D&D Harpies

I shared the harpies and the customizations I made previously while they were WIP. Today, here they are finished.

Grenadier and Ral Partha Harpies

I admire both sets of sculpts, the Grenadier ones by Sandra Garrity and the Ral Partha ones by Bob Olley, and what's better is how well they go together, even down to the exact same style base, with similar ground details sculpted on. I'm not sure which came first, but it's as if one sculptor had copies of the others work in hand while sculpting them.

I chose a straightforward color scheme. In my D&D campaign they guard a certain mountain pass and get a lot of sun. I could have got fancier with the wing coloration but kept it dark and minimal, and used vultures as reference.

Ral Partha Harpy

Ral Partha Harpy

Grenadier Harpy

Grenadier Harpy

Ral Partha Harpy

Ral Partha Harpy

Grenadier Harpy

Grenadier Harpy

Grenadier Harpy

Grenadier Harpy

From the time I put these on my wish list it took about five years of patiently sifting eBay listings before a promising lot of either the Grenadier or Ral Partha ones showed up. If you persist as a 25mm fantasy collector for very long you'll learn patience if you didn't have it to begin with. And then, as these things sometimes go, a lot of the other ones showed up, and then several more, and I wound up with at least six of the Grenadier and a dozen or more the Ral Partha ones, as well as several of the single Alternative Armies sculpt Olley sculpted for them in the exact scale and style as the Ral Partha ones. Enough for a good sized unit in a fantasy army. These are the first, but some day years from now I may get around to doing another round or two. In the meantime, five harpies are more than a match for any adventuring party likely to grace my dungeons.

D&D Scratch-built Ogre

I finally finished the first of an ogre encounter group I started in 2012!

Ogre

Here's how I made him (pardon the crappy picture taken from too close):

Ogre WIP

The body is from a HeroClix "Bi-Beast" figure, with the legs cut and extended either side of the knee. The arms are GW orc arms with green/brown stuff to soften the muscle definition. The orc hands were too big even for an ogre, so I switched them for goblin hands (it was the era of big hands, what can we say). The feet are press-molded from a HeroClix "White Martian" figure. The "warty bumps" are to Monster Manual spec and are just sand glued on with superglue.  I imagined them as something like human keratosis pilaris and placed them in line with this. I sculpted the head and the rest of it.

HeroClix Bi-Beast

Back when I launched my D&D project I gave ogres a lot of consideration, but I had a particular vision of them with longer legs and a smaller head than the figures I was seeing. I don't like the long-running trend of making giant humanoids (except for fire giants) more dwarf like than human figures.

My first thought was to sculpt over Marx cavemen, which I think may have been used in the original games in Lake Geneva. I settled on this bi-beast "chassis," though, which I also used for a hook horror and umber hulks (still WIP).

The base was an experiment that took too long to be practical for other figures. I did a thin layer of concrete patch (which I do a part at time and then let dry or else the plywood base would warp), then green stuff stones as thin as I could make them. Looks great but takes too long. You can see I also changed my mind after initially going with an oval base. The round one is 33mm cut to order.

I like him a lot, especially how the face turned out, but would make a few changes if I did him again. I'd make the legs even longer, give him a paunch, change the ear design a little more in line with the Monster Manual illustration, and maybe do the neck a bit differently. I had put these choices into play in further ogres I'm working on, which I'll share in a future post, though I never made the legs fully as long as I would have liked. In a world of unlimited time and projects I would have a go at sculpting a range not using parts.