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I found this model somewhere on the internet, alone and uncredited, so I have no idea who made it or what it is or anything. People have suggested that it's a Kirby, whatever that is, with a human face pasted on. I like it, and I'll print about a dozen of them, and make up some stats to use them in my D&D campaign in some way. I'm leaning towards some kind of waddling tar-baby critter, but we shall see. The original model was only about 1.5mm tall, so I've rescaled it by 1500% to roughly 20mm.

This is a model by Duncan Louca, one of a set of three demons. The other two of the set are on the printer as I write this. I've printed it at 0.08mm in PLA on my Ender-3, scaled at 150% which brings it up to about 50mm tall. I added a base of my own, as the models are provided baseless.

Here we have yet another of Reaper's plastic Bones miniatures, from one or other of the Kickstarters. I don't know the SKU. I've mounted it on a steel washer, and extended the base texture with Green Stuff. He's a stout fellow, in every sense of the word, but I get the feeling he might be a bit of a bastard if you cross him. This guy is painted as a more or less mediaeval European mendicant friar, though the weapon is one the Japanese call tetsubo, an iron-bound club-staff. It was notoriously used by some of the militant Japanese Buddhist monkish sects for killing people without (theoretically, though probably not actually) spilling their blood. There was one sect who carried their sacred bits and pieces in a casket into battle, and threw it into the enemy lines to inspire the monks to a fanatical frenzy to get it back. They were, let's face it, completely barmy.

This is a three-dimensional doodle I did in Blender in the process of teaching myself how to use its Sculpt mode to create organic forms. I had no plan at all when I started out with a simple cube, and it just ended up getting creepy so I went with it. The figure is one of the Bones Townsfolk, the bartender, who I've made a bit more sinister with his bloody hands and apron. I printed the cube on my Ender 3 FDM machine at 0.2mm in PLA. Hopefully it will inspire a certain degree of disquiet among my players.

89023: Balazar, Iconic Summoner by Bobby Jackson I assume this figure is meant to be a gnome; he's very short for a human, and he's lacking the beard of a dwarf. I find painting yellows and oranges very difficult. They tend to be colours with very low opacity, and getting an even coverage requires several coats.

89031: Whispering Tyrant by Bobby Jackson From time to time, when I need a very quick miniature that doesn't look completely unpainted, I'll pump out something along these lines. This has been primed black, and then had a zenithal spray of white applied to give me some very fast basic modelling shading and highlights. Then I've added some washes in various colours — mossy khaki green, sepia, and ochre to emphasise the detail and add just a suggestion of colour, with a touch of dry-brushing in bone-white to pull out the highlights some more. It's very fast, and at the end of it I have something that looks more like a little statuette than a raw unpainted gaming miniature. It's something I wouldn't be embarrassed to put on the table, and for spooky, ghostly things like this particular figure, it can probably just stay like this forever. However, for other sorts of miniatures, this state can later act as underpainting for a more finished paint-job.

This ill-mannered octopus is a model I found on Thingiverse and printed on my el-cheapo Ender 3 FDM 3d printer. It's printed in PLA at 0.08mm layer height; from memory it took about three hours. Next to it is Sergeant Measureby, for scale. Each of the divisions on his spear is 5mm. He's a very old Essex mediaeval wargaming figure from the mid '80s.

I made these primitive runestones in Blender and printed them on my little 3d printer. I thought the first one was a bit boring, so I added a bunch of skulls around the base of the second for that cannibal-headhunter vibe. They're on Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3010064 The miniature is from Reaper, the figure I use to represent my oldest (surviving) D&D character from back in 1981, Smirnoff the Huge and Ugly. There was one earlier character from my very first roleplaying session, but I don't even remember his name — he was blown to smithereens in that same session by being too close to an overly-curious halfling thief.

...or, as pretty much everybody else in the RPG world knows it, a Remorhaz. From memory, I think remorhaz are supposed to be more of a light ice-blue, but I got a bit carried away, so this one has more of a tropical look about it than an arctic one. Never mind. This was a real quickie paint job, taking about an hour and a half from start to finish. There's a lot more detail I could concentrate on, and maybe I'll revisit it one day, but for now it's good enough for gaming, and that's good enough for me.

