January 2026 – Grimmleigh's Lab

Marvel Crisis Protocol: Medusa

I started reading comics for real when I was about 10 years old, so indulge me as I take you on a trip in the Way Back Machine to my public library in 1980. I would spend hours there every week, since we didn’t have a television, and I would often find the big compendium books of comics and lose myself on a couch for a few hours. One of those books was a big Silver Surfer collection, and there were some cross-overs with The Inhumans, who seem kinda silly to me now, but 10-year-old me loved them. Especially the Jack Kirby stuff.

Why Kirby? By today’s standards, he looks to be a bit of a hack. But if you really look at his work, especially in the ’60s, he was a master of speed and efficiency. Kirby famously had no idea how many circles Thor had on his chest, he just drew what worked for the panel. He also drew over 100 issues of various Marvel titles in 1964… which is insane.

Plus, the dude drew this, and as we all know, everyone wins when a Nazi gets punched…

Kirby’s other big strength was an understanding of what works with four colors. We can learn a ton from the dude as miniature painters! Hulk doesn’t wear purple pants because they were the rage in 1963. He wears them because purple complements green on the color wheel, and we want our subjects to pop. Half the time I pull a blank on a color scheme for a miniature, I’ll just look at old four color comics and find something that works… and it always works.

*Decades after her debut, artists are paying tribute to Kirby by keeping what works, working. Art by the incomparable Terry and Rachel Dodson.*

For the Marvel Crisis Protocol Medusa miniature, I wanted to make sure to honor the original color scheme. Luckily, most everyone since Kirby has stuck to the purple costume. It looks great with the red hair, and really draws the eye straight to the miniature!

I have to give huge props to Atomic Mass Games for this Medusa sculpt. My wife hardly ever comments on the minis on my workbench, but the second she saw Medusa, she was suddenly paying a lot of attention. In thirty years together, she’s patiently endured my hobby, but actual interest in a figure has been rare!

Looking back at the Dodson art, though, I’m debating going back in and doing the mask, gloves and boots in black. Regardless, this is a fantastic take on a classic character from Atomic Mass Games!

Miniatures

Warcrow: Alborc the Wrathmane

Corvus Belli excels at offering outstanding lore for their wargame settings, and fantastic miniatures to live out the conflicts represented in that lore on the tabletop. Infinity’s lore has been a lot of fun to follow over the past decade, and Warcrow is proving to be even more fun only a year or so after launch.

*Early color blocking over a red a purple underpainting layer, which is really making the main colors pop! The Summoner on the right should be ready to show off soon!*

Take the Northern Tribes, for instance. Here be orcs. They don’t expect to live long, and rate their value by what they can take at the point of a spear. They live in some of the harshest climates of their world, and share that space with the Varank, outcast elves that ended up in the frozen wastes.

The Orcs of the Northern Tribes are shamanic people, and look to a Wrathmane to lead them in good times and bad. One such Wrathmane is Alborc, who is criticized openly for his willingness to work with the Varank.

*Layering in some highlights on the bone armor and mail skirt, and starting the NMM on the sword. I really hate NMM, but wanted to give it a shot!*

Alborc has had visions his entire life that he will lead his people to a better life, but only if he brings the Varank along as allies. Which means you not only get to play really awesome orcs in Warcrow, but some very cool Nordic Elves as well.

*The finished Alborc miniature in all his glory!*

The sculpt for Alborc is very dynamic, but, as it’s from the earlier offerings from Warcrow, I don’t think Corvus Belli had dialed in the casting process for Siocast as well as they have now. With those growing pains in play, Alborc suffers a little from casting artifacts that can make him a little hard to assemble.

*One of the other negatives to siocast is that it is surprisingly brittle! Here you can see a shoulder tusk that broke while I was trying to nudge it a little after gluing. Lesson learned!*

There’s also some duller aspects of the sculpt here and there, and I really do think that’s part of the early siocast work. The newer boxes of Siocast minis I’ve picked up from Corvus Belli for Warcrow have been fantastic.

The biggest challenge for me on this project was letting the underpainting exist in the final paint. The subtle pops of purple and red shining out seem really obvious up close, but from a distance they’re adding a lot to the overall tonal feel of the miniature.

Still, Alborc assembled and painted is AMAZING. These figures are so detailed and fun that I find myself looking for ways to challenge myself a little, so for my Alborc I went with a purple and red underpainting layer. I don’t have much experience with this, but holy cow… I love the results!

Now I just have to balance a mad desire to do nothing but Warcrow minis for a while! There’s a lot of grey from a lot of games in my backlog, I can’t get obsessed with just one game, hahahah!

