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 head 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 original 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, after all.

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.