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At last, a return to Berton and Bradbury's Magic Circus! Send in the CLOWNS! These are a pack of four untrustworthy chucklemongers from CP Miniatures, plus a fifth CP harlequin done by a different sculptor and sold separately. The special one I painted using inspiration from a Joseph Grimaldi poster. He's got a monkey! I painted that as a golden snub-nosed monkey, as those are among the most clown-faced of the monkeys. This is a clearly a clown in command, second only to the ringmaster. Other clowns will jump through hoops for him, sometimes even metaphorically. Next up, Fumbo! This clown may (MAY) actually have no other motive than entertaining children. Cheerful and bearing a honkable horn. On the other hand, those teeth look awfully sharp. We also have great clown Pagliacci, very funny clown. If you suffer from depression and want to end it all, Pagliacci can help. Bumpus the Stooge! Bumpus was inspired by Ed Kelly's hobo-clown look, dialed up a bit. Carries a shovel at the end of the parade. Astute observers will note that Bumpus's pink complexion is all makeup. He is a true clown, not just pretending. And here's Bogo! Inspiration should be obvious for this one. I might modify that upraised hand with some balloons. A group shot of the whole carload: And with all the clowns, including Reaper and Brigade Games: More angles:

Made up my mind long ago that I should paint A CIRCUS. I've had 50124 (Merlock the Magnificent) and 50125 (Yvette, Magician's Assistant) for a while, and also one of the Killer Clowns (50247, Zonkers). And then I found a sheet of red-and-white Big Top striped paper, and a few other things from other sources, and The Addiction set in. Here's what I've got so far: Sarastro the Mentalist there is from Black Cat, and the lady in the Romany garb is a Nolzur's dancer that comes with the barmaid. The orb was from Nolzur's Wizard's study set dressing, and you've already met Cole Stoker, the Pulp Minis stevedore. (Every circus needs roustabouts, especially ones with shovels.) BUT IT WASN'T ENOUGH. IT WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH. A circus needs: -a ringmaster (50277) -MORE CLOWNS (02216, Kosmo) -a sinister knife-thrower (50012, Jack the Ripper) -acrobats (50169, Lady Tiger--there weren't any acrobats under the Circus tag, but if you want spandex and eye-catching costumes, you go Superheroes) -fire-eaters/daredevils (50196, Devil Girl; she would also work in a Weird West game) -animal tamers (coulda used a pith-helmeted pulp explorer, but 50041 has a whip and a sweet costume) -a strongman (50273, Herq) And I also picked up 50121, Dr. VooDoo, because top hat, theatrics, and magic fit in well with the themes I've got. Had some wooden discs for targets (the half-assed paint job is on purpose, such as an underpaid clown might slap on with a very wide brush). I'll also make some cotton candy and fried food stalls, inspired by this: http://carmensminiaturepainting.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-i-made-hotdog-stand-for-my-pulp.html Decided to make Zonkers the "friendly" clown and Kosmo the "horrifying Grimaldi/Pagliacci" clown. My order arrived with a sample of deep midnight/cobalt blue that was perfect. So far, this is ArmyPainter True Red, that reaper-sample blue, white, and black. Devil Girl is also done in Reaper's Cinnamon Red (my go-to for tieflings.) The Plan (advice and C&C welcome): Jack, I think, will be grey pinstripes, including the top hat, the top of which is a target. Firefox the Animal Tamer: Brown whip, redhead, pale skin, fox-orange costume Lady Tiger: I would give her tiger stripes, but don't want to step on the orange territory too much, so yellow cheetah/leopard pattern perhaps? Ringmaster: Seeking advice on the trousers. White? Pale khaki? YELLOW? Stripe down the side, of course. Dr. VooDoo: Straightforward brown skin, yellowed grass skirt, going to try to paint skull-and-ribcage makeup on him Kosmo: that lollipop. Advice welcome. Rainbow, heavy on yellow? Peppermint? Continue his terrifying color scheme? Herq: I feel like he needs horizontal stripes on the tank top. Red or blue? Devil Girl: Also torn. I don't want that duster to be black (thinking probably tan, for the Hellboy resonance?) but that bustier is what's perplexing me. Come with me on this journey into calliope-sounding, popcorn-scented MADNESS!

