Converting Old Mantic Models: little space soldiers, a demon mercenary and The Thing

I had a bit of free time over the weekend. Here in the UK, it was unpleasantly hot, and I spent as much time as possible indoors. I opened the big box of random sprues, and found a bunch of old Mantic miniatures.

Mantic have made some decent stuff - their skeletons are particularly good, and used to be dirt cheap - but they have produced some... less fantastic miniatures. Their plastic goblins are pretty awful: they've got very little detail, they're made from some horrible plastic-resin material, and it's generally quite hard to tell what the heck is going on with them. However...

I've long been of the view that the most important bits of a miniature (unless it's some insanely complex GW sculpt with books, banners and the like) are the head and the weapon (or at least the hands). What this means is that by attaching a good body and arms to a ropey body you can distract from the bad parts enough to end up with something acceptable. In this spirit, I waded into the goblins.

I threw the heads and arms away. Instead, I used Perry Miniatures Afghan arms, and the WW1 style heads from the Wargames Atlantic "Bulldogs" sprue. A little bit of cutting was required to get the heads to go on properly, but nothing elaborate. The only problem with the guns was that it wouldn't be possible to arrange them so that the models were taking aim. No great issue there, as you get loads of guns on the Afghan sprue.

I really, really like the positions of some of these models. That's largely down to the excellent Afghan arms, which allow for a lot of interesting options.

I painted the bodies brown, and highlighted with successive drybrushes. I didn't bother to pick out any details, as it's not worth the bother. The heads were painted bright green: partly to fit in with another batch of goblin conversions I did a while ago, and partly to get away from the idea that these were short WW1 Tommies. The hands and exposed flesh of these little chaps was painted blue.

The end result is quite decent, I think. The goblin bodies are always going to be a bit rubbish, but the new arms and heads really improve the models.

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The second part of today's post continues the "random Mantic models" theme. Again, I've got no idea how I ended up with these miniatures. 

First up is a plastic orc, who was thankfully made out of a much nicer and more normal material than the goblins. He's a neater, crisper sculpt, but still nothing special. I gave him a horned head from the Frostgrave demons sprue. His arms and gun come from a Mantic "plague" warrior, who has a lot of spikes on his arms and shoulders, which went well with the head. I painted the whole thing red: he reminds me of the trolls from the Shadowrun game. I imagine him as some kind of thuggish mercenary.

The final creature is the most interesting, I think. This was made from the body of the plague soldier who provided the red chap with his arms. The body has a stretched, twisted quality, and looked as if it was about to turn into something else. All of this made me think of The Thing, and so I got some bits together and turned him into a warping, shape-changing monstrosity.

I liked the idea that his head wasn't needed anymore, and would just flop to the side while horns and tentacles burst from his body. Having the big tentacle and the spikes all pointing the same way gives the model a sense of movement. I sculpted an eye to replace his head and act as a focal point.

The model was painted in flesh tones, with a lot of washes to vary the colours. I undercoated in black and then painted a variety of odd colours to sit under the flesh: bright red, camo green and blue. Hopefully this makes the flesh more unwholesome and variable. The head was deliberately left rather lacking in detail: it's no longer important to this creature.

I left the clothes in drab shades and painted the eye with a bright blue pupil, to draw attention. I've got to say, I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

Horrid, really.

Two More Monks!

 Following on from last week's post, here are two more Westwind Productions monks with torches, painted with object source lighting. Despite a lot of mould lines in annoying places, they were very enjoyable to paint, and I even started to like doing the OSL, against my better judgment. 

Monk squad assemble!

Two Monks - Experimenting with Object Source Lighting

 A quick post, this time. Ages ago I bought a load of Westwind figures off ebay, and I've been slowly painting them over the last year or two. I had four monks, each of them equipped with a torch and hand weapon. The models are decent enough but old-fashioned and have a lot of flash on them, so I thought that I'd use them as a chance to test out a new technique: object source lighting.

This is something that I find pretty hard. The main trick seems to be to paint the model as usual and then to drybrush on a dark yellow/ochre colour, to show where the light would catch on the miniature. Then, you paint on the OSL bits, using the drybrush as a guide. At least, in theory. It's quite cumbersome and I'd be interested to know if there's an easier way of doing it. It's also hard to work out where to finish the light effect, and of course painting over your earlier work is daunting.

Anyhow, here are the first two monks. I think they've come out fairly well, although I can't help but think that something is "missing". I'm not sure what, though.

Converting a Great Big Lizardman

 

"Across roaring rivers their warsong rang

'Skull, skull, skull, skull,' the Norsemen sang.

They looted Lustria, lizards they slew

Till the Slann sent soldiers to slice them in two.

The Norsemen fought fiercely but their gold-quest failed

When the thane Thag Thagssen on a tail was impaled."

- The Saga of Thag Thagssen.

Years ago - literally, it was at least a decade - I subscribed to the Kickstarter for the first wave of Reaper Bones models. This was, in retrospect, not my best purchase, as a lot of the models weren't much good. The bigger creatures were a little better, and among them was a "swamp troll". This thing looked weirdly like a stegosaurus, but with a troll's head.

I pulled this thing out of a long-forgotten box, washed off the dirt and fluff and decided to turn it into a kroxigor for the lizardmen warband I seem to be making (extremely slowly). I cut its head off and sculpted a new one, going for that slightly bovine, snake-shaped head that stegosaurs have.

