Men In Boxes

Oooooooh, Dwarves!

Anne McCaffrey, creator of the Dragonriders of Pern and The Ship Who Sang,  passed away this November at the age of 85. I was first introduced to her work through a paperback copy of Dragonsong. I was lured to the book by the fantastic cover illustration and the fiction inside captured my imagination. Since then, I've hunted down other books written by her and have enjoyed them immensely. R.I.P. Ms. McCaffrey and thank you for the dragons. Art by  David Fairbrother Roe. Read more here . 

What do you do when you have a large diorama with trees and buildings and terrain features lovingly modeled and set up right in front of you? Why, you break out the beer and send a lambda-class shuttle with a gaggle of the Empire's very capable stormtroopers to hold the area until Darth Vader arrives! With the penguin townsfolk still being prepped for attachment to the christmas village ( see previous entry) I mucked about with some Micro Machines Imperial Stormtroopers. Too bad i couldn't find the rebel troopers amidst the chaos that is my storeroom and I had to hurry before the wife noticed the guys in white armor taking shots at her mom's penguins. Will the rebels be able to take back the town? Let's see...

We decided to make a christmas village this year to go with the home decorations for this holiday season and the family turned to me to lead in making it. So, we took out our small collection of Christmas village buildings and proceeded to make a diorama that depicted the main avenue of the village, a frozen pond and a large tree display. Unfortunately, we only had a small number of figures until we realized that this would be the perfect time to use my mother-in-law's collection of penguin figurines. Thus was born our Penguin Christmas Village! Here are some WIP pictures. The pond will feature a snow globe centerpiece, park benches and cotton candy. The frozen pond was made from glitter glue gel and left to dry overnight. The houses are being wired for lights and small vignettes are being made to be scattered around. Here's the main avenue. I'm trying to figure out a way to l;ight the streetlamps. How would the carollers get about if they dont have street ...

Here's a mummy from the Mega Blocks toy line that is a suitable Undead Giant for 54mm. Aside from the mummy, there's a winged vampire, demon, ghoul, Frankenstein's monster and a werewolf. Here's a side-by-side shot for size comparison.  After disposing of his enemy, the giant mummy looks around for his next opponent...   ... And engages in a deadly wrestling match with the giant scorpion! That stinger looks nasty!

Here's a D&D mini that could also serves as a monster for my planned 54mm skirmish. I'm not sure what the prepainted mini is called but I got it bulk with a boxul of assorted D&D minis. I'm not a fan of the prepainted and collectible miniature scene but I like most of the figures. The mini would also be a perfect Shelob for 28mm or 20mm figures!

I'm refraining from basing my 54mm Egyptians for HotT and plan to use them first for skirmish games using the demo Ares rules I downloaded from Freewargamesrules and FUBAR Medieval from Gaw'd Help Us Games .  I picked up a giant scorpion from the halloween accessories stand at the toy store  that will serve as a monster the figures can do combat with. There's an even bigger scorpion toy available but I'm afraid my table space wont be able to accommodate it for gaming. The one shown above is pictured with a 54mm to 60mm figure. The weeks leading to Halloween would be the perfect time to look for creepy crawly nasties like this.

Arcane Legion only has two poses for the undead infantry but I went ahead and based them as spears for an Egyptian Undead Hott army. The figures are a bit taller than the average 1/72 figure ( they'll be used with Caesar Miniatures Egyptians) but are surprisingly thicker in limbs. The detail is weak, especially on the faces. The plastic acts a bit weird because even careful cutting and trimming with a sharp craft knife doesn't seem to agree with the plastic and you end up with burrs and extra threads. Even the "feel" of the material seems wrong, especially if you're used to cleaning mold lines and such from hard and soft plastic figures.

Here is a fast conversion I made from an Arcane Legion centaur and a Zvezda Greek warrior. The Arcane Legion figure is made from a hard plastic that has some rubbery characteristics and is quite dense. A scabbard would have to be added and maybe a cape. The 2 part glue from Selleys works well and I mated the parts well enough but I accidentally glued the cap to the nozzle. These things dry fast! He'll be a hero for a Greek mythology themed Hordes of the Things army in 1/72.     Here's the converted figure with two stands of Centaur riders.

Here are some Egyptians from Supreme's 54mm playset bags. I do not have a complete set so there may be other poses I haven't come across yet. These come prepainted but will still get a repaint from me. The pack also comes with horses but they dont seem to match the set. These figs will be the core of my fantasy Egyptians for Hordes of the Things.

It was that time of the year when one gets to the point that he really, really has to get stuff arranged. The Southeast asian summer had already come and gone but my hobby room is still uber messy with little space left to engage in model making. Last week, I hunkered down and began the long and tedious task of arranging everything. Lo and behold, an old, large box yielded packs of 54mm plastic toy soldiers. I sp[ent the next few hours sorting them out and decided to try and make some HOTT armies out of them. Here are a few of the figures I found. Hopefully, they'll be repainted and rebased as HOTT armies before the year is out. And hopefully, the hobby room gets cleaned up too. These pictures were also earlier posted at my toy collection blog . You can find notes about them there.