Heritage LotR Hobbits / D&D Halfings

Heritage LotR and Ral Partha Hobbits/Halflings

Halflings for RPGs

A friend of mine and I have been noting an unplanned synchronicity in recent projects for our respective RPG campaigns, my D&D Borderlands campaign and his WFRP. In response to my last post he mentioned his "bartenders, beggars, and drunk halflings."

Well, the synchronicity continues unabated. My campaign starting local is Gygax's Keep on the Borderlands. Well, many years after the original publication, Kenzer and Company published a return to the keep/ send-up for Hackmaster in their usual style, creatively titled, "Little Keep on the Borderlands," wherein are many new ideas and twists to the original, which I'm borrowing as fancy strikes me. One of these is a camp of squatter halflings which adventurers must pass through to reach the camp. So, have my players also been accosted by drunk halflings? The answer is a resounding yes.

That said, my halflings figures are of a more placid, hobbity sort and are only doubling as vagbonds and rascals when the need calls for it. These are actually Heritage Lord of the Rings figures. If I ever do a 25mm classic Tolkien collection, these will be used for the purpose for which they were intended.

Heritage Lord of the Rings Hobbits

For the purist collectors out there here's a pic of just the Heritage ones.

Heritage Lord of the Rings Hobbits

I refer those wishing to know more about these figures to their entry in Lost Minis Wiki. They are taken from the following sets:

• 1750 The Fellowship
• 1755 Hobbit Sheriff Command Set
• 1752 Hobbit Townsfolk

Basing

Something about the figures inspired me to introduce yet another base effect to my repertoire. On the one hand, the oldest vein of retro old school miniatures, and on the other, the way outdoor nature scenes are often depicted in paintings and animation. The most representative example I have to hand are the paintings Eyvind Earle made for Disney's Sleeping Beauty.

Then I went and took the pics against a very yellow-green backdrop, making the intended effect an impossibility. I'll come back and take new pics, though, if/when I get a suitable backdrop, probably made of felt. I'm experimenting with simple, cloth ground coverings lately and having remarkable success. I have been shopping craft online shops and cataloging those I'm interested in for various purposes. I might make a post about this.

Not too much to say about the painting. I matched the colors of the Merry and Pippin figures with those used in the Bakshi films. The figures themselves are linked to the films and the designs from it. I like the scheme I came up with for the Ral Partha one, and am debating whether to continue it with other RP halflings I have.

Sculpting

I also can't go without comparing the sculpting of the Heritage figures with the lone Tom Meier Ral Partha one I also included. Both were made around the same time. I presume the Heritage ones were sculpted in Milliput, or something similar, and the comparatively rough, carved quality of the sculpts is indicative, as I think Meier himself has pointed out. The Meier figure, in contrast, is has a silky-smooth quality he achieved with the different sort of epoxy he pioneered, that became the ubiquitous green stuff we all know.

This is another good example to show all the people who buy into the myth of sculpting progress and the myth of casting progress. This figure sculpted in 1979 is a technical marvel, sculpted as well as anything since, and as well-cast as anything as well. The casting also puts 98% of figures cast today to shame, whether by large or small operations. I invite you to compare to the offerings you find in your local game store today. And this figure is 16mm to the eyes. It is literally 1/3 the mass or less of a halfling figure you might find today, if not 1/4 or 1/5.

Tom Meier Ral Partha Halfling, 1979

I thought I could bang out this hobbit/halfling post in no-time and that's why I chose to do this post over others, but it's taken me a good portion of the morning to make it. Such is blogging. After breakfast I hope to get back to painting peasants. Foundry Perry figures this time. I have 10+ here that need just 2-5 minutes each to polish off.

Oh, and last note, last night I just finished two Custom Cast hobbits/halfings that predate these, but haven't varnished or photographed them yet, so they will have to wait for another post.

On the Workbench: Scratch-built Violet Fungi / Shriekers

There are a number of nice violet fungi/shrieker minis old and new, but I was set on having a large collection of many different sizes as described in the Monster Manual, and the available figures are all of a single, large size. So, some years back I started sculpting these.

I thought about trying to sell the sculpts to a company, but even though they are sculpted with a mix of Super Sculpy and Super Sculpy Firm (except for one done with Terracotta Sculpy), I still think they may be a bit fragile to cast given the deep undercuts, or at least the the molds would tear easily. I thought about filling in all the undercuts with greenstuff, but am pretty sure at this point they will be one-offs.