I made a new tail, too. First, I made an rough armature out of a piece of twisted garden wire:

Then I sculpted over the tail, first in DAS clay to get the right shape, and then in green stuff for finer detail. I find it helps to put a thin layer of PVA glue over the clay once it's dried, to stop it flaking off onto the green stuff. 

I added tail-spikes from a wood elf plastic dryad and an ornamental tail-guard from a tyranid bit that was lying around. Other details were added from lizardmen leftovers, green stuff and random odds and ends.

Bright colours were called for, but I surprised myself by painting his skin a drab khaki. Still, blue armour and bright red back-plates set this off, along with gold ornaments. I added the skull of a conquistador to his base, along with a little snake made of green stuff. Invaders beware!

So that was my weekend (and most of my week)! All hail the serpent god!

Loads of Tyranids - zoats, zoanthropes and spore mines

 Hello again! It's time for a big post about tyranids.

I've been slowly working on a bunch of old tyranid models over the last couple of months. First up, I was able to acquire a second metal zoat fairly cheaply on ebay a while ago. This chap has a missile launcher. While he's a very detailed model, I found it quite hard to work out exactly what was what with his weapon. I suppose it's all "biological stuff", so that's not too much of an issue. I enjoyed painting this model a lot.

Here he is with his friend, about to hit the town.

Next up are three zoanthropes. These are floating psychic creatures that functioned in the game as tank-shooting artillery, a bit like lascannon teams. These models are the second iteration of the zoanthrope and were released around 2000: the first version was a four-limbed creature like a Tyranid warrior with a very big head, and looked a bit silly (like a lot of the very early Tyranids).

Originally, these guys had large helmet-like shields that went over their heads, and were usually painted like bone armour. However, these shields obscure their heads, and I think they they look better with their nasty little faces on display. They're identical models, although someone had trimmed the spikes off one of the miniatures. If you want to bulk out your army with a conga line of giant evil sperms, this is the unit for you.

Last of all, I've painted a unit of spore mines. Spore mines were Tyranid artillery, either fired by a creature called a biovore, or dropped in from on high and left to drift around the battlefield. They were essentially a mobile hazard, and were probably intended to slow down and confuse the enemy. They come in three varieties (frag, acid and krak), and were both plastic and metal. I bought some of these models as a bunch, and others came with various old tyranids. I collected them together until I had enough for a little unit.

Strange looking things, really (they remind me of Smarties), but they do fit the rather jolly colours of the rest of the army, and they're actually quite nice miniatures. They would make good weird little aliens, too. 

I'm not sure what I'll be painting next, but I think it will be some kind of fantasy creature. We shall see!

Retro Chaos Dreadnought

 Hello! I've had a busy week. I went to Glastonbury to relax for a couple of days, which was great, and then I injured my knee, which was less great. The damage isn't awful, but it does make sitting down to paint uncomfortable, and so I've been chipping away at little bits and bobs.

That said, I have been able to finish a model that I've been working on for a while. Hybrid Miniatures make a range of retro-styled miniatures, some of them quite reminiscent of 40k models from the good old days. They were having a sale of some of their old-school resin dreadnoughts, and I took the opportunity to get one of these.

The old dreadnought was the first dreadnought specifically made for Chaos, and can be seen in the blue Citadel catalogue. It had a very organic, Giger-ish look, with pipes and pincers, and an odd big skull for a head. It looked really cool to my mind and is my favourite version of the Chaos dread. Later versions were either blocky and awkward-looking (the 3rd ed version) or very fleshy (the Hellbrute). 

Anyhow, I went for a similar colour scheme to that which I used on a Necromunda Spyrer a while back. I highlighted the black with both grey and khaki. The weapons and pipes were painted quite brightly, for contrast and as a nod to the old version. I also painted a few pipes to look organic. Anyhow, here we are! It's 90% finished, but there are a couple of bits that I'd like to add to.

Zoidberg meets the Mekon

After the big project of the space marine multi-tank, I made a few more space weirdos. I'd bought a frame of Perry Miniatures Afghan tribesmen, from 1880 or so, and I thought it would be interesting to turn them into futuristic types.

The tribesmen are all wearing long robes, and either have boots or sandals. These would work for civilians and mystic monk-types, who probably wander about in flip flops, but less well for hardened soldiers. I then realised that by combining some of the alien heads, I could make some familiar characters. 

So, here are Dr Zoidberg from Futurama and the Mekon from Dan Dare. 

Both models have a head and arms from Stargrave miniatures, and an Afghan body. Zoidberg's claws were sculpted around some cut-off tyranid spikes, and the Mekon's saucer was a hubcap left from a toy car.

Then we have two ladies. The woman on the right has arms from the Frostgrave female barbarians sprue. I imagined that the two blades are something like light sabers, and painted them as such. She was given a white and orange paint scheme vaguely remeniscent of a Buddhist monk, to suggest mystic powers. The other woman has arms from a Frostgrave female wizard. She might be a psychic casting a spell, or maybe just someone normal running away.

Then I just made a couple of randoms. This man has an old Frostgrave soldier body (they do look quite basic compared to later North Star plastics) with a Ghost Archipelago head (I think) and a bionic arm made out of leftover Necron parts. His robot friend is just a Mantic robot that I've had lying about for ages. It's made from that nasty resin-plastic stuff that Mantic used to use (and might still do), which isn't very nice to work with.

These were fun to do, but as usual the pictures don't do them any sort of justice. Oh well. I'm used to that by now. More big things next time (maybe)!

EDIT: I've noticed that the pictures look better if you click on them to make them bigger.