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Every good fantasy story needs a mysterious stranger who is sitting in a dark corner somewhere. Here is my take (mini by Otherworld Miniatures):

I'm pretty excited about finishing this guy. Stone giant (HT8c) from Otherworld Miniatures. I used Badger's gray airbrush primer, Reaper 09086 Stone Grey and 09087 Weathered Stone 09476 Woodland Brown, Army Painter Dark Tone wash. Comments are welcome!

This is Otherworld Miniatures Barrow Guardian II (model: DM30b). Painted with the Reaper stone triad, and the dark Army Painter Quickshade. Vallejo earth stuff on the base. I am still pretty new to painting, and clearly am too heavy with the drybrush highlighting. Still think he looks pretty cool though. Feedback is welcome!

For quite a while, the Shrieker has been my favorite miniature produced by Otherworld Miniatures. Their animals are lovely, and their other dungeon monsters are excellent, but their Shriekers are a fantastic sculpt of a monster I love using and really haven't seen one I like of anywhere else. They're really true to the art, which I appreciate: So when I got my set of them, I waited a few days to paint it, because I wanted to be sure I'd do it right... Also it took a bit to figure out how I wanted the tentacles on the Violet Fungus conversion... Then, last night, I said screw it, and painted them all up over the course of like 6 hours. It's been a long week. Aaaayyyyy! I'm really pleased with how they turned out, needless to say! Painting these was actually one of the more multi-step processes I've done lately - most of the stuff I've done this month has been pretty basic, since I've been focusing on getting stuff off my desk and finished... They weren't hard, though. I went in with a pretty good idea of both my end goal and my process, informed by some other miniatures I've painted - Reaper's mushroom men. I painted those up a long time ago, and I wanted to get basically the same stem effect on these as I had on them. I didn't remember how I did it then, though... but I knew that it involved a green, a white, and a wash. So I started with basecoats: a sort of army-green that has long since lost it's label for the body, and a pastel violet for the crown. Like a lavender. Then, I drybrushed - an even paler purple on the crown, and Osirian Sand on the trunk. After that, a wash on each - Druchii Violet on the hoods, and Army Painter Soft on the trunk - to darken and add depth to the hood, and knock down the green of the trunks. After that dried, I filled each hole with the same green as the trunk, then used Osirian Sand again to fill in the area under the hood and to rim each hole. From there, a simple wash of Soft over both areas had the mushrooms themselves finished. I picked out the shelf mushrooms on the sides with red, to better match the artwork and add a little more color contrast - I quite like them, although the idea of mushrooms growing on mushrooms is... odd. This lucky chap got the horn conversions for the Violet Fungi. He was painted the same way, and then I used Walnut Brown and Osirian Sand to fill in the horns. I only got one set of horns for all three sets of fungi I ordered, but I placed a second order (I decided I really wanted the wonderful Attercops they do, and some of their Carnivourous Apes) and mentioned it in the comments, so maybe I'll get the other two with that. I didn't want to make them mail something all the way from England just for that. These guys will probably get some of the same green flock I use for all of my cave minis at some point, but I wanted to make sure they were really, really dry first, since I'll never get a mis-applique out of that texture. Stilll, they're a lovely garden for my drow... Which is probably where they'll see the most use. Wonderful, wonderful monsters, easy to use as part of a low- or high-level campaign... Basically, they're the opposite of some of the more broadly useful monsters. They do one thing, but they do it amazingly, and that makes them stars. Am I going to use them for anything other than alerting enemies and hiding Violet Fungi? No. Do they need to do anything else to be perfect? ...Nope! Next up will probably be some beetles, but those will have to wait until Friday... I ran through a 100-pack of bases in the last month, and my next one doesn't arrive till tomorrow, so who knows what I'll do today...

For Black Friday, I took advantage of Otherworld Miniature's sale to pick up a lot of minis I've been eyeing for a while for half-off. Fortunately, a lot of the minis I've really been after seem to be the least popular sculpt on their mold, if I understood the sale criteria correctly... I plan to paint up most of my picks over the next week or two, starting with the really excellent Giant Leeches. This is a fantastic sculpt, made super-easy to work with by the lack of any sort of broccoli base - meaning GSing up a base was super simple, one of my favorite aspects of the Otherworld Miniatures I've seen so far. However, I had a moment of hesitation: I've seen a couple of really good giant leech sculpts I'd like to do, but I don't like mixing sculpts by different artists... and I don't really need a huge number of leeches, to be honest. But at 4 for 6$, they were definately too good to pass up... So I thought: Hm, that mouth looks familiar... maybe... and then they arrived, and they were perfect. And now all of my players are going to die, alone and helpless, to a swarm of Purple Wurmlings... I kept my paint job pretty simple here, befitting the simplicity of the worms themselves! First, I basecoated the primed and based worms with a lighter purple, then drybrushed the backs with an even lighter one to get a little more of the texture. Then I washed with a coat of Citadel's Druchii Violet Shade, which really sank into the cracks, and darkened them a bit. From there, it was just a matter of filling the mouths in with Fresh Blood, then washing them with Army Painter Soft and using a fine brush to do the teeth in Leather White. Then I just did the bases up like all my other desert creatures, and called it a night! The whole group took around 3 hours start-to-finish; and a lot of drying time where I got a little carried away with the washes... There are four different sculpts for this set. I like the third one best (it has a commanding, leech-like presence.) I decided to stat it out as a CR5 monster, although for a group this large, a CR3 would probably be closer to what I'd use. Storm King's Thunder has an entirely adequate CR2 version, but it's a little weak tbh, especially since it's large... I'm sorry, a large sized monster should be packing some serious punch. That said, these minis are solidly medium - larger than a human, but they definitely couldn't be based on anything larger than a 30mm base like I used here. Their lack of limbs is a bit of a restriction in that way - ordinarily, a little bending and posing could have something this size on a 40mm base no problem, but it would leave them looking lost, especially the smaller one. That said, I like medium as a size category for larval wurms, so I'm happy with that - I feel like having them able to engulf a person fresh from the egg is a bit much. Maybe for a halfling or village child I'd pull those rules in. The super-deadly stinger and vicious bite will do for now... As a side note, I wish Barbarians had an ability, like Evasion for rogues, that turned con-for-half rolls into half-or-con-for-none rolls. I get that they get advantage instead, I just think it would be neat.