I stalled out because the next step is to make these stubs along the bottom, but sculpting them in greenstuff or Milliput seemed like a pain and I didn't see an easy way to sculpt them out of Super Sculpy, since they are already baked as shown here, and glued to bases that can't go back in the oven. I think I have it figured out, though. I will sculpt them in Super Sculpy right on these figures, then put them in the freezer and pop them off onto a bit of foil that will go in the oven. I will number the shrooms and put the nubs in piles starting with one, two, three, etc from the top left. Once baked I'll glue them in place and putty any joins that need it.

I like the process I made for the tops, which was to do them in two halves on a ceramic tile an then glue them together. To have them match up I need to sculpt one half and bake it, then sculpt the other half on the first half, put it in the freezer and pop it off, etc.

On the Workbench: Myconids

Another WIP D&D encounter group from the workbench. Part of the impetus for sharing is to start holding myself more accountable for the projects I start, keep the projects "in sight," as out-of-sight, out-of-mind, etc., and find encouragement to finish them.

 

The Monster Manual II tells us Myconids range in size from S to L and from 1-6 hit dice, with only the king having the full 6.

My 1HD small myconids are Ral Partha purchased from Ral Partha Europe. The castings are squashed along the mold axis to the point I had to greenstuff all the caps to make them round again, rather than oval. Really nice sculpts, though, and true to the D&D illustrations and description

I plan to scratch-sculpt the Myconid king, and perhaps a few other tall ones. If I ever put in an order with a company like Hasslefree or CP that makes good Myconids I will probably get a few of those to add.

As you can see, I'm converting some Reaper Bones mushroom men as well. The sculpts leave something to be desired and aren't a very good match with the MM description, and I'm modding them as you see here. I carved away a surprising amount of what I thought was excess mass. One advantage to Bones, though, is you can carve them up with a box cutter without a second thought. I just kept carving off chunks of them from the stomachs, legs, back until I could get them as slim as I could. They are still a chunky type of Myconid, but I figure that will be balanced out by some more slender ones to follow.

I was inspired by this fungoid print by Skinner that I own.

That's all on Myconids for now!

On the Workbench: Scratch-built Stirges WIP

Sharing another project I'd like to finish. Stirges are an iconic D&D monster from the Monster Manual somewhat like a cross between a mosquito and vampire bat. They feature in a few AD&D modules I'd like to run and will probably want these in campaign sessions pretty soon.

For that reason, I just did a session with them recently to move them forward to the state you see here. I'm pleased with how they are turning out.

And here's an older pic as it shows the scale, and I forgot to put a figure in the above one.

I sculpted the body and face on a glazed ceramic tile, then brushed the parts with vaseline and made press molds. The assembly line process is to glue the two pieces together, then sculpt the head hair, then sculpt the stomach with four segments and make holes with a pin for the legs. The legs are very thin copper wire I got by unbraiding a bit of insulated wire from trash electronic device. I just glue them in the stomach holes and cut to size after. The probiscus is slightly thicker brass wire and I drill a hole for this, snip and then carefully file the end smooth with a sanding block and fine grit sandpaper.

You can see I'm testing out round vs square bases. I don't have enough of the round, and didn't want to hold up production until I get around to my next laser-cut bases order. Meanwhile, my giant centipedes and giant rats are Dungeon Dwellers on their square, integral bases, so there is some precedent for those. The GF's opinion helped tip the scales over to the square bases. They are mounted on fabric/clothing pins.

I scratch-sculpted these as the limited choices on the market or from yesteryear are either oversized (as in 54mm or even 70mm scale by the looks of them)  and/or not that good a match for the MM illustration and description. These I've made are exactly the stirges I want.

On the Workbench: Harpies Encounter Group

Here's where I am with my harpies for D&D. The Grenadier harpies by Sandra Garrity and the Ral Partha AD&D harpies by Bob Olley mix very well together, with the Olley ones looking older and more crone-like. Here are the first five and I have more should I wish to expand the group, though five harpies seems like a pretty tough encounter for any adventurers in my campaign.

I like both sets of sculpts a lot but had to change the breasts, as they had no sag or believable weight to them and were covered up with fig-leaf-like feathers. I cut them off and sculpted them again with green stuff, using reference pictures of women having gone their life topless.  The one on the far right also has it's mold line down her center as she faces forward, and her face was a bit squashed because of it, so I filled it out with greenstuff.

