A Strange Thing That Happened On This Blog

In the past, most of the posts on this blog have got between 50-100 views. I don't write this blog as anything other than a record of what I've been doing and, while I appreciate the comments that I get, I've never really planned or wanted for it to "get big" at all.

On 19 August, I posted a post about painting an old ork weirdboy miniature. That post suddenly got a (for me) huge amount of views: about 500. The next five posts got between 600 and 1300 views. 

On 1 October, I posted a post about painting plastic dinosaurs. This post got 16 views. 

So what happened? Why did this blog suddenly get so many views, and why did they suddenly stop?

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My suspicion is that they weren't from real people. I think that, for some reason, the post on the 19th triggered something that attracted a load of bots. (It didn't trigger a lot of extra comments, which feels suspicious.)

I might repost the 19 August post, to see if it triggers more views again. If I do, I haven't gone crazy: I'm just trying to work out what occurred. After that, I'll probably delete the test post (and maybe this one).

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Strange. If you've any idea what happened, do let me know!

Escher Leader and the Start of a Necromunda Skavvy Horde

 While not painting inexpensive dinosaurs with egg yolk, I've also continued to work on the old Necromunda Escher gangers. These two are a leader, who has a boltgun and a laspistol, and another ganger with a lasgun. I've already got one copy of this model, so I tried to paint this version as differently as possible. One of the things I liked about Necromunda was that the weapons weren't just better or worse than one another, and it was often easier to equip your men with low-powered lasguns than fancy stuff. Anyway, here they are.

Whilst rooting about for more Necromunda bits and pieces, I remembered that I had bought a few scavvy plague zombies many years ago. The scavvies were a gang introduced in the Outlanders book, which was an add-on for the basic game. Outlanders included a few gangs, some monsters and some new (complex) rules about being outlawed and subsisting in the wasteland.

The scavvies were the lowest of the low: filthy and often mutated dregs of society, who lived in the rubbish of the undercity and were equipped with battered weapons that often broke down. They included mutants of various sorts, and even had special rules allowing them to eat each other to avoid having to pay for food.

One option the scavvies had was to attract plague zombies to the battlefield: unfortunates who had shuffled off this mortal coil and then shuffled back again, looking for brains to eat. For 10 credits, d.6 zombies would show up. While they weren't good fighters, they were a handy nuisance and could perhaps turn the enemy into other zombies, which was certain to make you popular with your friends. 

Anyhow, I was surprised to find that I'd bought 12 of these guys at some point. Some of the zombies would need repairs, but I was able to paint up one of each of the standard metal miniatures. They are very small models (maybe the plague shrinks you?) and are clearly sculpted on three basic bodies. Not brilliant miniatures, but likeable enough.

Braaaiiins...

I painted the zombies in a range of nasty flesh tones. They look a bit cartoony - I think it would be more realistic to paint them in the usual way and give them a blue or purple wash. But I like the variety and the rather drab "outfits". They certainly make a change from the jolly colours of House Escher. Perhaps I should do a gang from both of them.

£6 Plastic Dinosaur Paint Set Challenge!

 A few weeks ago, I went to Tring Museum of Natural History with my friend Ruth. This inevitably involved a look around the gift shop. Later, Ruth presented me with this item:

Yes, it's a paint set, complete with brushes and two plastic model dinosaurs! And all that for £6! 

I thought it would be a fun challenge to try to paint the dinosaurs, using only the paints provided (and a white undercoat). The brushes were so awful that they were hardly worthy of the name, so I threw them out and used my own. I stuck the dinosaurs to two bits of plastic and got to work.

The models were surprisingly detailed (and reasonably accurate, as far as I can tell). Given the undercoat and the quality of the paints, I used washes for the main body of the models. Some of the paints were better than others: the blue and green were pretty decent, all things considered, although the yellow was terrible and I might as well have tried to paint the miniatures with an egg yolk.

I had to mix brown for the horns and claws, which was a new experience. I found it easy to make some sort of brown (a mixture of yellow, red and blue) but making it more leathery was really hard. 

Anyhow, here are the results:

Tyrannosaurus:

Triceratops:

And of course here they are locked in mortal combat and ready to be banged against each other! To quote Firefly, "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

Not too shabby, all things considered! This was a fun break from the usual models and just goes to show that anything is a canvas if you're brave enough and get away before the police arrive.

