Men In Boxes

Here's a pair of scorpions I painted this morning before going to work. These are dime store insect toys. They'll be used for a HotT army I'm building. Of note are the bases. I lathered on a water-based acrylic texture from Acrylicos Vallejo formulated with permanent pigments, microparticles and acrylic resin. Here's the product line .  I still have to shade the bases as well as flock them. Nice product, I might get the sand version too.  

54mm Knight Templars. Playing around with a camera app on my Galaxy Wifi S. 'Nuff said.

I couldn't sleep last night and didn't want to count sheep. Ended up painting horses. Up first are the Greys. These are for my Games Workshop Rohirrim and are in 28mm scale. Here are the base painted Greys using the lovely Acrylicos Vallejo acrylic paints. They actually have two lines -- the Model range and the Game Color range -- that are perfect for models such as these.  Very, very nice acrylics. I've been painting since last night and a few hours this morning after breakfast but its been slow going. I'm feeling my age, my eyes are getting tired faster nowadays... Damn bridles and tacks! I decided to start with the Greys because they're the ones I have more reference pictures of. Here's wiki's entry regarding the horse color: Gray or grey is a coat color of horses characterized by progressive silvering of the colored hairs of the coat. Most gray horses have black skin and dark eyes; unlike many depigmentation genes, gray does not affect ...

I just joined a scale modelling and miniature painting community with tons of awesome work. Mainly mecha but very inspiring, especially with regards to the paint effects. Check out the galleries, they have something for everyone. Here's the link to Painted Hobbies.

Just saw the link this morning and pretty excited to catch up on HotT stuff from the best HotT resource on the net. Check out the Stronghold Rebuilt!

After assembling the horses, I primed them all with a primer grey. Then I divided them into 3 groups. One set was spray painted with red brown. These would be painted as duns, light bays, chestnuts and maybe some piebalds.   Another set was spray-painted black. These would be painted as blacks and dark bays. Finally, the last set was spray painted with a lighter grey. They'll be painted as greys and a few roans. As an illustrator for my day job, I managed to amass quite a bit of horse reference material and painting model horses accurately has become quite an obsession with me. Here are some older model horses I've painted. I hope my Rohan horses end up much better. Here's the wiki entry on Equine Color.

I managed to find time last weekend to start work on the Riders of Rohan from Games Workshop. My wife gave me a few boxes of these together with more orcs. I hope to use these with Ad&D's Battlesystem 2nd Edition.    First off -- these figures are beautiful! The level of detail, the posing and the practicality of the parts are simply beautiful. The figures were designed and sculpted by Alan and Michael Perry who did an awesome job with GW's LOTR line. If you haven't yet, do yourself a favor and check out their fantastic line of historical miniatures. Their crusades line has been tempting me for the longest time. Head on out to Perry Miniatures here.  Check out these poses. My only criticism with this line is that there are only 2 poses for the horses. The horse poses are indeed very dynamic and all but why only two? Plus, both attach to the stand using only 1 peg. I'm foreseeing a lot of bent and broken horse legs in the future:(  I've star...