Tree-man for 10mm & 28mm by Eureka Miniatures

 This mighty dude is from Eureka Miniatures and is an 18mm Tree-man. As you can see from these images, he works well for both 10mm and 28mm.

There are three different sculpts, two of which are near identical. However, being metal, you can bend their limbs to provide a good variety of poses. This one is mounted on a 40mm base. Time to paint some more.

Otherworld Miniatures Huge Spider no. II

Huuuuuugggggeeeeee!

I recently painted up the excellent Otherworld Miniatures Huge Spider No. II. You can find the beasty here.

Big enough to scare the poop even out of an Orc!

She is an excellent miniature in my opinion. She was a pain to put together, mostly because my SuperGlue didn't! Once it finally did glue (after several legs fell off because said glue didn't...cheap Chinese crap!) the miniature looked suitably impressive to scare the arachnophobes of my RPG group.

Here she is next to a 32mm tall Reaper Miniatures Orc

She was meant for a Boss Fight in our RPG gaming session on the weekend just gone and so I was desperate to finish her off ready to spring her on the Lads as they searched the caverns they were exploring. The Boss Fight ended up being a bit of a once sided affair as the Lads miraculously managed to stun her for two combat rounds and then proceeded to beat the crap out of her with all sorts of pointy things. Damn thing took something like three weeks to glue and paint and it lasted less that 20 minutes on the table during our gaming session. :(

Ooh, webby

Thankfully I had the real boss still up my sleeve. That was a Wraith that gave them some grief and a Boss Fight that lasted close to an hour of playing time. Sweet! They survived though.

A hapless victim's remains adorn the base along with the spider's offspring

The miniature doesn't come with a base and so I bought off eBay a 90mm round base to glue it on. The spider webs on the base are cotton wool pulled thin and then glued by my finger dabbed in PVA glue. I lightly dabbed the wool in areas in order to glue it to the base but left other parts of the wool untouched. This anchored the wool but kept if "fluffy" in other areas.

I used a Reaper Miniatures Spider Swarm and half a Kings of War Skeleton to decorate the base.

She will now join my Chaos Wars and Kings of War armies as a monster for the Goblins. She may still make an appearance in a future role playing session where she may yet get her revenge.

Angmar Shade

Just finished an Angmar Shade. Pretty happy with how it turned out.

Lots of nice detail on this mini for dry brushing.

Red Box War Trolls

Red Box from the Ukraine do some nice 1/72 scale fantasy plastic soldiers. I've shown in a previous post some of their Isengard style Uruk's before. Recently however they released some War Trolls.

Red Box War Trolls set 1

Putting on my thinking cap I decided that these may be useful as Olog-hai (Black Trolls) or as Half-Trolls. Olog's were, if I remember correctly, described by Tolkien as smaller than regular trolls but more cunning and dangerous. So I thought I would take a gamble and get some and see how they fair size-wise and also whether they could fit on a 40mm base for use in WotR cavalry movement trays.

So firstly, what do they look like? There are eight in a box and they come in four different molds (2 of each obviously).

They are pretty detailed for a softer plastic miniature. There is a bit of plastic "flashing" along to mold lines, but nothing too bad as to ruin the miniature. The plastic is thick enough to prevent too much bending. So they should be robust enough for the gaming table. They aren't as strong as the GW plastic miniatures, but will stand a little rough and tumble. So that's a bonus. They are also cheap if you look around on eBay, so that's a second bonus. Finally, the four types you can see above are also rather nice. So another bonus in my book.

OK, so far so good. So how do they compare to the GW LotR / WotR size miniatures. Well, as you can see below, not too bad. They are taller than the average human / elf / orc. So that's excellent news. They would certainly tower above the 1/72 scale miniatures that Reb Box also produce.

One elf vs. four trolls. My money is on the elf!

So how do they compare to the GW Trolls. They are roughly the size of a GW Cave Troll, but smaller than GW's other trolls. Which is fine by me, especially considering that I will be using them for the smaller Olog-hai / Half-troll troops.

I haven't painted them yet. So no idea how well the paint will hold. But I will be toning them in the Army Painter shader Strong Tone and that tends to hold the paint on well with more flexible plastic miniatures.

I may even use these guys in a kit bash fashion for some Blood Bowl varieties. More on that idea in the future!

Magnetic Warg Riders!

I'll post in the future on how I painted these wargs, but I just wanted to show a nice trick I used to make these miniatures convertible to either wargs or warg riders.

First I made each of the wargs as strait wargs with full manes.

On each warg I then super glued a very small 20mm wide by 10mm deep rare earth magnet.

Doing this was a total pain in the backside. So in future I'll use a 30mm wide by 10mm  round magnet. Not the 20mm magnets. That will give more surface area to manipulate the magnet.

I then glued another magnet to the base of the warg riders. Again, this was a total pain as the magnet kept flipping in the drop of superglue or attempting to stay stuck to the tweezers I was using.

As such, I ended up with rider magnets not fitting to warg magnets. Despite this I did end up with proper magnet poles for each warg and rider (i.e. + and - poles). Odd riders could still sit on the same polarity side up magnets (i.e. + to +) as they would attach to the side of the magnet on the warg where the opposite pole was. But this made for an off center seated arrangement for the rider. Fortunatelly there was one warg for each rider to attach too. But using the 20mm magnets was a real pain. So be warned.

And that's how they finally turned out! So a nice trick if you want to use your wargs as both warg and warg rider.

Games Workshop Inspiration - Lord of the Rings / The Hobbit

I've had these images for some time now and took them at my local GW shop for painting inspiration. The painting appeared to be simple (i.e. not too complicated to imitate) but I believe it was really effective. So I took photos for a personal record for my own miniatures. So if you are looking for inspiration to paint you LotR / Hobbit miniatures also, hope this helps.