Forgotten Heroes - Final

So its time I submit the finished product. I'm in two minds about photographing my miniatures. On the one hand I keep thinking that I need a proper light box thingy that people use to make their photographs look professional. On the other hand though, I have to remember that my paint jobs don't really warrant the expense. I've ended up using my smart phone and struggling with a couple of lamps, one of which causes the phone camera to strobe if not in the right place.

In any case here's the finished product.

Thanks again to Forgotten Heroes and particularly Roger Webb for inviting me to participate. I've certainly enjoyed the process and have tried to step up to the challenge. I'm pretty happy with him overall and I'm sure he'll find a place in any pulp games I play. 

BTW I did find some examples of gangsters with leg cuffs from the 1930s, but maybe not so pronounced as this guy :-)

Forgotten Heroes update

So Roger accepted my late entry to the forgotten heroes challenge so its full steam ahead for the final week. The other entrants seem to have picked up the pace and some have multiple entries.
I've finished the figure itself so it up to throwing some paint around. I've been doing some more browsing to check out the colour schemes and this is when I find that a figure does exist for Sandman in the heroclix range.

I' reckon though that my figure still meets the criteria as I am using a different model that I've based mine on and my inspiration is drawn from a different comic era.I was chatting with Craig and he tells me the figure I'm going for was from a 90s revival rather than the original 30s/40s version.

Definitely aiming for the black and tan version now. I've added a whiff of sleeping gas to his modifed weapon, some straps to his gasmask and cuffs to his trousers. I'm not sure about the cuffs though. I see them on some illustrations but not others - and I still haven't seen any cuffs on actual gangster photos on the very limited research I've done. I'll see how it looks with a bit of paint on...

Forgotten Heroes

There was talk of making some unique miniatures for super hero/villain types over at ForgottenHeroesSite and I had a mind to join in but as usual life's been getting in the way.

I was talking with my wife a week ago and she encouraged me to do something anyway and she suggested I do the Sandman. I immediately started thinking of Neil Gaiman's version, from the graphic novels I read many years ago, and started looking for existing miniatures. I couldn't find any in my collection that I could easily convert in a short time.

Then I remembered that Craig, a friend of mine from long ago, mentioned that Sandman was quite an old DC hero that went back to 1939. In fact it was he who let me read his Neil Gaiman graphic novels and showed me an old DC comic that featured the original character. I went looking for images and saw two main versions, a guy in a green suit and purple cloak and another in just a tan suit and overcoat, both also sporting a fedora, gasmask and special sleep gas emitting gun.

I went looking for a figure to match and found Mark Copplestone's Gangsters in a FLGS, in particular, Sam Spade. He's not quite what I'm after in that his overcoat is slightly different to those in the comics but I think he'll be good enough for me with a few changes.

I've started converting this miniature and I've changed the right arm to that of a Reaper bones cowboy figure that I've sacrificed for his revolver-wielding hand. I'm now throwing a bit of greenstuff around to blend in the arm, modify the weapon and add a gasmask to the face. I think I'll go for the tan-suited gent as I'm not so good at making cloaks yet ;-).

Now I just have to convince Roger to accept my late entry...

Fun with animals!

Here's a bunch of animals I painted up to be used as random encounters for roleplay games.

 Bears repeating... The figures are from the left airfix grizzly, GW, can't remember, airfix polar bear, Heroclix (D&D) and airfix grizzly again.

The Big Cats. Some appear bigger than others. The tiger on the far right appears to be the smallest. Maybe he's a normal sized critter while the rest are giant varieties? Four toys and the tiger is an airfix figure.

Lotsa doggies! and one ginger cat. Various brands. 20mm bases

Fluffy from Harry Potter. Well okay, Kerberos from Greek Mythology. A plastic toy I picked up somewhere and repainted. 40mm base

Pretty little ghouls

I've had a few older style GW ghouls for  many years but never enough for a complete unit. More recently I received some GW plastic ghouls, you know, the hunched over ones that look nothing like the old metal ones. It took me a while, but I worked out how to make the new plastic ones look more like the old ones with a bit of putty and glue.

I wanted them upright like the old style ones which caused a bit of a problem. The new plastic ones look more like beetles to me, all hunched over, so I straightened them up by adding some guts with greenstuff and shaping and refitting the arms into the sockets. The heads still sat too low on the necks so I cut away the neck bit and made new necks with putty. I had to do a fair bit of puttying to make them look reasonable as you can see above.

This is the back rank. I posed the arms so that they were mostly by their sides or flung back in ghoulish fasion to stay out of the way of the front rank. I cut a few of the extra bones off them that they wore a trophies peircing their skin as this nonsense did not appear on the older style ghouls. Even so there's alomst a whole skeleton on the back of one new ghoul figure which I couldn't really remove without compromising the figure.

This is the front rank with their arms reaching forward. I forgot how I got the purplish colour on the skin so I had to experiment with a very watered mix of red and dark blue to make a maroon colour. These guys gave me a bit of trouble as every time I went to carve a bit of putty off or clean a flash line, the body would come away from the putty belly or the legs would snap off the putty belly. I ended put waiting for the putty to dry, then pulling the legs away from the putty and gluing it with superglue, then waiting for that to dry, then pulling the body away from the putty and regluing that. I had to follow the same process for the arms and the head as they all had putty bits between them and the body.

This is a rank of the older figures . It seems I also put a little bit of brown wash into the eye sockets at the same time that I washed the bones, to give them that sunken look.

Here's all the figures together as a unit. I think I did fairly well to get them to blend together. The colour scheme  does most of the work I guess.

Last of all I have this little fella which has been knocking around my collection for many years. I suspect he might have come out of a collection of GW Talisman miniatures I bought once. He's a little different again so I've stuck him at the back :-)