy glue or superglue for reattaching limbs or weapons to minis and gluing them to their bases, and a bottle of normal everyday elmers glue if you want to add ballast and foliage to the base of the mini. For now, I leave you with a couple of pictures of minis I have kitbashed.  I apologize for the low-res scan on the cheetah, I wasn't the one whot scanned it but the nice guy who did also added those cool backgrounds... so I can't complain too much.

Leeta - A skimpily dressed Shadowrun mini, or maybe a Ravenloft one.  I can't remember.  This was for a one-shot session on tabletop that I did with an online roleplaying game.  My players were actually there in real life, so I  played in real life.  I had five custom minis I needed to make, Leeta, two red-haired kids, and two cheetah cubs.  Basically an adult and four children.  I don't have the minis for the cubs or the kids (no scans), opting instead to leave them at the house where I do most of my tabletop RPG but they were quite an annoyance to make, lemme tell you!  firstly, as miniatures are normally used for **WAR** games, it's really hard to find children.  So here's what I ended up  doing... I snagged some 15mm elves which were children sized compared to the 25-28mm ones I was using for roleplay, snipped their funny hats off and added drapery over their weapons to make it look like they were wearing robes.  One of them had been varying a spear in his hand and was now kitbashed into carrying a staff.  I also had some Warzone 'Children of Illian' which were ugly goblin things with no  weapons in their hands.  They wouldn't make for good human kids because their proportions were all wrong, but they had the potential to make nice cheetah cubs.  I ground away all the evil skulls and wires coming out of their head with mister dremel, resculpted new heads and added tails.  One of the tails fell off somewhere along the way, but they still looked okay. Leeta herself needed work on several points.  First she's supposed to be a slave, and her dress was cut more like a bimbo.  I got out my putty and covered up the large slits in the sides of her dress and changed it into something more conservative.  Next came the magical part... the mini had been chosen because it had the hair type I needed, so I had to be careful not to sculpt over it.  The face is my favorite part, but also the most difficult.  Carefully I applied the greenish putty and  sculpted in the features with my knife and little needle clay tool.  From there I added ears, making sure they were both the same size and not too big, and the always stubborn to apply tail as a final point.  After the putty hardened (It hardens in about 3-6 hours after application) I painted all five of them up and they were used to roleplay that very same day. This one has a much shorter story.  I did this for fun... My raccoon mage, Fenter, has been a fun outlet for awhile and I wanted to pay homage by making a miniature of him.  He started out as a 'Ral-Partha Remembers, Evil Wizard'' miniature.  Fenter is far from evil, but this mini had just  the right pose and just the right potential.  I wish I had a picture of the original so you could see a 'before' and 'after' version of it all. First thing I needed was to take care of the hat.  The one on the Evil Wizard stuck straight up like a carrot.  I lopped it off using mister happy dremel and resculpted Fenter's floppier hat along with his smiling little face.  Next came the hands.  The Wizard's hands were bony and thin, while Fenter is a portly and soft little fellow so I resculpted new hands, exchanging the evil skulltipped staff he had been carrying in one hand with a more cheerful stone mug (Fenter likes to drink, afterall).  Next came the build.  The Evil Wizard was scrawny and covered in talismans of skulls... unstead of painstakingly filing them all off I just globbed putty over them and sculpted it into drapery, this had the added effect of  making Fenter look more like his proper tubby build.  The bones at his feet were covered by ballast and foliage. After that he was painted up.  This is when a mini really starts showing some life!  Fenter's colors are rather erratic, he doesn't have much in the way of a wardrobe and his one robe (It's not a dress!!!) has been washed so much that whatever color it was originally has been lost.  It's a sort of purplish blue with yellow symbols scrawled over it.  I just kinda went crazy with the paint, and the end result is what you see here. This was one of my first kitbashing attempts.  A Bauhaus "Order of the Gryphon" sargent with a sniper rifle.  The only thing I changed was his face... which originally had a wolf's muzzle instead of a bird's beak.  The only thing I'd been told was that The Order of the Gryphon wore gold armor... but solid gold didn't seem to fit so I toyed with different shades of gold along with the white shoulderpads and bits of red. This is Zoltan.  I hope to use him if I ever get into a Mutant Chronicles RPG.  Unlike the other Zoltan, this guy is a human and simply wears the armor of one of the Order of the Gryphon.  There's a story behind him, but that's for the gaming page and not here.  Zoltan's  dominating colors have always been black, violet, and gold/ochre.  I wanted him to have dark colors in his armor resembling that of the Brotherhood so I kept the apperance of gold to a minimum and focused on as much black as I could manage instead.  the beak did not come out as nice as it had on the previous gryphon, but it was faced at a wonky angle and was a lot harder to do properly.  Imagine trying to sculpt over a face that's partially hidden, you see how his head's turned?  I had to sculpt it so that it wouldn;t look like his beak was stuck in that shoulderpad!  When I get his human counterpart finished, I'll stick it in here as well.

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