I did the modifications a few years ago and started painting them here in 2018. Nearly done!

Miniatures to prime when the weather turns warm

The weather is too cold to prime these days and the minis in need of priming have been piling up. Amongst these are hobgoblin reinforcements, hellhouds, saracens, undead, harpies, giants, adventurers, and various beasts and monsters. Honestly cleaning, fixing and restoring figures is not my favorite part of the hobby. Much of these have been languishing in various "on the workbench" trays. In some cases as I was sorting through them I had the thought, why did I choose to start on this particular miniature out of the thousands unstarted? Most of these I look forward to painting, however, especially the harpies, hobgoblins and that big giant.

Dungeon Dwellers Fire Giant

Today I get to show you one of my favorite miniatures from my collection.

Manufacturer: Heritage USA
Line: Dungeon Dwellers
Figure: 1231 Fire Giant
Release date: 1979
Date painted: 2014

The Dungeon Dwellers line has a special place in the history of D&D, and lately I've been adding a few figures here and there to my Dungeon Dwellers collection (which is respectable at this point but far from comprehensive). While we Dungeon Dwellers fans can admit the figures that make up the line tend toward the crude or primitive end of the miniatures spectrum, this figure is an unqualified success and a real gem in the line as far as I'm concerned and rivaled only by the Asmodeus and Orcus figures. Here the art brut sculpting style works to advantage, giving the figure a savage, menacing presence. Like those two the fire giant captures the essence of the creature described in the monster manual as well as the factual details. However, the expression and dynamic pose of the fire giant lend it more power than the other two. The expression on this figure is fantastic. The angry, googly eyes, the gritted teeth, the fiery beard, all of it. Honestly it's one of my all-time favorite D&D figures in my collection and amongst fire giant miniatures I think it perhaps second only to that by Paul Muller for Otherworld (got it and will get to it eventually). It's been a few years now over which I have gotten him out every now and then and looked forward to doing him justice with paint.

I should say somewhere, this being as good a place as any, that this a considerable chunk of lead. Hailing from an era where sculptors would skimp on giants this is fully up to Monster Manual spec in terms of dimensions, and is one of few fire giants from the original years of D&D figures whose sculptor took to heart the part about them being "very broad (about 6' at the shoulders), looking almost like dwarves."

Does anyone know who sculpted it, BTW?

I got it for literally two bucks at a flea market a few years back, though it was missing the sword and the I'd say I invested about what a complete one is worth in energy fabricating a new one from brass sheet and brown/green stuff. Later I saw a complete, pristine-looking one for $22 buy it now on Ebay and had to fight the impulse to pick up a spare. I regret a bit now that I didn't get it but hopefully it found a good home. The sword is carefully based on actual measurements I took from a photograph of a complete figure, though mine turned out a millimeter longer and a bit wider. It's also of uniform width where the original is narrower at the base and it flanges at he point, and the decoration is a bit different.

If you compare the unpainted above with the painted below you'll also see I added gauntlets between the times the pictures were taken. The figure is so cool I wanted to keep it as original as possible, but on the other hand this guy doesn't look like a fool, and it'd be foolish to be armored up like that and leave your hands exposed right at the level where humans tend to stab and slash. The style of the figure is obviously fairly stylized, abstract, cartoon-like, what have you, and I wanted to find a way to abstract the gauntlet concept, but I just couldn't figure out how to do it and wound up sculpting each overlapping plate distinctly. Something of a chore (for a one-off) as I believe there are six plates per finger plus several more to cover the hand.

There was also what looked like an empty socket in the knife hilt so I dropped in another gem.

In the pics above you can spot how I polished it with a brass brush in the dremel to make the armor smooth. The original surface was a little rough and would have dulled the effect of any metallic paint applied over it.

And here it is painted.

Obviously, when it comes to painting, the focal point is the face set off by the beard, and these need to be just right. The beard has to be a burst of flame around the ebony face, with smoldering red eyes. After a red basecoat on the beard I undercoated most it with dozens of coats of white to get it has white as humanly possible, then many coats bringing it up to yellow, and then alternating glazes and highlights until it was as bright as I thought I could get it. Same with the eyes.

