Something Different: Owls

Somehow two of my hobbies have managed to run together. Both my wife and I are birders and also volunteer with a bird rehab organization. Part of the reason for this stems from our love of birds and owls in particular. Last year my wife started a new hobby of needle felting small birds and again in particular owls. She has also started a sideline of selling them on Etsy. ( You can check it out here at Birds By Botzan.) I have helped her out with parts of her projects before, mostly making armatures and constructing feet and beaks for some birds.

Saw Whet owl found in Canada

Then she asked me to try my hand at sculpting some owls for her after seeing something similar online. I decided to try to use Super Sculpey for this project. I've made some terrain and architectural details with Super Sculpey before but never any real detailed sculpting. I also used premade glass eyes for the sculpts. These are worth their weight in gold for really making the figures come to life.

The first one I did was a Saw-Whet Owl based vaguely off a picture I took of one last fall in Canada.
He was basically a learning experience with how to work with the Super Sculpey. After he was baked and hardened I also painted him up.

The second is a snowy owl. A while ago we had purchased a pair of books about making wood carvings of owls. These were an invaluable reference as they have tons of excellent drawings and scale references. He still needs to painted but I think he is a big improvement over the first little guy.

28mm figure I dug out of my collection for scale. Not meant to be giant ferocious owls but they could work in a pinch. 

Hardboiled Detective and the Long Goodbye to the Painting Challenge

Well the Painting Challenge came to an end on back on Friday and I submitted my last entry just a bit earlier than that. I still needed to paint up an anti-hero to send to Curt as my entry fee. I knew going in that I wanted to do a Film Noir detective and to try to do him in greyscale. I found the perfect miniature in the Reaper chronoscope line and got him ordered in.

I've never painted a miniature in greyscale before but I thought back to my boyhood art classes that mostly consisted of two tasks; mixing colors to match paint chips and painting still-lives in monochrome. So I broke out all of my greys and off greys and set to work. I tried to keep each piece of clothing in a separate tone to break it apart and give it that look of colors translated to black and white.

I gave the end of the lit cigarette the only touch of color. From looking at other peoples work it seems like that touch of color is what really sells the grey scale. Plus I think it looks cool.
I'll be trying to ship him out this week. Hopefully the cross border postal system will be kind to him.

I've really enjoyed my time in the Painting Challenge. Its been the most fun I've had painting in years and a special thanks to Curt and all of the other participants for making it so. I got figures done for several projects that have been sitting idle. As fun as that was I think the highlight for me was the Bonus rounds. I got to work on a few figures that I probably never would have otherwise. I'm particularly happy with the pennyfarthing cyclist that I sculpted. He along with the Uhtred conversion I did each got me a second place finish in the voting. I do regret missing out on two of the rounds however, and hopefully better planning next year will see me in all 6 rounds.

As far as overall production I think the past months of the Challenge have seen me paint more figures than I did in the previous year and possibly two years.

35 15/18mm infantry
1 15mm vehicle
1 28mm/ 15mm giant monster
Martian Tripod and drone
19 28mm figures (3 with their diorama base)
1 54mm scratchbuilt Cyclist



After this I'm going to be taking a bit of break from painting. I actually have a few started miniatures that didn't quite get done for the Challenge so they'll probably be trickling in. But for the most part I'm going to concentrate on sculpting and getting some terrain done. At least that's the plan for now.

Bonus Round 6: Uhtred of Bebbanburg

For the final bonus round the theme was Anti-Hero. I actually had a plan for this one laid out a while ago but forgot to get the correct miniature ordered in time. ( When he does arrive this week he'll still get painted up and submitted as my entry fee.) I was left looking around for another option as
I didn't want to miss another bonus entry round.

Fortunately I had just read the latest book in the Saxon Stories series by Bernard Cornwell. I still had the command sprue from the plastic Gripping Beast Thegns and figured I could turn the leader into the indomitable Uhtred of Bebbanburg. First up the figure need a couple of modifications. I sculpted some fur onto his cloak to give him a bit more savage appearance and of course changed the prominent cross on his chest to an amulet of Thor.

 

I couldn't remember a good description of colors from the books but I always imagined him in grays and other dull colors so I went with a sea grey for the cloak but gave him a touch of color on the hem of his tunic. I hand painted on a wolf's head for his shield as the traditional heraldry of Bebbanburg and gave him overall a little bit of weathering to give that fresh off the battlefield look.

 Don't forget to check out all of the entries and vote for your favorites!

 

Martian Tripod

My first full sized Tripod is done for All Quiet on the Martian Front. I think the colors actually work better on the bigger version than they did with the drone.