Here's the first piece of bog terrain finished. I originally intended to use a 5-minute epoxy and acetone mix for the water, but I can no longer find really cheap and nasty epoxy — I used to be able to get 40ml syringes for just a couple of bucks, but now the cheapest ones I could find are closer to ten. So, instead I used polyester casting resin, which costs about thirty bucks for a 250ml can. There are down-sides to using the polyester: First, it stinks to high heaven while it's curing. Second, the disposable plastic cups I used for mixing are dissolved by it — I had to do a rapid transfer into another vessel before it ended up all over everything. Third, it's very, very clear, which would normally be a good thing, but for this purpose it could have done with being a bit more murky. I added some colouring, but not quite enough, so the water looks more lake-ish than boggy. Fourth, it's quite a bit thicker than water, so the meniscus is more pronounced, and it takes a bit of persuasion to flow into all the nooks and crannies. However, I was pretty much expecting that and I'm not heartbroken by it. The vehicle in the picture is my 3d-printed 1/100 scale Burford-Kegresse machine-gun carrier.

Here's another Bones Kickstarter figure. I don't know what the SKU is for this one, or even if it's for sale yet — it seems to take quite a while for the Kickstarter figures to filter through to the online shop. I like it mainly for the over-the-top shield. I have a weakness for that sort of thing, probably from early exposure to the old Warhammer stuff back in the day. For those unfamiliar with the term: E.H.P. stands for Evil High Priest. I don't know if it's still used, but it was common shorthand back in the distant primeval past.

Here's the translucent Bones 77305 Gelatinous Cube. Being translucent, it's a bit of a tricky thing to photograph. I haven't put any paint on the cube itself at all; I've seen some translucent figures that have been tinted in various ways in an attempt to bring out the detail, but in my opinion the results are seldom successful. It comes in three parts; two for cube itself, which I joined with clear silicon sealer, and one for what is supposed to be the contents of its last meal, a rather nice pile of skeletonized adventurers and their gear. I painted them in very high contrast, in the hopes that some of the detail would be able to be seen through the cube's walls.... The hapless adventurers are supposed to form the base of the creature, but they're completely wasted as a model that way, as once they're inside the thing they can only be made out as a blurry, formless blob. So instead, I've kept them separate, and they'll come in useful as dungeon dressing. A pile of skeletonized corpses will always come in handy.

Here's one of the Cthulhu Mythos creatures from Kickstarter III, a Gug. I really don't know what that is; I've played a bit of Call of Cthulhu from time to time, but never come across one of these. I suppose I could look it up, but I'm lazy.

I'm not sure if this figure is actually meant to be a half-orc or not, but that's what I'm using it for. I have a pair of half-orc twins in my campaign, a brother and sister, and they need some figures.

This is one of the Cthulhoid critters from the recent Bones Kickstarter. I think they call it Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, but I'm not completely sure about that. Just a side note: Windows 10 did an update recently, and since then Photoshop's colour balance has gone entirely to broccoli. What I see in Photoshop has no relation to what I get as output, and I'm really struggling to figure out how to get it back. That's why all of these images are too blue.

This is a piece that came in the Mythos expansion pack to the Bones III kickstarter, a good old-fashioned stone sacrificial altar. Tim the Enchanter I've shown before; he's just there for scale. This is the sort of terrain piece that comes in handy quite a lot. I can foresee getting plenty of use out of it. Unfortunately, I'm a little short of terrified and helpless sacrificial victims; I shall have to see what I can do about that.