The face, meanwhile has no highlights at all. It's pure black. Many painters feel they need to highlight black the way they do other colors, and especially on creatures that are to have black flesh, like fire giants and drow, the painted result is usually gray, purple or blue. But that's not how black flesh works. Flesh has small, specular highlights that are only readily apparent under certain conditions. Meanwhile, I'm in control of the actual reflectiveness of the surface of the miniature through the use of varnishes, and I trusted that when I was done the flesh would produce it's own natural highlights.

I couldn't be happier with the results and am glad I fought down the urge to highlight. This was a nice trial run in the lead up to an encounter group of drow, which whose flesh I'll also leave pure black. Generally speaking I think painters should consider how glossy or matt the surface represented on the particular thing being painted and vary their highlighting scheme accordingly. As for the varnishes on this one, after the standard coats of "matte" Rust-oleum Ultra Cover clear (actually satin) and Testors Dullcoat I went back to brush the gems with Testors gloss-coat. I was being conservative and thinned the gloss a little, and the result was a bit more conservative than I was aiming for, even after ~ten coats, but eventually I built up a pretty good lustre. Next time I might try it full strength.

A brief word on the gemstones. They are done in the style Mike McVey popularized in the nineties and which has become the standard, but I try never to lose sight of the fact I'm representing an actual object, and I always use reference. The tendency with gem stones is to push the contrast, so you have black at the top fading through red to white at the bottom. But this gives you an effect that looks like glass, rather than a gem, and honestly if you successfully sell it as glass it looks cheap, rather than like treasure. The ones I did have less contrast and have speckled gold at the bottom of the gem and result is something that glitters and shines but is not transparent. It's not a cut, clear stone like a ruby.

Next up here are three true giant types I've covered so far, frost, fire and hill. I've also done a verbeeg, which is a slightly lesser giant, but I'm aiming first to cover the major types in the Monster Manual before I start including the lesser types in the family photos. BTW I have the Paul Muller Otherworld stone giant about 90% done, which is also one of my favorite D&D figures of all (and hands down the best D&D stone giant full stop). The other two have been shown before, but I reworked the hill giant since I put him up.

As always, the collection can be viewed in its entirety at flickr.

Grenadier AD&D "Solid Gold" Line Box Art and Insert Scans Part II

New scans by m4jumbo

In Part I I put out a call for anyone with other Grenadier box sets they'd be willing to scan, and m4jumbo of LAF and elsewhere stepped up and contributed the following, and was kind enough to let me add them to the archive I started on Flickr. I'm pretty excited to show these and very grateful.

Here also is the AD&D Action Art Painting Guide that went with the 8001 set above in a few flavors of PDF for you to choose from. The clean print and reader copies have the contrasts boosted and the color removed, and the only difference between the two is that in the reader copy a sideways-oriented chart has been rotated so you can read it on your screen. The archive copy has the scan contrast and colors preserved. All copies have OCR.

• Clean reader copy
• Clean print copy
• Archive copy

Per usual you can also see these on flickr

And anyone got any of the others? We're doing pretty well here and it would be great to edge toward a full set!

Grenadier AD&D "Solid Gold" Line Box Art and Insert Scans

For posterity and the good of the community I scanned my Grenadier AD&D box sets and inserts. Art by Ray Rubin and figures by Andrew Chernak.

I also made some cropped shots of a view of these sans lettering in case they prove useful.

These are on flickr where you can download high res copies (trickier now since the latest flickr facelift but still possible, don't give up!).

If you have other sets, would you consider scanning them at 300dpi or above as well and would you let me know if you do? I don't need a full collection of figures but I'd love to have a full collection of decent pics. And if you don't want to go to the trouble to host them I'd love to put them on Flickr and credit you in whatever way you want.

I also contributed these where appropriate to the Lost Minis Wiki, which has mostly fairly poor copies of the box art so far:

• The large sets
• The small sets

Finally, I'd love to hear what you think of these! For me they rank high among the reasons I started an American style 25mm fantasy collection in the first place and my sense of nostalgia viewing these is pure and strong. I love the graphic design, the painting technique and the degree of unintentional camp. The magic user explorer is a classic, the demon's fur pants are out of control, the female thief third from right is expressing what is hands down the height of fashion in my campaign world, and seeing the renditions of the lizardman and shambling mound make me wish Rubin had had the chance to put his hand to every monster in the books.