Necromunda Beetle Knight

 Hello again! This post was supposed to be about more House Escher gangers, but I didn't paint them in time. Then I thought that it could be a tongue-in-cheek post about painting some iffy plastic dinosaurs from a museum, but those aren't quite ready either. So, this is about a space knight riding a giant beetle with a bionic arm across a wasteland.

There are a few conversions that I've had planned for ages and never got around to doing. One of these is to turn a Nurgle plague drone fly into a riding beast. For some reason, the idea of weird people riding strange monsters really appeals to me. 

I assembled the drone much as normal, although I swapped the front and middle legs around to make it more of a quadruped. I used DAS clay and green stuff to fill in the rotting bits and the wing-holes, and gave it a head from a tyranid bit turned upside down. The head makes for nice faceted eyes.

The rider was more complex. He's got legs from an Eldar guardian, an upper body from a very battered Bretonnian knight that I've had for years, and a lance arm from a dark elf. The front of the head comes from a chaos cultist and the helmet is a bit left over from some weird Age of Sigmar bone monster. I think his backpack, with carries water, is originally a dwarf bit. Quite a lot of green stuff was involved. The bits and bobs stuck to the beetle come from all sorts of  places. 

Halfway through construction, I dropped the model on the floor. I decided to replace the beetle's left small arm with a mechanical arm that I'd built out of junk a while back and never really found a purpose for. 

There's nothing especially complex about the painting, It was difficult to make the rider look interesting, in that he felt a little drab compared to his beetle. I decided to give his armour a verdigris look: perhaps, in the wasteland, that sort of discolouration is seen as impressive. I'm not entirely sure about the stripes on the beetle - I like the concept, but I don't think they work all that well in practice. I'm not sure how I could improve them without an airbrush, though.

Overall, I really like him. I think he's got a weird charm: as much inspired by Moebius as anything in Warhammer. I could see him riding about on the dunes, prodding enemies with his lance. 

More Escher Gangers

 Another week passes, and I continue to find myself surprised by the number of views that this blog is getting. I can only conclude that it has been hijacked by some sort of super-efficient automated Ponzi scheme, so if you receive messages from "me" offering to sell you inexpensive timeshares, a Nigerian goldmine or compromising pictures of Brittney Spears (my knowledge of internet spam ended in 2005 or so), don't click on the link. I do not have access to these things.

Anyhow, I've been painting more gangers from House Escher this week. These ones didn't require any repairs, and are as they were originally released. They are very detailed models and really good sculpts, although the sheer smallness of the models - especially the juves - makes them quite intimidating. I've found that it's easiest to paint the stuff closest to the model's skin - including the skin itself - and then work outwards. 

It strikes me that it would have been really tricky to play Necromunda "properly", as the rules say that you were required to show all equipment and upgrades on each model. This would lead to some very fiddly conversions as the game went on, especially if people lost limbs and gained bionics.

I also discovered a nice way to shade purple. I usually just add white or pink to purple to lighten it, but I've found that adding a light, fuxchia colour as well makes the shading look more vibrant, which helps for "neon" style pink.

Anyhow, the first two are standard gangers. The lady on the left has a lasgun, and the one on the right is carrying a length of chain - presumably a flail in game terms - and a laspistol. 

And here is another juve. I really like the variety of expressions that the juves have. You can't really see it here, but this one looks really alarmed as she blazes away with her massive (but not very effective) revolver.

That's all for now. I have more House Escher models to paint, including a heavy and two leader models. I'm not sure if that's what I'll work on next, but there's plenty of stuff to do. 

House Escher: Spares, Repairs and Very Big Hair

Who remembers Necromunda? Not the recent one, which I've never played, but the mid-90s skirmish game. It came in a box with cardboard terrain and awful plastic models, and involved odd-looking gangs fighting it out in the depths of a hive city. It was complex, interesting and probably an inspiration for Mordheim, which had a similar basis but removed some of the more awkward rules.

Several years ago, my friend James and I played quite a few games of Necromunda, and we enjoyed it a lot. It's got some weird features: like Mordheim, it's designed to be played in a tournament-style campaign, and a winning gang quickly outstrips the gang it defeats. Also like Mordheim, most games end with one gang running away, and the rules as to which of your minions survive are pretty crude and arbitrary. Unlike Mordheim, Necromunda puts a lot of emphasis on pinning your enemies with gunfire, and making them lose their turns. It's an interesting mechanic, but a potentially irritating one too.

