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So it's been an adventure! But I finished this guy today. I don't think I can do anymore damage to him :P You can check out my WIP thread, but here are some (ok, a LOT) of pics of him from just about every conceivable angle. He's got a lot more iridescent than shows up on the pictures :( not sure how to get that to show up. His base is Reaper Ruins vignette 74027. I pinned him in three places to get him to stick to the base, as I was really worried about him falling over.

Not a lot done yet, it's likely to be slow going. I'm trying to think of a colour scheme I want to use for it. I suspect purple will be involved. I just finished finally putting him together, and removing mold lines. The epoxy is still curing atm. One of his... antennae? I think I may have put in a bit off, but it was quite hard to tell how those were meant to go unfortunately. I'm currently working on gap filling, which I suspect will take me quite a long time as I've not done it a whole ton before and this is the largest model in metal I've ever attempted so cross your fingers!

Herein I'll take up the challenge of the infamous Jabberwock from Bones 1. I already attached the wings and sculpted their joints with Magic Sculpt. This piece is well known for its tendency to sag under its own weight. Others have come up with various solutions. I intend to burrow along the length of the left leg, as indicated with the green stripe, and embed a bent jumbo paperclip for reenforcement. Then I'll have to re-sculpt the removed surface, but after doing the wing joints that doesn't seem exceedingly difficult.

While painting has been a little constrained, it's been a good month for gaming. I attended two conventions, running demo games of Chaos Wars for Iron Wind Metals. At Cincycon the first weekend in March, we had access to the company collection of figures, so I didn't need to worry about what to put on the table, but at Cold Wars I was running games (with the aid of my brother) out of my own collection. My collection runs to vintage rather than current production, and I thought it would be nice if I could work toward getting some stuff on the table that is still in the catalog, although vintage sculpts. I started a unit of a dozen goblin archers from the recent Kickstarter, but left them at work on Thursday while on my way home for a three day weekend. That made finishing the last six a little difficult. So, I picked two medium monsters that I had primed at the same time, that were going to be largely monochrome, and went to work. As stated in the title, these were a Tom Meier Jabberwock, and a Dennis Mize Manticore. It took me about two hours to get these to the point where I was ready to start basing them. For wargaming, I kept the base treatments fairly simple. They're both on 40mm round wooden bases, to which I'll add a flexible steel bottom to engage my magnetic storage boxes. Here's a closer shot of the manticore: And the Jabberwock:

03692 Halloween Tree by Jason Wiebe 03233 Townsfolk Children Little Boy by Bobby Jackson 01-095 Jabberwock from IronWind Metals "Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll and included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!" He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought. And as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! and through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

I was taking a stroll through the woods one day, and came upon a beast from the ancient days of BONES I, the Jabberwock! This guy had been mostly finished for a long time, but wouldn't stay upright. I couldn't get a rod through his legs, so I wound up gluing the heck out of his tail to get it to stay to the base.

Hey all, here's what I'm currently working on. I got a shipment of some more Bones in on Friday before I had to leave town, got back last night and have been painting a bit today. I finally got around to getting some green stuff for filling seams, and I'm trying it out on my Jabberwock. I'm also going to try out base coating in a few different colors rather than hitting the whole mini with a coat of plain black first. I painted Feiya plain black everywhere there wasn't exposed skin or hair. I'll be base coating those later, probably in dirty bone since that's about the only off-white color I currently have. I also got a ton of work done on a Holy Vindicator. I think I'm about 75% done on him. Really just need to get his face, hair, and base done. Base coat was Reaper pure black. Cloak was done in multiple layers of Reaper pure black mixed with increasing amount of dragon blue. The base color for the plate armor was Vallejo Model Air gungrey mixed with a tiny amount of Vallejo Model Air burnt umber. Plate highlights are straight Vallejo Model Air steel. I used Vallejo Game Color burnished copper for the scalemail/chainmail areas, and the hip and shoulder pieces and the angel pattern on the shield were undercoated in burnished copper as well before I applied Vallejo Game Color polished gold. Leather straps/belts are equal parts Reaper harvest brown and leather brown. I also applied a black wash over the whole figure, then went back and re-applied gold and silver to some areas that it darkened too much (mainly the gold areas and the sword and shield).

