More from the lab from the 15mm Fantasy project! I’ve been feeling a bit green lately, so I figured I would mark the occasion with a little greenskin action. And when I say little, I mean really little…
As I mentioned in a previous post, 15mm has become my Goldilocks scale for miniatures. Stuff just prints up lovely, and there’s a ton of options out there from some independent miniature companies.
This particular Green Menace started out as a subscription set of STL files I got from Forest Dragon Miniatures, but my doctor says I need to avoid printing with resin, so I have been ordering the rest of the army from a company on Etsy that does a pretty nice job!
The first finished fig is an Orc Warboss on a Wyvern, and I seriously love this mini! There’s a print defect on the wing, but he’s pretty small and it’s hardly noticeable:
I also finished up a small group of grunts, which were mounted to #10 washers for bases. Those work out to about 1/2″ wide, which allows a pretty solid balance between functionality and display needs. I originally had 3/4″ washers on there, but that made the miniatures hard to place on terrain!
I plan on using these guys for skirmish games, and there’s a travel board in the works that will have some pretty sweet terrain packed into it! More to come soon! (pay no attention to the ratboi in the basement!)
I have a problem. It’s not quite all consuming, yet… but I am finding myself more and more drawn to a philosophical conundrum that I’m afraid will never resolve itself in my mind.
That conundrum? I want to find my “Goldilocks” scale in miniature wargames. I am primarily a painter, and will more likely than not drop a smoke bomb and disappear into the ether if confronted with an actual game. So, the age-old adage that smaller (than GW) scaled minis won’t work for me doesn’t quite apply. I really don’t mind if most of the people I hang out with in the hobby sphere only game in Heroic 28mm scale, since I hardly play games in the first place!
Lately, the thought of smaller scale miniatures has been really appealing to me. They take up a lot less space, and there are plenty of options out there to fill out just about any genre for a collection. Sure, I can’t really put together an Age of Sigmar list from most of the options out there, but I can do plenty of fantasy stuff!
Now, the biggest question ends up being which scale works for me? With that in mind, I worked on four dwarf minis in different scales:
From left to right we have a 10mm, 15mm, and 20mm Dwarf from Forest Dragon Miniatures. The stalwart chap on the right is a standard GW Beardie Boy, which I have a metric butt-load of at the moment.
The classic Heroic 28s look great, have tons of detail, and are a lot of fun to paint. But they DO take up a bit of space, and they take some time to paint up, especially if you’re putting together regiment sized collections of figs.
20mm minis had me pretty pumped up for about a week, since they translate to roughly 72nd scale in models there are a lot of cool scenery and terrain options, just not much for fantasy. They also paint up a bit faster than the 28mm figs, but not so much faster that they have a clear advantage. Also, while taking up less room than the GW figs, it’s not that much less room!
Now, I have to be really honest right now. I’m already a sucker for 15mm, which you can see above. They’re small enough that they don’t take up much space, terrain is also pretty small, but they’re still big enough that they have a good amount of detail! Plus, they paint up pretty quickly because of the size. Downsides are that they are small enough that I’m concerned about eye strain, but at least I’ll go blind doing something constuctive!
the less said about 10mm the better, this scale broke my brain. Cool as hell to see put together in a battalion, but at 55 my eyes and hands just aren’t up to that challenge. I might come back to it later, because it’s really tempting from a storage perspective, but I did not enjoy the experience one bit!
My personal favorite after all of this comes down to 15mm! There’s a ton of options available, and I just love how a group of troops looks massed together. This group of Dwarf hunters would work well for just about any skirmish game, and I’ll be back in a bit with some tips on how to put together a group for rank and flank games!
What’s your favorite scale to work with? Let me know in the comments!
Still playing catch-up on the never-ending mass of miniatures from the Marvel Zombies Zombicide game from CMON! Today it’s all about Drax. Or Mr. Destroyer, if you’re feeling fancy.
I’m pretty consistently surprised with the quality of these figures from CMON, considering the first Zombicide minis I painted were not the best of experiences!
Also, I LOVE that these miniatures have base details already. That’s a really great addition that goes a long way towards selling the mood of the game!
I still haven’t played a game of Zombicide, but it could happen. Regardless, I’m happy to have these around for any super-hero action that might come along!