Workbench

Paint What You Got Challenge

While perusing through some posts from Argent Badger’s inspiring blog I stumbled across Dave’s excellent Wargamesculptor’s blog, and his annual “Paint What You Got Challenge“. It runs from the end of December through the end of February each year, and it’s exactly what it says on the tin; a challenge to paint what you have started or just sitting in your collection.

*Rasputina crew for Malifaux, painted in 2021*

I’m not going to even try to hide my enthusiasm. I have WAY too much stuff, and every time I look at the news I somehow end up feeling bad and buying MORE stuff. So, I probably need to cut back on the news and hide my debit card while I’m at it.

I’ve decided to take Dave’s idea and just run with it. So, from this post forward, I’m painting what I’ve got. I won’t be buying anything new, and barring gifts or something out of my control like that, everything you see posted from here on out will be stuff that’s just been sitting and waiting for some love.

Big thanks to Dave for the inspiration, and to Argent Badger and Kuribo for the great blogs!

Star Wars Shatterpoint, Workbench

Star Wars: Shatterpoint- Lord Maul

I have such a love/hate/love relationship with Atomic Mass Games‘ Star Wars miniature offerings. Legion hit in the mid two-thousand-teens and I loved the idea, but couldn’t stand the soft plastic miniatures. Then, Shatterpoint took the lead in the early 2020’s with some really dynamic sculpts and a fun game system.

But damn, buying the same characters again wasn’t something I wanted to do. Those soft plastics for Legion made my initial plunge into Shatterpoint an easy one, but then Legion ended up with some pretty good hard plastic sculpts as well.

Now it’s coming down to scale preference. At 35mm, Legion is already pushing the envelope of how big I want to get with a miniature. The 40mm figures for Shatterpoint look amazing, but with bases even bigger than Marvel Crisis Protocol, they get challenging to store, let alone display.

So, once again, I find myself debating going to one game at the exclusion of the other. Sure, I could keep both, but again, space is an issue. And Shatterpoint doesn’t have vehicles! AGH!

Still, Lord Maul for Shatterpoint was a blast to paint. He’s got those freaky spider mech legs from Clone Wars, and the larger minis really are fun to slap paint on.

Decisions, decisions.

Uncategorized

28mm Fantasy Troops

I have been really fussy about relative scale for most of my four decades of miniature painting. I want figures to be close in size to each other, which has led to me making some rash decisions about using slightly smaller scale miniatures with slightly larger miniatures typical of the Big Game Juggernaut.

Recently, I was out for a walk and had the old “no one is the same height, why stress that in miniatures so much” thing brought to life in living contrast. I am a little over 2 meters in height, and most people I encounter in the world are a little shorter, or sometimes quite a bit shorter than I am. So, yeah… why am I stressing out about that so much with miniatures?

*Gnoll warrior from Frostgrave, perfect beastman foil to store your arrows in!*

By placing those roadblocks in my way I’ve been blocking perfectly good Frostgrave minis from taking up space on my hobby table. They’re inexpensive, fun to paint, and make great rabble and foot troops for my skirmish games.

*Barbarian Warrior from Frostgrave, a perfect vessel to store your beer in, whether you like it or not!*

Sure, they might come up to a Warhammer hero’s shoulder, but on that walk most of the dudes I was passing by came up to my shoulder. So, that’s settled. Frostgrave minis are back on the menu, boys!

This might seem a little silly to most folks. Wardollies and their scale don’t keep most people up at night. I’m going to try my damnedest to give this a shot and not stay up all hours shrieking into the void about it!

*Human warrior, obviously out of arrows.*

Oof, those layer lines on my terrain, though! I think it might be time to get back to scratch built terrain. No knock against 3D printing, but I miss the charm of scratch built buildings! That, though, is another post. Here’s a cultist to wrap things up!

Am I alone in this? Does anyone else out there stress out about size differences within a scale? I’m not really losing sleep over this, but it does bug me a bit!

Uncategorized

Random Malifaux Miniatures

Malifaux is an amazing game. I love the lore, adore the miniatures, and think the game mechanics are incredible. I’m also so intimidated by the rules that I know I’ll never play a game of it again.

I still love painting the minis, and I have to be honest with myself; I’m far more a painter than a gamer anyway, but I sure would love to find a ruleset that allowed me to use these guys!

The big zombie is part of the Residents of Rottenberg crew, helping bring about a town that zombies can un-live in peace. At least I think that’s what they’re doing. It’s in my head-canon and won’t leave! I wish I had seen the seems in the sculpt before painting him, but thus are the perils of assembling and painting in bad light.

The next gribbly is a Desolation Engine, pretty much killing machines that only want destruction and carnage. They’re hard to kill, and are made up of machinery and dead bits of folks.

Even worse, if you DO manage to destroy one, they become a bunch of Steampunk Abominations, which is a fun little bonus. I think, I should say, since I’ve never actually played this crew and have no idea how they work. But it SOUNDS cool!