My Bones III Kickstarter fulfillment arrived a couple of days ago, and I've been happily sorting through them. I've engaged in all three Reaper kickstarters so far, but I doubt that I'll do another — it's not that they're not a good deal, but there's always a very, very long wait for them to arrive, and they've all been very heavy on the character figures, of which I really do have an ample supply. I mainly want the monsters, and it'll be simpler just to buy them individually when they eventually appear in the shop. I chose this one to start the painting with, mainly because it would be very quick and easy to do, and in fact it only took about twenty minutes. It probably would have taken longer if I'd actually removed any of the mould lines, which I kind of forgot about in my enthusiasm. I don't know what its SKU is; I couldn't find it with a (fairly brief) search in the online store.

I thought it had been too long since I painted a fantasy figure, so I reached into my Big Bag O' Monsters and this was the one that came out. (Full multi-angle image linked due to excessive boobies): https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rmDg_Rk9xkw/WYFH353IOlI/AAAAAAAAIps/cuqeA94FFScu0brueXZlQcGYawXQthsuwCLcBGAs/s1600/20170802ReaperHarpy.jpg It's 77041 Harpy by Julie Guthrie. As usual for me these days, it's one of the plastic Bones miniatures, and if you want one it will cost you the princely sum of about three of those Yankee dollars.

Next up on the Bones-painting production line is this one, 77261: Bat Demon by Bob Ridolfi. At first I was going to paint him classic devil red, but I went with green in the end to give it a more serpentine look. I don't know why I wanted that; there's nothing very serpentine about the sculpting, but there you are. The heart has its reasons. The wings and elevated position make this figure a bit more imposing than its stature actually warrants. As far as its body goes, it's just very slightly — if at all — larger than the average Reaper bloke.

Here's another of my vast stash of Bones figures, now splashed with paint. This is a very quick and unfussy paint job, and not really a very good one, but it will do the job. It took me about half an hour. It appears in Reaper's inventory as 77258: Blood Demon, but it seems pretty clear that it's based on an AD&D minor demon called a Babau that I first saw in the MM2, published in 1983.

This is a very old miniature, from Games Workshop I think, which I've had sitting on my desk undercoated for years and years. It came in a blister of two versions: this one, and a mounted figure. It was actually the mounted figure I was looking for when I came to finally get around to painting it, but I couldn't find it, so this guy finally got the treatment. It's designed for a plastic slotta-base, which I hate, so I've mounted him on a 22mm washer and built up the ground with GreenStuff. I briefly considered adding some foliage, but that stuff catches the dust like you wouldn't believe, and is impossible to clean properly. So, he gets to stand on bare rock.

I got these four guys in the last Reaper Kickstarter. They're ghasts — a sort of uber-ghoul, for those who don't know D&D monsters. Retail price now is about $2.50 each. I just wanted mooks, so I painted them up as quickly and simply as I could bear: black primer followed by white zenithal spray followed by white wet-brush highlighting followed by greeny ink-wash followed by ivory dry-brush followed by undiluted inks for clothes and ground, and that's it. Actual painting time, not including waiting for things to dry, was about twenty minutes I guess. This is definitely what I'd call very basic tabletop quality, but they'll do nicely for that purpose. I might revisit them and give each its own colour accents, just to ease identification in my GMing notes, but it's not a high priority. The only thing I don't like about Bones figures is the mould lines. They're a real pain to get rid of.

Back to monster-painting, after a fairly long break. This is one of the two nasty boil-ridden critters from the Reaper Bones 77198: Barrow Rats pack. They're pretty big rats; beside a regular human-sized figure they'd be about the size of a pony.

This is another Bones miniature designed by Jason Wiebe — 80001: Ape-X. I think that a gorilla's skin would tend to be blacker than this, but that made it very monochromatic, so I browned it up a bit. And here it is again, photographed from every angle, just in case you really need to know what it would look like from a rear three-quarter view.

Here's another critter. It's 77259: Fly Demon by Kevin Williams. I wanted a metallic effect to the blue, which I got, but the end result isn't quite as successful as I would have liked. The miniature would benefit from having its wings replaced with much thinner acetate ones, but of course that would be a lot more fragile. It could also do with a bit more detail modelled into its limbs, to bring out the insectoid articulation a bit more. All in all, not one of my better efforts, but it will just have to do now.