I’m an absolute dork for the stupid-ass villains that plague Spider-Man’s life. The dumber, the better. It’s a real testament to the design genius of the old Marvel art stable that these guys still resonate with me half a century after I discovered them as a kid!
Sandman will be kicking off my collection of Spider foes from the Marvel Zombies Zombicide game from CMON. I’m really digging the added sand work on the base, he was a lot of fun to paint!
Next up on the Spider-foes docket is the Scorpion!
I’ve had these models kicking around the house since they came out, and while I have painted a fair few of them up, I was never really happy with the way they turned out. The Scare Shields just weren’t coming out right, and the whole army was frustrating me.
Add to that my general disdain for the overall play style of Age of Sigmar, and I was finding myself in a funk. But, I remembered a lesson learned from painting Infinity models, and that is that sometimes Grimdark just isn’t the way to go. Sometimes, you gotta go Grimbright. Get some color in there. Be bold with your color choices, and just go ham!
With that inspiration fresh in mind, I got to work and put some fun colors together and had a blast!
Here’s a couple more finished up, I’m really liking how these turned out!
More will be coming along as the inspiration and energy hits!
When I was a kid, I thought Ben Grim was the coolest Marvel super hero in the world, and then I discovered the X-Men, and all that went out the window. Still, I devoured almost all of John Byrne’s run on Fantastic Four when I was a kid, so it was a lot of fun for me to get to work on this pretty spiffy miniature of the Thing from Zombicide: Marvel Zombies!
Right off the bat, the quality of these Zombicide sculpts is hands-down some of the best work CMON has done. The detail is pretty nice, and even the plastic quality appears to be a higher grade. That’s pretty good news for sure!
There’s quite a few Fantastic Four characters in this box to get to, so I had best get to work!
I’m still on this weird-ass quest to find the perfect scale, and I’m afraid it’s leading me to this whole new world of resizing existing STL files to smaller scales to see what scratches what itch the best.
Lately, that itch has been tiny super heroes, and that scale appears to be 15mm. I have been taking some regular 40mm files from C27 miniatures and printing them off at 15mm scale on my Saturn, and the results have been really fun.
And really frustrating. The figs not only get super tiny, they’re also super fiddly and really come off the supports alot, even though I’m painstakingly supporting the damned things. Oh well, live and learn. We’ll see how long I stick to it, but for now, the madness shall run its course!
First off the plates was this tiny Captain America:
I was pretty happy with the results, and really happy to see that Speed Paints and a quick highlight look FANTASTIC! Plus, this is a half hour to an hour of a paintjob, so wins all around!
Here’s Cyclops:
One down side is that my focus is getting freaked out by the penny, so I’ll probably start shooting without the scale comparison. Still, it’s fun to see how freaky tiny these guys are!
Time for some Southern charm:
And, finally, my absolute favorite character from Silver Age Marvel, MODOK. I am absolutely smitten with how this little maniac turned out!
Full transparency, I painted these before a medical emergency in November that pretty much knocked me on my ass and is still effecting me. My hand-eye coordination is pretty messed up, and I can’t hold a brush for very long, but physical therapy will help with that. I’m just trying to catch up with projects that I had been meaning to post about prior!
I’ll be trying to get more of these printed off soon, but I’m going to have to find someone to print them for me, since the doc says I can’t run resin anymore. Poo. Still, no use dwelling on that, I still have a mountain of gray plastic to tackle as I get back on my feet from surgery!
I picked up the Kickstarter All for the Marvel Zombies: Zombicide game from CMON during a moment of weakness. Okay, more like a month of weakness while watching the stretch goals slip by. Sure, there is already a perfectly good Marvel based miniatures game out there, but I really don’t like 40mm miniatures from a storage perspective, and if I’m going to paint up a mini range, I would rather it be from something more reasonably scaled.
Plus, the mins are actually pretty cool and have pre-textured bases. What would I have to lose, other than half a week’s pay?
The boxes arrived several thousand years later (and before it comes up, I don’t do Kickstarters anymore, they’re kinda terrible for independent game stores). There was, one fateful afternoon, a box on my porch the size of a small Yugo, or perhaps a very large mini-fridge. Inside were an assortment of even smaller boxes, crammed full of little plastic super-heroes.
