Vargouilles

So I'm a DM for a couple of  D&D games at the moment (v5e). One group of characters found themselves recently in the infamous bowels of Undermountain. Their first encounter? Vargouilles. I didn't have any miniatures at the time so the ever-present goblins were pressed into service. Having never used vargouilles as an encounter before I found them to be unusual and fun so I decided to make some for future encounters.

Now I have a number of ghoulish/zombie/skeletal heads in my bits box, but no small bat wings. To make these I realised that the little squarish clips used to tie loaves of bread were made of plastic, and so could be used to make the wings. I have a feeling that someone has suggested using these before for model making but I can't for the life of me remember who it would have been but I would love to give them credit for this revelation as they are a great, free alternative to buying plastic card - for making small things anyway.

So after making the wings I selected the heads and cut little slots into the sides of them into which were glued the wings. Here's some GW zombie heads from years ago that I used.

Next I attached them to roughly 5cm lengths of garden fencing wire which was glued into the conveniently placed neck holes. I did use a pin vice to drill a bit deeper for some of the heads.

Next was to curl up the bottom ends of the wire so that they could be easily glued to some 20x20 stands using a glue gun.

I then used a little bit of greenstuff to add the odd tentacle and/or rotting tongue, etc and then finally  painted them and finished the bases.

The painting scheme is inspired by this image. I'm pretty happy with them, especially as they cost so little to make.

As a side note I was pronouncing them as var-goo-eels. My father questioned this as the word looked french and so expected the 'll' sound to not be pronounced ie Var-goo-ee. We looked it up in wiki and found it was pronounced slightly different again. Having thought about it for a little while I reckon my Dad was probably right...this time...;-)