XLIX. Devil Went Down to Gardens of Hecate

The fifth bell-ringer creature (yay, I'm half way through them!). This is a special one, though: the Devil. In folk carnivals a Devil characther is often present, along with Death, Bear with Handler, Hobby Horse, etc.

I was very free with my design, but he nontheless got his pitchfork, hooves and horns. ; ) 

The body is a Plaguebearer, but lower parts of his legs were replaced with horse legs. Just as I promised, I stole that neat idea from Jeff Vader's Plague Prophet conversion. The head and tail come from a Black Knights mount, and the pitchfork from the plastic Giant kit. 

Fun fact: he was first painted in a different colour scheme. I liked it and he looked good on his own, but so it happened that it made him look too different from the rest of his faction. With the makeover he lost some of his devilishness, but at least now he fits in. The deviant... : P This was the first paintjob:

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My LGS finally restocked some of The Hobbit range, so I today I picked up a box of Goblin Warriors for my Troglodytes. I like that kit a lot. Each of the 18 goblins is a unique sculpt, and they are all single piece figures, but without looking two-dimensional. They won't need much alteration beside exchanging their metal blades for weapons of either bone or flint. 

I also came by a blister of Freeboter's Fate pistols, so my characters can accessorize when the need arizes.

XLVIII. An Old Fence and A New Goatman

I slapped some paint on that fence gate I made earlier. Here I tried out Agrellan Earth, to get somehing like old, cracked paint.   

Then I thought it would be a good idea to make some fence pieces to go with the door. It was pretty tedious business, but listening to audiobooks while working made it bearable. I alway like to listen to somehing while I paint and such, I think this time I went through Arthur Machen's The White People, and The Great God Pan, and possibly something else.

 Now I have ten fence segments of this kind in total, including the one with the gate in it. 

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Another cattle-headed revenant joins the ranks. This one has Tzeentch Horror arms on the standard Plaguebearer body.

 Here's the whole group:

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XLVII. Some More Revisions

While at it, I messed with the musical Bell-Ringer as well. I wasn't too happy with his warpaint (which I introduced to counter the monotony of his big green surfaces), or his skin tone in general. So after repainting the skin in a more suitable shade of sickly green, I tried to employ other means adding a bit of detail and interest. First, I let his head sprout a couple of antlerlike branches with tin leaves. I like it, because it's a pretty surreal concept. Just this was not enough, as the chest area was the biggest problem. After trying out some other stuff, I eventually just hung a bell around his neck- and that solved the problem.

And here's a group shot of the three done so far:

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Several parcels of goodies have arrived to my address this week, including a small order from Victoria Miniatures. I ordered the awesomly grotesque and quite amusing Labyrintus Fairies, and along with them these white metal goggles:

 I am very, very pleased with these. In fact, as soon as I unpacked the goggles, I installed them on the Plague Doctor and the Nurse. I think it considerably improved their faces:

Now I'll have to restrain myself from putting goggles on everything... 

And just this afternoon I picked up a pair of the new Citadel Technical paints: Typhus Corrosion and Agrellan Earth. Can't wait to try them out. Especially the latter, since it seems like a crackle effect paint that actually works.

XLVI. The Third Bell-Ringer

And here we go: my first mini in 2014. Another footsoldier of Hades:

 

Just as the others, he is a converted plastic Plaguebearer. I replaced the daemonic sword with a wooden club I sculpted. Added a rope around his waist, with several jingle bells on it. The hairy neck was built up with green stuff, and the face is a GW beastman skull. The horns are spikes from VC Corpse Cart.

 

I did some more changes on the first bell-ringer: added the ribbons hanging from his horns and changed the colour of his intestines to black. 

This happens to me a lot. When I work on a faction my idea and vision of it evolves as I slowly get through models, so the ones I make at the beginning often get updated at some point later.

XLV. The Keeper of the Golden Bough

Happy New Year!

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Behold the last miniature I painted in 2013: the Keeper of the Golden Bough, a giant tree-man:

 

In one scenario the Doctor and the Countess will both try to get their hands on the Golden Bough, a legendary alchemical ingredient. They will know the Bough grows somewhere in the canopy of what was once a sacred glade, but is now a collection of ancient gnarled trees. However, they will not know exactly which tree it is on, and they will have to look for it while fighting each other and creatures of Hades.

Once someone finds the tree with the Golden Bough and tries to collect it, its Keeper will awake: the old tree itself will uproot and start atacking everyone around it. Only when the Keeper is brought to the ground can the Bough be picked up...
We haven't yet written the exact rules, but you see the general idea.

A closeup of the "head", where the Golden Bough sits:

And a size comparison with what was until now the largest model in the Gardens:

XLIV. Fate Deck

Happy holidays, everyone!  : )


Now, let me introduce you to my own hand-made pack of cards:

 I wanted a custom card pack for the Gardens, based on the Fate Deck used for Malifaux, which is in turn based on the French deck. The first thing you can notice in the picture is that I replaced the Rams, Tomes, Masks and Crows of Malifaux with my own four suits. They are: Blood ( B ), Flesh ( F ), Bone ( O ) and Spirit ( S ). I spent a lot of time thinking about the symbols for the suits, and there were some funky ideas, but in the end I went with the simplest possible solution: spots. Partly because I can be incredibly lazy, partly because I really like the look of it. 

So, there are full spots for the solid Flesh and Bone, and empty spots for the more flowing Blood and Spirit. Blood and Flesh should be red, which leaves black for Bone and Spirit. Makes sense.