I pulled out half a dozen, put the horde of zombies in the “who gives a damn” box, and set to base coating. Since I was going for quick over quality (I’ve since changed my logic on this) I sat down and put some paint on a test model. And, lo and behold, she didn’t turn out half bad!
I am having a hard time spotting the mold lines on these models, and the plastic CMON uses is a little on the soft side, so sometimes they can be a little tough to clean up. Still, not a bad first effort, and I’m excited to get more heroes painted up!
This project is short and sweet. A squad of Necromunda figures with an Ambot for backup.
I have only played a couple of games of Necromunda, and while I enjoyed it I found it overly complicated. And there were a couple of spoofs that players could pull that massively wreck the fun factor, so I won’t be playing again since I already know what any opponent will be fielding. Take out the glue guns, and maybe I’ll think it over again!
Still, the minis are incredible and full of character, and will work really well with Stargrave, Core Space, and Zone Raiders, so this probably won’t be the last Necromunda set that I pick up!
The squad was painted primarily with Citadel Contrast Paints over a zenithal primer coat. Highlights were then layered in to punch of the details, then a diluted wash of Agrax Earthshade was given to tie everything together.
My favorite little detail in the Cawdor kit is the candles a lot of these goofballs have just jutting out of their armor, with the dude with the giant crossbow dealing with dripping wax all over his visor! Great little details that tell their own story. Love it!
Since absolutely no one has asked, I thought it would be fun to put together a quick guide to how I paint ork skin. This is a speed paint method that I have been tinkering with for the better part of 20 years, and allows me to get a squad of orks (or goblins, or green dwarves, or emerald halflings) on the table pretty quickly!
Step One:
Start with a good foundation. Deeznudds here was sprayed with a coat of black primer, then I gave him a zenithal highlight pass with gray paint. Then, he got a downward drybrush of light grey paint. I’m going for high-contrast here, so subtlety is absolutely not a goal.
Step Two:
I blocked in the skin with some Sap Green ink from Daler Rowney, mixed with just a tiny bit of airbrush medium to dilute the pigment just a little. With the pre-shading done in step one, the skin could be considered done at this point and look just fine on the table-top…
Step Three:
…but we’re not Barbarians, are we? At this point, I started picking out the upper left side of the highlights with a little bit of yellow paint (Army Builder Babe Blond to be exact). Any light yellow will do the trick. I took a couple of passes to build up the lighter effect.
Step Four:
Why yellow? Well, Padawan, green is made out of yellow and blue, therefore it really likes being highlighted with yellow, and if you need to shade, blue works a wonder. At this step I have mixed a little Army Painter Arid Earth in with my yellow, and my highlights are getting smaller with each layer. It’s also time to paint that manky damned eye.
Step Five:
This step is completely optional, but I really like the effect. I paint in the highlights on the lips with a lighter skin tone, this adds a cool effect to the face and breaks up the monotony of a purely green face.
Step Six:
This is where I block in final highlights on the lips by adding a little Army Painter Arid Earth to the flesh tones.
Step Seven:
Deeznuddz is looking pretty fierce, it’s time to line his gums and his manky damned eye with some Flesh Tearers Red Contrast Paint from Citadel.I also painted in his teeth with some Menoth White Highlight from Studio P3.
Step Eight:
The gums get a little highlight action by adding a little Army Builder Arid Earth to the Flesh Tearers Red. Yes, I do try to highlight with the same color, good eye! This is a good place to coat the teeth with some Skeleton Horde Contrast Paint from Citadel.
Step Nine:
At this point, all that’s left is the teeth. Since highlighting with a yellow based paint won’t give me the effect I’m looking for, I’ll be using Menoth White Highlight from Studio P3. Deeznuddz is ready to smash some skulls!
The same technique that was used on this face works perfectly for any green skin, whether it’s arms, torsos, or even squishy little goblins. Have fun!
Now, the colors may seem a bit washed out, but that’s because we’re looking at this guy much bigger than he is in real life. Look at your screen at about what his real world size would be, and you’ll see what I mean!
If you enjoyed this guide, let me know! I’m thinking about starting a series to help people navigate learning to paint miniatures!
Grimmleigh's Lab 