The kit went together very easily once I managed to track down some instructions for assembly. And painting was pretty quick for such a large model. I really like the size of the model compared to the 15mm infantry. He really towers over the human figures and gives a nice sense of implacable evil.



The Brits I painted earlier look like they are in a difficult situation standing alone against the tripod.

After posting him up for the Challenge earlier this week Curt raised an interesting criticism. He was of the opinion that the face has a sort of goofy look to them, even likening the noble Martian war machine to a clown's face with the eye as a big red nose. I have to say he has a point, and it comes across especially in pictures. Since I have two more to build I might try to recess the eye into the face plate instead.



Malevolent eye or clown nose? You decide!

It got me to think about other Martian designs I've seen before and I have to admit I like other more sinister versions much better than this one. One of my favorites is actually from the JLA cartoon and had a much more organic and asymmetrical look to the tripod. They even gave Superman a hard time for a while up until the end of the episode when they were destroyed by the handful.

The other picture was pulled off of Wikipedia and I think this is more in the theme I wish they had gone for in All Quiet. Its much more menacing looking with a more organic styling to the machinery. Its not that I don't like the tripod as is, I do think it has a nice retro-futuristic style to it, but now all I can see is that damn clown nose.

 

 

Sicktime Sculpting Projects

I suffered through a case of the man-flu this past weekend which threw my plans into disarray. I didn't get to submit my entry for the Hot bonus round and since I'll be on vacation next week it looks like I'll be missing the Comedy one as well. Disappointing but at least I should be able to submit the figure for the Hot round as a regular entry once I get around to taking some pictures.

18mm - The one on the left is going to be the first of my Great Victorian Writers Running in Terror series. On the right is almost done just the hard parts of face and hands to do.

I couldn't muster up the energy to do any painting this week but I did get started on a group of new sculpts in a variety of scales. I have vague ideas for uses for some of them but in general I'm just working on what I feel like right now.

Early stages of various pieces. 28mm on the left, a bust of indeterminate scale, and one scaled out to 1/35 as a trial run.

Armored British Infantry

I managed to finish up my squad of BEF infantry from All Quiet on the Martian Front. I had started three of them back in the fall but sidelined them to work on Painting Challenge entries. Now they and the other seven got their time on the painting table.

I had a debate with myself on how to paint them but finally went with basically the same as my regular infantry with the addition of grey/white for the helmets and breastplate. That way they will fit in in with the rest of my British ( all 6 of them HaHa) but still stand out on the battlefield from them.

My favorite out of this group is the Coil Gunner. I wish all of them had the same look. There is just something about the heavy armor, and the massive gun and backpack that just really speaks to me. I might try to make more of my own version of these troops based on his design.

For my purposes they are guys are going to be the specialist troops for the British Empire tasked to fight the various weird occurrences happening both at home and around the globe.

The squad getting down to work!

White Worms

Way back in November of 2012 I pledged on kickstarter from Troll Forged Miniatures for a set of cool looking aliens mostly since I liked the designs of the grubs. They were a nice mix of worm and insect and they just screamed weird Mythos creature to me. Time progressed and years passed but I never felt like I would never get my miniatures as there was excellent communication all along. I think this is where a lot of Kickstaters go wrong. As a backer I expect delays and for the delivery date to be moved back several times but as long as I'm kept informed about what the problems are and how it's progressing I'm perfectly fine with that. Of course I may just be atypical to the standard Kickstarter backer who I see complaining everywhere about not getting their stuff yet.

Back to the miniatures, the grubs are made out of Trollcast which I gather is some sort of plastic and resin mix. I'm quite impressed with it, especially in comparison with other similar materials I've had to work with. Nice detail, seems pretty resilient, and cleans up nicely with a file. I did run into a problem priming one of the four grubs even after washing them up with soap and water. I just ended up hitting him with some spray primer and he was fine from there ( I usually use Vallejo brush on primer out of sheer laziness to go out and deal with the spray can.)

 

Painting was straight forward as I decided to go with white as the scheme in honor of the Clark Ashton Smith story The Coming of the White Worm. The worms I think will be useful for both 15mm and 28mm. I could see them as giant worms in some underground caverns for 15mm. A cavern terrain board would of course be something that I would love to make at some point but that will probably be down the line. I think I could also use them with my dungeon stuff as some sort of crazy insectile wormy creatures. I still have a fistful of these guys left as well as the rest of the aliens from the pledge so I have more than enough to play with.

I haven't thought about it till looking at this picture but maybe I should use some 15mm figures as tiny faeries or imps to go with my 28mm stuff too.