Necromunda certainly had its problems as a game, not least the needlessly complex and so-random-it's-unfair dishing out of territory at the start. You could just award each player $200 every time they fought a battle and have just as much fun. One of the things I do like, though, is the comparative lack of detail in the backstory. Most of the details are, unsurprisingly, cloaked in shadow. I really like this, as it gives the player the opportunity to make up pretty much whatever they like.

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Gangers of House Escher, by Mark Gibbons.

One of the six big gangs (like Dune, Necromunda calls them "houses") is House Escher. Escher is an unusual organisation, as almost all of its members are women. They're basically amazons in space, and their skills suggest that they are fast and good at close combat. Escher fighters have an odd visual style, as if someone decided to make them "sexy" and changed their mind at the last minute. As it is, they look like a punk band about to do some kind of yoga class. I suspect that their design owes a lot to Tank Girl, who was big in the 90s.

That said, the old metal miniatures look much better than the modern plastics, which all have weird metal clogs as if they've just removed a pair of skis. One of my pet hates in miniatures is female soldiers in high heels - I can almost understand some maniac running into battle in their underwear or even barefoot, but heels just look silly even by the silly standards of Warhammer.

Anyhow, I've been avoiding these models for a while, or more accurately summoning up the courage to attempt to paint them. The amount of detail on the Escher miniatures - designed and, I think, sculpted by the excellent Jes Goodwin - is incredible. They're very slight, and there's a lot of opportunity to paint detail and get it wrong. Unlike orks, they've got human faces and, unlike eldar, they don't have the decency to wear helmets. That's just not on. 

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All of this week's models are repairs of some kind, because it was cheaper to get the models broken off ebay and to tidy them up myself. Also, it adds variety, as I've got some duplicates.

The ganger on the left was missing her left arm, so I replaced it with a dark eldar arm. The woman on the right didn't have her right foot. I made a bionic one out of a skeleton foot and a cut-down necron arm, using the elbow joint as a metal kneecap for her. I think it's worked pretty well. 

The next pair are juves: young members of the gang who are weedier and less reliable than the seasoned fighters. One thing I really like about the old metal juves is that they tend to look worried and frantic. Necromunda has a much better range of expressions than 40k (space marines have one face per chapter). Neither had a head, so I replaced them with Stargrave heads, which were small enough to look right on their scrawny bodies and had some suitably extreme haircuts.

Finally, we've got two models built from the same body. Bear with me here. Each Necromunda gang had access to heavy weapon soldiers, imaginatively named "heavies". Most gangs had two or three heavy models, one of which would be armed with a stubber (a clunky, WW2 type machine gun). The Escher stubber body seems to be easy to get hold of, while the other heavy model, who has a plasma gun, goes for silly money.

I found what seemed to be the plasma gun variant, but wasn't. I ended up with two spare copies of the stubber body, and so I converted them both to be doing new things. This model was given pistols and a mechanical arm from Stargrave:

And this one got a new arm, a gun cobbled together from various bits and bobs, a backpack from some kind of Mantic robot, and some sculpted armour to cover the gaps:

After all that, here they are painted!

While there's no uniform here, I've tried to use a set of reoccurring colours. The outfit designs are vaguely inspired by old GW paint schemes and Tank Girl comic books. I've tried to introduce variety by varying the skin tones a bit, although it might not be obvious.

So, join me next time for more brightly-coloured Necromunda loonies. Or possibly not. I've got a lot of fantasy miniatures stripped and ready to go, and I've just bought some goblin green paint...

Oldhammer Goff Ork Unit, and a few thoughts on batch painting

I've no idea why this should be the case, but the numbers of views that this blog usually gets have leaped up with the last two posts. The last post, with the ork robot, got about seven times the number of views that the average post gets on this blog. I have no idea what has caused this, but I suspect that they represent bots drawn to this blog like vultures to a man lost in the desert. I expect that the next couple of posts will be hugely disappointing and normal non-service will be resumed.

Anyhow, I've been painting some plastic Goff orks from the 1990s. Back in the day, they were available on their own in a unit-filler set of ten, and also in a boxed game along with gretchin and (of course) space marines. They're not technically monopose, as the right arm is separate and could be stuck on at a range of exciting angles, but really, there's not a lot of variety.