A free mini of the month and some clowns and acrobats from Brigade Games should just about round out my Bradbury & Barton's Magic Circus project. First up, Bonzo the Killer Klown (50245)! This clown comes with several options: a kindly head, a terrifying head, a bicycle horn, and a giant cleaver. Since I already have a clown of kindly aspect (Zonkers, 50247), I went with the monstrous face and the plausible-deniability honk-horn. Look, we all know this is a murder-clown feeding on the terror of children, and that hankie is definitely attached to several yards of colorful but chloroformed rags. The cleaver is just gilding the lily. (plus, a lot more useful for future kitbashes than the bicycle horn, which is highly situational at best.) Next up, Happy the Clown, from Brigade Games' 'Barnwell's Circus' line! This is a friendly clown. Added some pin balloons to complete his ensemble. Never take anything a clown offers from its pants. This is a lesson most of us know instinctively, and others learn only once. Also from Brigade Games Barnwell's, here is the Tall Man! This one was fun to paint. I lost count around the sleeves, but I'm pretty sure the jacket has a pulp-era-appropriate 48 stars. The pant stripes look more uneven than they are due to the wrinkled trousers. What better place than the Saturnalian anarchy of the carnival to depict Uncle Sam as a world-bestriding clown? And lastly, again from Brigade but this time from the Cheshire Circus, the harlequin contortionist! Forgive the paint job; I'll probably repaint her in a year or two with thinner paints and crisper lines. The ball is my own addition, but it seemed to fit. All the clowns, including Zonkers and Cosmo: And the whole Circus, all of whom have been posted before under the "circus" tag at one point or another:

A delightful sculpt, this Devil Girl, Supervillain (50196). She works as a super, a pulp villain, a Weird West devil, a temptress, and in this case, as a pyrotechnician and performer! Any circus is better off for a fire-eater and stuntperson, especially with flame-colored boots and a gold-sequined bustier. I decided to go with a tan coat for the Hellboy resonance, and tried to make it look good and scorched around the edges. Also tried to make that flame in her hand shed some yellow light on that side. The cat knocked over a bottle of black paint onto the flocked paper I'm using for circus turf, and this worked out very nicely after cleanup! Good job, cat, despite your best efforts.

Berton & Bradbury bills itself as a MAGIC circus, so let's see a couple of fortune-tellers and mystics! The lady--Mme Zaragossa, the Sybil of Syracuse--is from the Nolzur's pack with the barmaid. The headscarf and dress looked vaguely Roma, so I decided to take that and run with it. And a pack of Deep Cuts wizard accessories I had gotten for the books and bottles included a crystal ball, so this was an easy choice! She refuses to clarify if the Syracuse she hails from is Greece or New York. Can she actually predict the future? For player characters, absolutely. The gentleman--Dr. Desmond Mesmer, Mentalist Extraordinaire--is from Black Cat's Civillians and Townsfolk line. He has a great worried expression. Maybe he's picking up on a hostile, and equally powered, intellect? The hypno-eidetic phantasms of his Zoeotropic Chresmodeon won't fool anyone with ACTUAL knowledge of the future! Or perhaps that oddly enthusiastic volunteer placed something from Mesmer's deeply-buried past in the lead-lined Box of Secrecy.

"AND HIGH UPON THE WIRE ABOVE YOU, ladiesangennlemen, prepared to make a leap of certain doom to all but the most skilled acrobats and trapeze artists, Ailura the Fearless Cat-Woman! BORN and subsequently ORPHANED on an ill-fated expedition up the turbid Amazon, then RAISED by JAGUARS, YES-ladiesangennlemen-you-heard-me-correctly-there-I-DID-say JAG-U-ARS, she learned to leap from branch to vine before she could WALK! Discovered and rescued by a team of scientists, several of whom PERISHED IN THE ATTEMPT, she has the instincts and body of a FERAL CAT of the DEEPEST JUNGLE! No man or woman born and raised in our civilization would be capable of such DIZZYING and VERTIGINOUS AERIAL DISPLAYS, such PRECIPITOUS PLUNGES!" (In reality, "Ailura" was born in a small town in Nebraska and raised by reasonably competent human parents. A remarkable flair for gymnastics coupled with a total lack of opportunity and scope for those talents meant it was this or the burlesque stage. And in the circus you get to travel the country, get a lot more air-time, and you have the World's Strongest Man to back you up if a drunken patron starts getting too close.) My god, what a dynamic sculpt! Such a forward sprint, such kinetic drive! I think only Zenith (50080, Not!Captain America) comes close to it. I need to get another copy and put tiger stripes on her.