Normally, folks paint these guys up in dead flesh schemes, but I wanted to do some purple hues and play a little. Not strictly lore accurate, but it works for me!

Marvel Crisis Protocol, Workbench

MCP: Shadowcat

My introduction to The Uncanny X-Men was Rom Spaceknight #18, a cover with the coolest looking characters I had ever seen, teamed up with a FREAKING SPACE KNIGHT, not yet knowing that the cover had been drawn by the legendary Frank Miller. I was eleven years old, and doomed to love the X-Men from that point forward.

One of the coolest aspects of comics browsing in the early ’80s was that just about every grocery store had a spinner rack or some shelves with their comics on display, and that meant whatever hadn’t sold was pretty much still there. So, even thought the issue was a couple of months older, I was able to pick X-Men 139 up with a fortunate donation of half a buck from my mom.

This was also my introduction to John Byrne, an absolute legend in his own right. But right there, front and center, was Kitty Pryde, freshly minted X-Men rookie. She wasn’t Bucky or Robin, mere sidekicks (at the time) to title characters. She was the real deal, just training to get there. She was also about my age (sure, 13, but what’s a few years?). She was my favorite character, and pretty soon, Fifty cents a month was being saved up to follow along.

Fast forward some decades, and I’m still an X-Men fan. I don’t pick up the first-run titles, since $5 a pop is just more that I can afford, especially with an already expensive miniature hobby and Marvel cranking out half a dozen X Books a month. But I still pick up the trades where I can, and I’m still hooked.

Marvel Crisis Protocol released Kitty a bit back, and the miniature is fantastic. I wasn’t a fan of the phasing effect always being “on” with the sculpt, but these little figs are a work of art and it just works for me now that she’s painted up.

I’m hoping against hope that her “Captain Kitty” costume makes an appearance, I loved the Krakoa storyline and would really like to see new costumes! Still, this is a home run from Atomic Mass Games.

Star Wars Shatterpoint, Workbench

Star Wars: Shatterpoint- Zeb Orrelios

I’m a pretty content Star Wars fan. I think I grew up with enough hit-or-miss Star Trek that I can allow myself to enjoy a less than perfect visit to that Galaxy far, far, away, and I’ve only really loathed one of the movies. So I found myself pretty excited to get my hands on the Ghost Crew for Star Wars: Shatterpoint!

I’ve already painted Hera, who was a bit challenging because her leu pattern is pretty distinct. Still, she turned out pretty well and I’m happy with the paint job.

Zeb is a lot more straight forward, with a little bit of striping on his legs and arms. I had some fun using fluorescent yellow for his eyes.

It’s also a bit of fun painting this crew because you can either go more muted to match a live action feel, or vibrant for a cartoony look. I went somewhere in between, but that’s what I’ve been aiming for with my Shatterpoint minis from the beginning!

I should be taking on Sabine next, I hope Atomic Mass Games revisits some of these characters with the older versions from Ahsoka!

Workbench, skirmish games

Warcrow Orc Revenant

New year, new game!

I have always been a fan of Corvus Belli‘s Infinity miniatures, and have probably painted more Infinity figs than any other game. Mostly, that is because I worked in a game store that sold a ton of Infinity, and I was often contracted to paint armies for folks. I loved it. Loved the minis, loved the lore, but the game? Damn. I’m just not that kind of masochist. It’s crunchy, tricky to play, and I often found myself knowing I had lost in the first turn. Still, those minis are sublime!

We had been hearing about Corvus Belli developing a fantasy game for years, and most of us just assumed they would be putting out a fantasy re-skin of Infinity. Flash forward a few years, my store is gone, my game group is fractured, but dammit, CB just put out some lore for Warcrow, their new fantasy game. And… wow. It’s not an Infinity clone. It’s a good, solid game with very little crunch, and some amazingly well done minis. The lore is pretty spiffy, too!

My first fig for Warcrow is an Orc Revenant. The Orcs of Warcrow expect to die gloriously in battle, but they also continue growing throughout their lives. Once they reach their 30’s, they are pretty damned big, and salty as hell about not being dead yet.

These salty lads and ladies become Revenants, and set out into battle to meet the best end possible. The figure makes me happy, and I had a really good time painting him!

Assembly, on the other hand, wasn’t so great. The model is made from Siocast, which is a pretty environmentally friendly type of thermoplastic. I approve of that. The mold lines? Not so much. I also snapped the blade that goes on Punchie’s Stump, since it appears that Siocast is pretty fragile. I was going to complain a bit, but having put together more recent Warcrow minis, I’m happy to say that CB has worked out the kinks in the molding process and Siocast is working out pretty well for them!