As has been a theme this year, the minis I manage to paint will all count towards the resolutionary challenge. As per the resolutionary painting challenge guidelines, I will post them here, and link in my post in the challenge thread. One of my all time favorite poems is by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland: Jabberwocky From "Through the Looking Glass" (1871) ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!†He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!†He chortled in his joy. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. I love how all the words sound like real English words. To quote Alice "It seems pretty (...) but it is rather hard to understand." This then, is the source of the +5 Vorpal Sword. Also, the not entirely unrelated movie "Jabberwocky" by Terry Gilliam which is absolutely frabjous! Unsurprisingly, since not only the Vorpal Sword, but also the Jabberwock itself has found it's way into D&D, Reaper makes one in Bones. Because that's what Reaper does best. The Bonesium material is really great for monsters! Bonesium works really great with deep detailing! But the bendy Bonesium is not so great for thinner parts that support a lot of weight...like legs... Hence most of my Bones dragons and such are drooping all over the place! This one has actually been straightened and stood up! Majestic Dragons bending over in the dust?? NO! This will not do! SCREAM at your Bones! This needs \../ METAL! \../ This Jabberwock was all bowled over and in a sorry state before I inserted metal pins all the way up the leg from the base and again through the lower calf (the bit running parallell to the base). And the base itself needed some serious weighing down to keep from tipping over all the time. Good thing I had those old Heavy Metal shields from back in the day lying about. I left it tilted to the side in this way on purpose as I think it helps to convey it's rabid insanity. Jabberwock Bones KS1 89016 Reaper Miniatures Bonesium PVC 50mm round lipped base

Let my start off by saying that most of the Bones miniatures are fine. The problem seems to be with large miniatures that have narrow/thin supporting legs or what have you. The Bones with the biggest problem seems to be Jabberwock and one of the dragons (I think the Red Dragon). Both have sagged to the point where their front legs now touch the ground. Does anyone have a suggestion on how this can be addressed? I love these two miniatures but I’m not sure what I can do with them to fix the problem. Thanks, ~ S ~

Sooo.... I'm sitting here, out on the West Coast of Canada, impatiently waiting for my KS Bones to finally get here, and browsing these forums looking for ways to amuse myself. Having found the "Show Off" forum and been impressed by many of the paint jobs here I was reminded that, quite some time ago (2005 to be exact) I'd took some time to actually assemble and paint a couple of Ral Partha lead miniatures that I'd had kicking about since the mid-to-late-90's and that I'd subsequently uploaded images of the final results to a "Microsoft Live Spaces" blog I maintained at the time. Now, I do still have both these mini's so I could take fresh images, but, as it happens, all images uploaded to "Live Spaces" blogs were automatically stored in what would eventually become "Microsoft Skydrive" so it was actually quite easy to locate those older images, allowing me to share them here, now. :-) One point I'd like to make is that, actually having first started miniature painting as a pre-teen back in the early 80's (ya, ya. I'm an 80's chick, get over it!) I first learned with enamel based model paint and continued to use them almost religiously until recently. (In fact, I haven't actually started using acrylics yet, but I have friends who switched over ages ago and will be doing so once my KS bones package, with all four paint sets, arrives.) In any case, working with enamel model paint is quite different from working with acrylics inasmuch as how colours are mixed and blended. Also, the reason I continued to prefer enamel paints was their natural glossy depth (something that I thought wasn't possible using acrylics given examples I'd come across back then but this site has proven that belief to be unfounded) and I generally enhanced this with a glossy top coat, which did have an effect on how the photos turned out. The next two posts will include the photos. First up (as it was painted first): The Jabberwock