Chewkannon conversion

A big part of the fun for me about building armies is converting things and recreating some already cool minis in order to make them totally unique.

Funny how your miniatures are like your most precious objects, they have something about them that you get attached and when you walk a extra step to convert them to your desires its like you gave birth to your first child heheh... Its silly how a adult gets so sentimental with these little bits of pewter.

So on my desk was my latest love the Chewks from Khurasan Miniatures and they are so cute that they look like they are from a Star Wars movie, but when I unpacked the Chewkannon blister all that fuzzy feeling was a bit gone, I mean its a superb miniature but it was a bit boring and to realistic, specially if you took out the Beast of burden.

With that in mind I set up to create a new Chewkannon that was funny, evocative to Star Wars not very realistic or functional and that was a easy and fast conversion with minimal sculpting. The beast of burden should be the star of this project.
With only the bits from the original blister cut and placed in a different way I changed this miniature to something a bit silly but damn funny, the green stuff work was so simplistic that anyone that can fill a gap can do this in a couple minutes.
I liked the final result and will buy 2 or 3 more Chewkannons and convert them to match this one.

Brilliant work by Khurasan on creating the Chewks and I hope my little convo didn't destroy them much.

AT-43 Therians Arachns find a new home in 15mm Sci-fi

I have been a big fan of Rackham metal miniatures back in the day and on its last years alive Rackham released a Scifi based game named AT-43. The big downside, for a hobby guy like myself, is that in those days I really disliked the pre painted nature of this new game.

Some years latter and here we are in this really addictive 15mm adventure and I was searching for a couple of big spherical nasty robots to represent some kind of bosses for my Wyrd robot faction... First thing to pop up in my mind was the Therians Arachns for AT-43.
They were very hard to hunt down and I managed a sweet deal, so instead of being forced to get a full box of 6 I got 2 individual minis, perfect!

When they arrived here I checked up the size and again perfect! They are still pre painted plastics but they are going to be fully repainted with my brushes and fight some nice 15mm battles in the future.

New miniatures transport box from Portable Warfare

When it comes to transporting your miniatures you have to decide which box or bag on the market fits better your needs and that can be a bit stressing if you don't know were to start.
So first thing I had to decide was the objective of the transport.


Objective:
A small durable bag filled with Pick & Pluck foam to carry all of my 15mm to the UK, it needs to fit inside a casual luggage bag and its going to be traveling a lot by airplane ( not carry-on luggage). It must not be expensive. The cheaper the better.


Options:
Looking at main bags in the market I selected:


- Battlefoam smallest bag THE P.A.C.K. MINI with pick and pluck starts at £22.80 plus shipping £15.78 total £41.74


- KR multicase Cheaper and resistant bags but the smallest of them is still way to big.


- Feldherr MINICASE or MINIPLUS cases are of a good size but the bags are soft so they will not protect the minis from the airplane luggage gorillas.


I was about giving up of getting a case because either they are to expensive or to big or fragile... But then Portable Warfare released a new case called the APC.


Its a nice size resistant cardboard box filled with Pick and Pluck and its only £9.5 and £7.6 shipping, total £17.1


Ordered one and about a week and a few days later I got it. Great customer service... OH I forgot to say that the shipping costs at Paypall store are not accurate and I mailed Portable warfare about a quote, the reply took less than a hour and it was extremely polite and professional so 10/10 in customer support.


So this is what I got.

A proof how durable this box is it was just delivered wrapped in paper and in perfect condition.

Opened it and checked out the foam.

Its about 2 inch foam with a white foam topper... the pick and pluck squares are about half inch each.

There is one of my 15mm there for scale ( its going to take plenty of my minis)

So there you have it a great option if your objective is a very strong and not to big box to carry your minis... For my small 15mm its the perfect solution since I can stack them in those 2 inches. The customer service was perfect the shipping fast the quality of the foam and card box was awesome and above all VERY cheap.

I'm happy with this purchase and will get some more in the future.