There are thirteen cards in each suit, each marked with Roman numerals and the number and type of spots corresponding to their suit and value. The only exception is the lowest card, with the value of 1, which is marked with an A. There are no face cards. There is a pair of Jokers, Black and Red, which have no writing on them; just a rectangle of their respectable colour covering most of the card's surface.

Flesh suit.

Bone suit.

Blood suit.

Spirit suit.

A little bit about how I made them. First, I cut them all out from A4 sheets of thick white paper, and then stained them with coffee and left to dry. The next step was painting all the spots, for which I used a little trick: a plastic tube. For the empty spots I just dipped the end of the tube into acryllic paint and stamped them on. The full ones demanded a bit more effort: that is filling the outline in. Next came the numbers, written by hand with a ballpoint pen. 

That only left the backs of the cards. I didn't want to leave them bare, so I went to a local hobby shop to try and find some nice printed patterned paper to paste on all the backs. I found nothing of use. However, I came across something else: stencils. I picked an arabesque motif. And it was on discount, too. : ) 
The cards' backs are not all identical (due to coffee staining and little flaws in the stenciled design), but that doesn't bother me since it will not be used in any kind of competitive play.  

Ace of Flesh, 13 of Spirit, 4 of Bone, 13 of Flesh, 10 of Bone, 9 of Blood, and the Red Joker.

And I'm going to need another one.

XLIII. Bell-Ringer and Graveyard Shrine

With the holidays coming up, I've finally got more time to spend on the hobby. So I'm happy to say I have two interesting things for you today:

I. THE SECOND BELL-RINGER

For a while I've had this idea for one of the Bell-Ringers of Hades, whose body is in fact walking bagpipes- with bloated belly and pipes sticking out of his back. Conveniently, there's this cool loking aerophone instrument in the Plaguebearers kit that I could use. And his face could end with a pipe as well, like on the winged critter in this painting by Hieronymus Bosch:

Detail from the central panel of The Haywain Triptych. Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1516

So I got to work. All the bits apart from the head come from the Plaguebearers box. The head is a big skull from a Tomb Kings banner. At first I intended to give him a tall fur cap, which is why I left this thing sticking out of the head- to build the cap around it. But I changed my mind later and eventually cut it off:

WIP.

I painted him green, and in the end gave him some warpaint because he somewhat lacked detail. Probably because this one doesn't have any ropes around his waist.
Here he is, ready to unleash his infernal music on the world of the living:

 

 

And here he is with his friend:

The friend went through a little change, as a matter of fact. There was something about his horns that bothered me, and I tried painting them differently a couple of times, but nothing worked. So I removed them and gave him a new pair.

I think a whole group of ten of these will look very nice indeed.

II. THE GRAVEYARD SHRINE

 

An update for my cemetery terrain piece. The old shrine was built on a round 50mm base out of balsa and wooden beads, with plastic details. This is it before painting:

It was painted to match the headstones:

It can work as a part of the graveyard terrain or stand on its own.

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XLII. The Old Cemetery

Made an old graveyard. I used the base from the Citadel Wood kit. There were three slots for trees on it, and I got rid of two of them by filling them with a mix of sand and Vallejo heavy transparent gel. The texture I got this way almost perfectly matches the ground texture sculpted on the base. The remaining slot can be filled by any one of the Citadel trees, or a small shrine I am yet to make for this purpose. That way this piece of terrain won't have to look exactly the same every time I use it in a game.

Some of the headstones are plaster casts, and others are carved out of balsa. The symbols on top of some of them are High Elf bits. 

A dilapidated fence surrounds the burial grounds, so they can't be accessed from all sides.

Front.

Back.

I'm working on some smaller bits, too. I built a functioning wooden fence gate: it can be swung open or closed easily. There will be matching fence segments to accompany it. 

In front of the fence you can see more plaster barrels (like the ones I made before), as well as some plaster old wooden boxes. I put together the original out of balsa, thick paper and pins, and then made a mould.

I already have a couple painted. During the games they will be scattered around the board, with a possibility of containing an item or a small amount of coin.

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Another inspiring artist I would like to recommend: Keith Thompson.

THE PROPHET, by Keith Thompson

Keith's gallery is packed with intriguing concept art and illustration, and almost every piece of artwork is accompanied by a bit of backstory. I strongly suggest that you go through the entire gallery. Still, in the next few lines I'll turn your attention to some of my favourite pieces.

THE FOUR HORSEMEN  is a modern reinvention of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I love the fact Death is wearing a bodybag instead of a shroud, and the Totentanz  around a nuclear missile. And even the famous text from the Book of Revelation is rewritten so that computer files are opened in place of seals, instead of beasts monitors speak, the bow and sword carried by the first and second Horseman are replaced by a rifle and a great missile, and so forth.

A number of works feature some sort of fish-people, including PONTIFF, BROOD MERMAID, and PROPHET (shown above).
Several pictures thematize plague, my favourite being PESTILENTIAL ADVENT. I wish someone would turn that concept into a miniature. PLAGUE CART is also pretty neat. 
There is a number of unusual undead, including the especially repulsive FUNGAL ZOMBIE. 
And another one I really enjoy: the APOLLONIAN WIGHT. Especially because I normally find outer space quite scary, and would never like to be an astronaut. The concept of a skeleton in a spacesuit also reminds me of the Doctor Who episodes "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead". : )
There are many more captivating ones, and the short texts that accompany each picture always make it even more awesome.

What do you think?