Stirges

So I saw a youtube on how to make stirges using plastic leaves and a glue gun. It looked really easy and surprisingly effective. I decided to make some stirges as well but with wire and greenstuff.

The wings were two little blobs of greenstuff with some wire snipped and pushed into them. I shaped the wings roughly into little diamonds and let them set. After they had set I held them between the wings with some needle nose pliers and bent the wings up a bit to look a bit more natural.

At the same time I snipped off roughly 50mm of wire to serve as a stand. I bent about 8mm of each end at 90 degrees to the stand. One end was glued to a 20x20mm cardboard square and with the other I wrapped some greenstuff sausage shapes, leaving a couple of mm poking outside the sausage to serve as the proboscis. I did a bit of prodding with my knife to form a round shape at one end for the head, a gap in the middle for where the wings will be glued, and then dragged the knife down the body from the head to the rear, so that it looked like it had some hair, and let the body hang out past the stand so it looked like the wire stand attached more toward the middle of the body.

I let the body set and then glued the wings to the body. I got two tiny blobs of greenstuff and squashed them onto the head to form eyes and then painted the little beasts.

For a little bit more time and effort than Scotty in the youtube, I had me some stirges ready to swoop on the next lot of low level characters in my game. Looking at them now, I really should have just stuck some pins through some dead flies and be done with it ;-)

Snakemen!

 So I finally finished my snakemen. This was a project sitting on my bench every since I saw someone's post about converting GW plastic salmanders into snakemen. I thought I'd make them beefier by using Heroquest and Battlemaster plastic Orcs instead.

These started out by trying to find something to do with the extra greenstuff that I had made up for other projects. With the left over greenstuff I would do something to these figures like add a nose or some mail, etc.

 

I chopped off their lower halves and replaced them with some curled wire. I then built up the lower bodies with green stuff.  I built separate layers on the backs of the snake bodies which gave them a segmented look - don't know why I did this, maybe I was thinking of worms or maggots?

 

I also extended and and put hoods on the heroquest coats with greenstuff to give them a cultist feel. The two battlemaster figures ended up being guard types so I fixed their mail armour. On all of them I puttied the faces so they had more snakelike snouts.

I didn't like the chopper on one of the figures - too Orcy - so in some kind of ironic move, I replaced it with a Heroquest Orc curved sword that I must have removed from some other orc miniature at some stage.