Giant Scorpion - Reaper Bones

Scorpion with some paint thrown at it. Was digging through my reaper bones minis when it occurred to me the scorpion could work well as one more mutant bug. Also good for This is not a Test as a rad scorpion.

Mars Attacks Dice Tower

Made a cool thing thing for next time I get around to playing or demoing Mars Attacks. Grabbed some artwork from the internets and cropped them to fit the panels of one of my dice towers. Mate printed them out and putting two sheets back to back laminated them so they'd be laminated only on the front when we cut them apart. Then tower sprayed black, green felt cut to fit the tray and and ramps and then glued together. He did up some towers for towers for Super Dungeon Explore and Ninja Allstars for PAX demos, they got a good work out over that weekend.

Mars Attacks Spy Girl Painted

Started off painting her dress in P3 Menoth whites working up from Menoth Base, Highlight and then White.





Then lots and lots and lots of freehand swirls, I wish I had an appropriate metallic red for these but that would have made it even harder to do.







Love this angle showing the crazy exaggerated pose of the mini that made it perfect for the Martian Spy

















Also some experiments in sticking glitter to the Martian Commander's cloak over the red paint. I can only say working with glitter and glue is a pain in the butt and constantly flakes off. Maybe I should have tried glitter nail polish.

Mars Attacks converting a better Spy Girl

When I received my Mars Attacks game the one mini that was a total disappointment was their spy girl, she is tiny compared to every other mini in the game and looks very anorexic. Of course what I wanted and probably most Mars Attacks fans is the wonderfully weird spy from the Tim Burton movie:



The challenge was finding a better mini. I considered one from Crooked Dice which is clearly inspired by her but I wanted something much more slinky. It's however very hard to find minis of girls in dresses to start with and especially in exaggerated poses. Eventually I had a look through Reapers stuff and struck potential gold in the Ghoul Queen, particularly since I had two of her in Bones so could have a hack at one without blowing too much $. Was an interesting experiment in carving off Bones plastic down to the just her and her dress, it involved much careful carving and a lot of sanding with diamond files and sandpaper trying to thin her arms especially. Then using greenstuff and my trusty Wax 5 to smooth out the gaps and add the bell bottom to the dress as well as the giant beehive hair. 













On the far right is the Mantic spy girl that I am replacing. She looks like a twig next to the other Martians.

I GOT A JEEP!

Been hunting around for about a month for a US Army Jeep to give a touch more retro feeling to my Mars Attacks soldiers. Found some nice 1/48 Vietnam era ones from Corgi but missed them on eBay. Then I found this 1/43 Cararama one which I won last week. 

Looks pretty good with the soldiers.

Painting the Tank Part 1

Starting with a white prime on most of the vehicles will let me have a bit of a faded look to the vehicles also it lets me mask the white stars on them.



I cut the stars from masking tape using some plastic decorative stars I bought ages ago.



Placed on the Tank and the truck.













I wanted to experiment this time with preshading by spraying Tamiya Olive Drab









Then the vehicles were sprayed with thinned down Tamiya Nato Green. I went a bit lighter coverage on the truck compared to the tank which makes it look a bit sun faded.





With the masks peeled and assembled they look good already. I still need to add washes and some drybrushing to finish them off.