I painted them in groups of three, and for some insane reason tried to vary the outfits so that none of them were identically dressed. I don't know why I did this. The models are pretty decent, and have a nice balance of simplicity and detail, but I don't really enjoy batch painting and I was a bit tired of it by the end. I did save one bloke and painted him up with more detail and fancy golden horns to represent a champion for the unit.

Here is the champion.

I think they're quite cool, but they do make me wonder about painting squads. Since I very rarely play any games, is there any point to batch painting? I have a lot of nostalgia for old Fantasy Battle armies, with their matching uniforms, and it would be nice to own one. However, I'm used to the idea of small units where each model is a character - as you'd seen in Mordheim, Necromunda and the Frostgrave games. 

Besides, painting several miniature at once removes some of the pleasure of individual painting. When I'm doing one model at a time, at some level I'm wondering what this particular guy wears, what his function is, and so on. Obviously you lose a lot of that sense of painting individual characters when you're doing a whole load at once.

That said, I've got a small Bretonnian army to paint. Hmm. Anyhow, the next post is going to be something small and individual. Maybe from Necromunda...

Ork Dreadnought Time!

 So, Toby, how's that project to repaint all your old Brettonians going? Well, it's not really started yet. In fact, I'm still not entirely sure how to spell Bretonnia. On the other hand, I did rebuild and repaint an ork dreadnought that I scratch-built many years ago. The best laid plans of squig and man, as they say...

The main body of this thing is some kind of broken toy that I was given by a friend. The legs are landing gear from a marine flyer. The guns come from a very cheap walker from (I think) a Russian wargame (again, I bought these a decade ago, so my memory isn't great). The rest is stuff from the bits box.

I tried to give the dreadnought a wonky, awkward look like a clockwork toy. The clockwork key at the back was a late addition, made from plasticard and a bit of rod. I did wonder if it was a bit too silly, but you probably can't overdo it with old fashioned orks.

Just in case anyone's wondering (which I doubt), the yellow was painted over several thin coats of pink. The metal is done with a base coat of dark brown, onto which dark grey is roughly drybrushed. Then increasing amounts of plate metal and silver are added to the dark grey, all the way up to pure silver for chips and scratches. I find that the dark brown gives the metal a tarnished look that suits orks and heavy machinery.

I don't intend to make a big force of these old orks. For one thing, the metals are expensive and the early plastic orks aren't that great (and are expensive). But a small skirmishing group would be fun - and very Rogue Trader, where twenty men, one dreadnought and a converted shampoo bottle constituted an entire army.

Even More Space Orks - Weirdboy and Painboy

 So, after all that stuff about repainting my ancient Brettonia models, I've thrown myself into Oldhammer with a vengeance and painted some... space orks. These days, grimdark is very big again (did it ever go away?) and I don't seem to be able to open Instagram without seeing a sepia demon made of severed legs and barbed wire vomiting mud onto the baby Jesus. Ever one to jump onto a bandwagon (or battlewagon), here are some more bright green orks from the good old days.

First up, here's a weirdboy, an ork psychic. This guy is from the Blood Axe clan, but let's ignore that. The important thing is that he's an absolutely awesome sculpt. He seems to be dressed like a mixture of a Napoleonic soldier, a voodoo priest and a majorette, which fits the semi-military look of the Blood Axes perfectly. He also just looks absolutely brilliant.

This model was unusually large for an old ork sculpt. I'm pretty sure he's an original, as the base tag even said "wierdboy" (sic). I mounted him on a bigger base. He was missing the top of his staff, so I made a new one with an Empire bit. The laurelled skull matches his hat. His left arm was made from an newer plastic ork bit with an ogre hand and a lot of green stuff: partly to keep in scale with his body, but also because he needed a sleeved arm to match the metal one. 

Then we've got a super painboy (medic) miniature. In the old background, orks didn't have hair, so they sometimes put hairy squigs on their heads. That's what this chap has got. He's also got a brilliant expression. Many of the old orks have real charm and personality - not that I'd like to meet this guy and his massive pliers.

Here are three plastic boys that I painted over a little while. They're not the best miniatures, but they've come up alright. Getting the plasma gun to sit on the model's shoulder - and getting his hand to hold it - was really difficult, and I ended up using a lot of green stuff and additional parts to make it look reasonable.