The HAROOK sculpts

A new race of creatures just arrived to the battlefields, they are bigger than any man and carry strange and deadly weapons, their motivation is unknown but they are ready for war.

Mad Robot Miniatures created the Harook concept and it was my mission to sculpt them. It's one of the coolest new Scifi creatures I have seen and the concept art was very detailed with lots of nice ideas, as such I had to sculpt the best I can in order to make them justice.

The Harook sculpts was a big, small challenge. Big because it was not one or two or five but 10 Minis... and small because these miniatures are for 15mm Scifi war games.

I hope you like them it was a patience test to sculpt so many tiny and detailed minis but a pleasure to see them finished up.

The HAROOK

Heavy weapon

Heavy weapon and scanner

Harook Leader

The full squad

Scale bigger than a 15mm man.

So thats it, lots of pictures and lots of new greens.

Hummm these are for 15mm but I was wondering something... The Harook could also double as a 28mm race, like some small chickens of doom or hell pigeons, ehehe these would look interesting for sure.

Juiblex the Slime Lord sculpt for Fractured Dimensions

About a month ago I got into contact with a new company that is producing some really cool minis for all the rpg monster fans.
Their miniatures have some really old school thing about them and I got some flashbacks about all those epic rpg dungeons fights I had in a dark room when I was a young fella.

I leave you the links of their new blog/newsletter and online store:

Fractured Dimensions blog and Fractured Dimensions Webstore .

So I was commissioned to sculpt more than 10 monsters for them and the first one I just completed is:

Juiblex the Slime Lord

The Juiblex is a mass of flesh, slime and many eyes and has several protrusions that expel slime, vomit, acid and all kind of nasty things... With a description like this I knew I was in for a crazy ride.

Alongside the miniature the Juiblex also comes with a couple of vomits.

The Juiblex was created with 6 different spots that you can attach the vomits, this way you can have lots of different Juiblex just by changing the place you choose to glue the vomit, it really changes the overall look of the monster. Here are some examples.

You can even just attach one of the vomits if you like... or none. It will create several different variations if you intend to have multiple Juiblex.

As for the scale its 45mm tall miniature and the base of the body fits a 30mm base.

Here's a picture with a 32mm miniature.

Looking at this miniature I think it can fit a large number of purposes, from a role play monster for your dungeon crawlers, a chaotic or demonic objective for a fantasy/40k game, a spawn, Cthulhu creature, pulp monster to even a really huge alien manifestation or entity for smaller scales games.

I hope you like the Juiblex the Slime Lord.

Rebel Miniatures MATV Comanche

I received my first order from Rebel Miniatures and I have mixed feelings from what I got, so this is my little and quick review about it.

So I needed a small transportation for my Caravela fleet Scout HQ and I loved the concept of the MATV Comanche from Rebel Miniatures... A week later I received the pack in the mail. Good service there.

At first inspection everything looks ok and it shows that this MATV is clearly 3d print, the lines of the printer are visible on the cast as most 3d prints casts usually are. On the metal the cast is nicer but when I look at the resin, specially one of the sides, its a bit of a messy cast... Its not nothing a competent hobby veteran cant fix but its going to take a lot of extra work.

Fortunately this its only more visible on the MATV left side and more discreet on the front and right sides. Also I will paint with lots of battle damage and weathering so it will make things a bit less obvious, but if you want to paint it like a clean vehicle then its going to be very hard to sharpen all of the mess in the resin cast.

Comparing this with for example Old Crow casts its a considerable difference in quality and unless rebel changes its casting on resin I will have to search my vehicle fix on other manufacturers.

Maybe I'm way to harsh and picky about this since the model design is superb and they provided all the weapon choices for different turret etc... its a nice model but the cast on the resin parts is a bit of a let down and its something I tend not to let it slide since there's other small companies that also cast in resin at competitive prices and with super sharp results.

You can find Rebel site at www.rebelminis.com/ 

So in short;  Good customer service. lovely model design, lots of options included in the kit, nicely scaled for 15mm and acceptable metal casting but the resin cast is not that good.