After finishing up my army of Purple Wurmlings from Otherworld last night, I decided to keep it chugging with some more of their minis today. I've had a fever for the last two days, and been home since I was throwing up, so these centipedes were a nice easy way to push through a couple more miniatures. And, conveniently, they let me beat my score for Most Productive Month Since Reapercon, bringing me up to a total of 46 painted and based miniatures for December so far - beating out the 41 I did in September! And I have a lot of miniatures to go... I grabbed two packs of these magnificent creepy crawlies. I wish I had grabbed a third - these were a delight to paint, and are going to be a fantastic encounter. Or probably several fantastic encounters - CR 1/4 creatures they may be, but the 3d6 poison damage they can do on a successful poison attempt means that they can be a lethal threat to party members up until level 3 or so, especially if they get a rogue or caster with bad con saves alone in a room for a few rounds. Action economy and blind luck can make Giant Centipedes a real threat, if used strategically... of course, with only 4hp, any hit's gonna kill them, so they really need a good set-up to really threaten people. In an open combat, you're gonna need at least 3-5x the people in the party to kill consistently, and at that point, it's just a CR-appropriate encounter. Notably, though, at first level a lucky hit could deal up to 24 damage, meaning a real good hit or most crits could kill a character outright by dealing double their HP in damage... The 2e Pathfinder one is interesting. It's around the equivalent monster level, and initially the damage looks worse, especially considering the way HP works in PF, but six rounds of poison will kill a 1st level player pretty consistently still. It's a rock-solid new-player monster in both systems, and I'm surprised it's not in more published beginner adventures. Painting these guys was a little tricky. The legs are too close together to get a brush into, so I had to get a bit creative. I started by painting the whole 'pede black after priming, then drybrushing the legs red. Then with a very fine brush graying the areas between the wide legs, leaving the other ones black. Then I painted the bodies red and hit the whole thing with my workhorse wash, Army Painter Soft, which gave the whole thing a sort of brown tint and shaded the scales pretty well. Some dotted eyes and a coat of 'ardcoat (glossy Citadel clearcoat) and I just had to base them up, which was easy - the bases on these are integral, and fit the 1" display bases I was using well enough to not bother GSing them - there's a .5mm ring around it, but not enough to be noticeable in anything except close-ups. I will say, I'm not sure why, but the greens and reds in these are both a little too saturated - both colors are a hair more brown in person. 'ardcoat is magical for insects/snakes/fish, though, I have to say - I very rarely use glosscoat, but every time I do it adds a ton of pop to the figure.

I finally got this bad boy on my painting desk. Went with the 'original' colorscheme. Really pleased how it came out.

So I painted these ogres originally in X, but with my rebasing spree they came up again. I don't have pictures of the originals anymore, but I redid most of the base. :) So old paintjob, new base work. Enjoy.

So... I finished painting my venomcult from Otherworld Miniatures! Woohooo! I intend to add cultists and venomous creatures from Reaper to this cult. I took, way, way, too many pictures. :) Behold!

This is the only mini I finished in December of 2016, but at least it was a larger figure.... Otherworld Miniatures Iron Golem (SKU DM32d) on a 2 inch diameter Reaper base. He is painted using mostly metallic paints.

So there is a cool Pathfinder Society scenario which features a awesome Otyugh. I offered to paint one for a friend. He had a plastic one from I think the D&D boardgame? I happened to have a Otherworld metal one laying around myself. So I painted them both up at once! :) I noticed that there is a bit of chipping on his left tentacle (his POV), I fixed that since I took the picture. :)

I finally found some time to setup my picture studio thingy again. Here are two lemures that my girlfriend got me for our annivesary (yes she is that great, she knows I like the minis!). She is trying to, in her words, 'keep me alive by making sure I never run out of things to paint'. I had a lot of fun layering these guys up. Great miniatures.

Big fan of these pig faced orcs. Its a welcome change from the usual gorilla type orcs.

This is a work in progress because I have the whole diorama. But the statue itself is really cool dungeon décor.

I’m working on finishing the rest of my Otherworld dungeon adventurers before the last part of the Indiegogo campaign and next in line was the Male Human Illusionist. There’s parts of him I’m pleased with and some I’m not. I could have worked more on the “skirt†and the face didn’t come together. On the other hand the figure has lots of small nicknacks that came out quite nicely.

This little guy have been sitting on my shelf basecoated and begging to be finished for about a year now. Since I’m focusing more on my metal miniatures this year, and focusing on getting them done, I picked this up and applied the finishing touches. At first I wasn’t happy at all. The whole paintjob just looked dirty. And not the good kind of “in a dungeon for a while†dirty, but just plain “sloppy paintjob†dirty. I didn’t manage to take it all the way but at the end I’m pretty satisfied with the result.

Here is a trio of unicorns from Otherworld Miniatures (Wilderness Encounters 19). The hedgehog is from 2969: Familiar Pack VIII.