And that's it for now, but more plastic orks will be appearing soon. Watch this space!

Brettonia Redux: My First Painted Models Ever

The first models I ever bought and painted were a bunch of ancient Eldar (now sadly gone) and a load of metal Brettonians. I got the Brettonians from a kid called Alan for very little money, mainly because I wanted to play Fantasy Battle and they looked like King Arthur guys, which I recognised. I painted the Brettonians over a week and proudly fielded them in their first battle. They were the only painted miniatures in the game and I was so keen that I gave every one of my knights his own name.

They were garbage. My opponent exterminated them, and so I failed to take the hint and bought some more. What I didn't know then was that, at the time that I was starting to play Warhammer, the only armies that GW cared about were High Elves, Empire, Orcs, High Elves, a bit of Chaos and High Elves. My main opponent had High Elves.

For a long time, Brettonia was literally the Empire without any of the good units. Fighting High Elves was like a medieval army fighting the Battle of the Somme: they just got mowed down by bolt throwers. The only way to win was to buy the minimum number of actual Brettonians and to pack out the army with manticores (I do miss those general lists of monsters available to all armies, which gave them a lot more options).

But now, Brettonia has two army books and even a new list in the Old World. Hmm...

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Repainting the Alice in Warhammerland models got me thinking about my old Brettonians, and Lasgunpacker's comment on my last post pushed me over the edge. I've considered repainting my Warhammer Frenchmen before, but have been deterred by the complexity of the heraldry involved. However, painting old harlequin models has given me a bit more confidence - at least, in painting checks. 

Here are some of my old models. I'm putting these pictures up as a bit of a record, as I'm going to strip and repaint them. They've got no real shading and are extremely basic, but they're not bad for my first efforts.

(Incidentally, the first GW Brettonian army was painted in flat block colours, without shading. It looked very basic.)

So there they are. I also found a few blister packs in a box at my parents', stashed away for many years and testament to a time when even GW were desperate to get rid of the Brettonians. Back then, as my friend with the High Elves pointed out, £1 was not a bargain.

So there we are. I am going to paint a load of Brettonians in the near future. Not a very big load, certainly not a proper army, and I will paint them pretty slowly. But I reckon they might look nice, and it'll be an interesting project.

Now I'm going to paint some space orks.

Queen of Hearts, Caterpillar and Dormouse

 The Wonderland books don't really have heroes or villains, especially. Most of the time, Alice wanders into a new place, meets some weirdos and tries to talk sense to them, usually with bizarre and comical results. There isn't enough plot or time to develop many characters in depth.

On the other hand, the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland does seem keen on cutting everyone's head off. That's not normal. And (amazing segue alert) nor are inquisitorial minions in Warhammer 40,000.

My own version of her - slightly more glamourous than the John Tenniel pictures - was based off an old metal dark elf sorceress, who I'd chopped up in the past. This version got a new hand and an axe from the Frostgrave demon set, and to my surprise a left hand from a Mantic ork. I sculpted a heart on her crown with green stuff.

I painted her red and cream/white, as suits the look of the warband and her background as a playing card. Her face is slightly greyer than normal, for a bit of contrast.

I expect that she is just about to deliver her catchphrase - "Off with his head!" - while doing the decapitating herself. Times are hard and you just can't get the staff.

I also had a go at tidying up a couple of my old conversions for this warband: the Caterpillar and the Dormouse.

The Caterpillar is based on an ancient metal Necromunda milliasaur model, with a kroot body and arms, and a chaos warrior's head. He's sitting on a "toadstool" made from a Tau drone. The hookah he smokes was made from pieces of kroot rifle and some kind of dwarf contraption.

Finally, the Dormouse himself was a tiny detail from a skaven kit. In the original Alice In Wonderland, he ends up in the teapot, so I gave him a massive mechanical teapot in which he rides. I expect that the spout functions quite like a flamer.

The legs and ball of the teapot were left over from a big robot kit from a steampunk game called Wolsung. It looked really cool, but I don't think it still exists. The spout, handle and other bits came from Necron and Dark Eldar leftovers. I suppose there's a bit of a nod to The War of the Worlds in the tripod structure, as well. I think he'd function as heavy support!

