is not a real big fan of pre-painted minis, and he positively despises randomly-packed "collectable" ones - so why is he writing this article?
This is the somewhat vague story of how I'm recruiting monsters for my dungeoncrawl game.
A good dungeon needs a variety of monsters, and - being short-handed in that department - I decided that a fast start could be made by picking up old MageKnight pre-painted plastic figures.
These guys were Gargoyles from the Dungeon series, sort of half-flying, half-crouching, with their tongues lolling out of their mouths. The color of the tongue (and their G-string) indicated their rarity.
Popping off their game bases was easy. I decided to convert their pose to make them more upright - which made them look even sillier (now they look like they are half-flying, half-tripping, and about ready to fall over backwards). That put one of the feet in the air, so I used a hobby knife to trim away most of the base attached to that foot.
Then I stuck them down to steel disks, added rough texture to the base with Renaissance Ink's Coarse Flocking Gel, painted the bases black, and drybrushed them with grey. (I think "rubble" basing works well in a dungeon setting.) I also painted the tongues red, and the G-strings grey (to blend in).
I used a trick I read about somewhere - a hair dryer - to soften the wings so that I could re-pose them.
The figures were touched up with a grey drybrushing to bring out their texture.
As you can see below, when I "stood up" the figures, it gave them rather a silly posture - which fits in well with the concept of them being more nuisances than fearsome fighters.
And this gives you an idea of how much difference the wing posing makes:
And the only problem? They're too wide to fit into my corridors!
