Thinking Outside the Box

After I'd painted my TMNT figures I knew I would need a Casey Jones and April O'Neil some day. Thinking of Casey my mind pulled this miniature out of the cobwebs of memory. If I was going to paint one figure from the box, I might as well do the whole set. After I glued him to the base I did a quick size comparison and was a little disappointed that he's quite small; about the same size as Splinter. The turtles tower over him quite a bit. I briefly considered rebasing him on a base topper to match the ones on the turtles, but it would have meant doing all three figures from the box, or just the one and have his base not match the rest of the set. It also might have been pretty difficult gluing him down with just the one heel as a contact point. Maybe trying to pin it would work, but I don't think I have a small enough drill bit to do it. In the end I opted to leave him as he was. For a brief moment I did try to think of how I might create a golf bag for him to car...

Several months ago I finished painting my first figure from the old  SuperFigs line, Kriegshunde . I was mostly pleased with how that one turned out, and have several others from the line in my massive pile of unpainted miniatures. I needed some test subjects for priming with acrylic gesso, and these fellows were waiting on my priming board. Since I've already got plenty of cultist figures around, I decided that these would be good candidates and gave it a shot. A brief aside about acrylic gesso: it works much better than I'd expected. It shrinks a ton while it dries so you can really glop it on. I bought white, and have since done a second test adding matte medium and paint to it to create a coloured brush-on primer. It has a very nice tooth to paint over, although it may be a little rough for some of you, so I do recommend adding in a tiny bit of water to smooth it out. If you are somewhere with weather that makes spray priming outdoors a challenge, give gesso a shot! ...

Well folks, with all the zombies out there in games, on TV and in the popular media these days, you'd think I would have painted dozens of them by now. Amazingly enough however these are my first but I'm pretty sure there are going to be hordes  more of them! (Ha ha, see what I did there?) Here's my work with a box of RAFM zombies I bought late last summer at Sentry Box for $30. There were ten in the box, and I admit to being a little annoyed at getting duplicates of two of the figures inside. A little creative painting though and hopefully they won't be too obvious among a mass of undead flesh eaters. Congratulations, you've just had twins...twice! The lone female in the set is massive  in stature. If she were standing upright she'd tower over top of the rest of the figures, and that right arm is almost as long as she is tall. The gore and wounds on her are well sculpted, but do think that she's rather over the top (as are her 'endowments...