So then, here is the whole warband so far. I'd quite like to do a white knight (presumably a friendly space marine), and maybe some other character to get it to ten. 

Curiouser and Curiouser

 Time for more weirdos for the retinue of Inquisitor Alice.

Every inquisitor requires some heavies, and even the most subtle operative needs protection. Hence we have Tweedledee and Tweedledum, two hefty lads armed with big pistols and large fists. These models were based on some mangled plastic ork nob models that I've had for years, with heads and an arm from some ogre Blood Bowl players (I really must do something with those guys). They look slightly cartoony, which is appropriate.

Tweedledum is carrying a brand new (power) rattle: in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the Tweedles have a battle over the breaking of the rattle. It started off as an axe: I replaced the blade with a weird bit of machinery I found and made the rattle itself out of plasticard.

I gave them suitably gaudy outfits. As chance had it, Dum's armour resembled squares on a chessboard, and I painted them to resemble that. I painted chequers on Dee's arm and shoulder armour, to reflect the checks in the rest of the unit. They got plasticard squares for their bases.

Painting them wasn't terribly hard, although the faces took a long time. I do quite like ogre and troll-sized models, as you can do some interesting shading, but the faces of these guys took a while. I used grey on their jaws to suggest stubble, red for their noses and cheeks, and purple for their lips. A couple of real bruisers. I'm not sure if they're mutants or small ogryns, but they can take care of dirty work.

Here is picture of them being recruited.

Alice in Warhammerland

 I've always liked the Alice books. They're extremely strange, and have a weird combination of logic and anarchy that's very appealing. Also, they're fantasy stories that aren't derived from Tolkien, which is actually quite rare. They're both sinister and comical at once, which of course makes them ideal for adaptation to Warhammer 40,000.

Well, to be honest, it doesn't. Modern 40k consists largely of identical bald men shouting "Heresy!" at once another, which isn't ideal for a surreal Victorian children's story about a little girl with yellow hair. But what the heck.

I did these conversions a long time ago, but I took the opportunity to repaint them where needed. In the case of Alice, I entirely stripped and dismantled the original model. This involved resculpting quite a lot of green stuff and making her a new base. It was a right pain, to be honest, but the end result is definitely an improvement on the original. How much of an improvement, I'm not totally sure. 

So, Alice is basically the upper body of a sister of battle and the bottom half of an Eldar warlock, with lots of extra bits stuck on. I've no idea where her pointy little feet came from. I think her hammer is from a Mordheim sprue.

The Hatter is based on a Mordheim plastic soldier, with a lot of green stuff. His gun is probably from a plastic terminator. 

The Cheshire Cat is from Neferata, an old vampire model. He's got some sculpting around the mouth, and is standing on a bit of wood elf dryad to make a tree.

Getting a half-decent picture of these models was very difficult, which is really irritating but feels appropriate somehow. Here they are - normal people going about their lives.

The Minions of Mark: Dark Age miniatures

 Over the years I've accumulated a lot of random miniatures. Among these models was a blister pack of strange little guys that my local games shop was selling for £5 in a bargain bin. 

They're actually from a game called Dark Age, which I think is now defunct. It was a skirmish wargame based on the pictures of an artist called Bron, and seemed to be about small warbands abandoned on a desert planet. The guys I bought, if I remember rightly, were the followers of someone called Saint Mark.

What they look like, to me, is a cross between the War Boys from Mad Max and the Cenobites from Hellraiser. I put them in a drawer for a long time, and was rather intimidated by the prospect of painting them, especially because they would need a largely monochrome paint scheme, which made me nervous. I don't really enjoy painting black, because the highlights often come out as chalky or too stark. 

Well, I finally dragged these guys out, painted one as a test, found that it worked, and got going on the other four. They're strange designs but really well sculpted, with loads of detail. They seem to be holding guns that fire circular saw blades, as well as truncheon-type weapons that might be electrified. I doubt that they're the good guys of the setting.

Making the skin different to the clothing was quite hard. The clothing is highlighted from black to light grey, by adding more grey and white. The skin started off as light grey, was given a very thin wash of purple, and was then highlighted by adding first bone and then pink to the mix. The skin was eventually given a thin glaze of pink to suggest that it is alive. I'm not sure how well this comes out in the photos.

Here they are.

Weird, aren't they?