"STEP right up, ladiesangennlemen, to BEHOLD Herq the Turk, the modern world's greatest student of physical culture! From the Bosporus, standing six foot six in his socks and weighing TWO hundredan'sixty-three pounds NONE of it fat, a Hercules or Gargantua for the twentieth century, with a neck thicker than a normal man's waist and a chest LIKE A BRICK OVEN! He's got an arm like a leg, and a punch that could SINK A BATTLESHIP! Watch him bend IRON BARS as though they were WAX! Watch him juggle kettlebells no other man could LIFT! His very MUSCLES have muscles!" 50273 is a whimsical sculpt, bald as an egg and with mustachios that would make Poirot weep with envy. Looks like Stieg Brinegrog's (03627) brother who's taken care of his waistline. I did the weights up in ArmyPainter Rough Iron mixed with a touch of black, and decided on slimming vertical stripes on the shorts and horizontal stripes on the tank top, so as to deceive the eye into seeing him as even bulkier. Of course, on a canvas like this, you gotta add some shoulder, back, and chest hair. The sight of him shirtless is "STRONGLY contraindicated for children, ladies prone to the vapors, or gentlemen of nervous disposition, and attendants ARE on hand to remove those audience members who faint at the sight of SO MUCH MAN!!"

"STEP right up, ladiesangentlemen: come one, come all to the BERTON & BRADBURY MAGIC CIRCUS, home to the greatest-collection-of-esoteric-practitioners-the-world-has ever SEEN! WITNESS feats of legerdemain and sorcery beyond the grasp of mortal men! Be AMAZED by the death-defying stunts of our dexterous daredevil divas! MARVEL at the FREAKS OF NATURE collected-at-no-small-expense-to-purse-or-lifeanlimb from all corners of the earth! SEE the jaw-dropping power of the World's Strongest Man! GASP in awe at the lovely Beast-Tamer, who TOYS with RAVENOUS CARNIVORES as though they were but FEEBLE PUPS AND KITTENS! LAUGH at the antics of our inexhaustible supply of CLOWNS! Test your STRENGTH, try your LUCK, win fantastic PRIZES, yesSIR the world is YOURS at the CIRCUS!" Any pulp or fantasy game can benefit from a travelling circus which may or may not be (it will be) involved in sinister plots. For fantasy, you've got bards, wizards, knife-throwing rogues, beasts, illusionists, and diviners to contend with; and the circus as cultural institution probably peaked during the pulp era and the formative years of midcentury science-fiction/weird/horror authors. Ray Bradbury, for one, is almost obsessed with circus themes, and you'll find them in Leiber, Lafferty, Simak, and (perhaps a bit on the nose here,) Barker. In more recent times, our most circus-intense artist is easily Tim Burton, and the Bartons from Marvel Comics (Clint and Barney) are also deeply tied to the circus. Hence the names I picked for this latest project: the Chronoscope carnival, the Magic Circus. Here's the Ringmaster, Clive. (50277). A magnificently theatrical and over-the-top figure, stout and boastful. The elephant was, I think, a Schleich elephant calf which I modified with some paper accessories and paint. And here are some CLOWNS! Kosmo, the Killer Clown (02216, Dark Heaven Legends, needs to be tagged with the Circus tag btw.), is a scary little fellow. Horrible grin, horrible face, that giant lollipop can't be sanitary. Every circus needs a clown with a Fear aura (to keep the children in line). Zonkers (50247), comes with two heads and multiple accessories. Instead of the horrible scarecrow head I elected to use the friendlier one. He's the happy clown. The mallet is for the Test your Strength! High-Striker game. Mostly. And here's a shot including a Pulp Miniatures Drunk (from the Gangland Justice: 16th Precinct set) doubling as a sad-hobo clown. More to come!

Putting some of the magic into the Magic Circus! This sculpt (50121) is listed as a supervillain, but so over-the-top are the stereotypes and tropes that I would feel uncomfortable fielding him as an antagonistic bokor using the Petra or Rada for evil. Weirdly, though, I feel no such compunctions about using him as a purposely exaggerated showman fleecing corn-fed rubes out of their dimes with a flashy act. Prohibition-era yokels would eat that right up (and of course, there's probably a side racket going on involving rum. For ceremonial purposes only, of course.) And tabletop games being what they are, who's to say some Friends on the Other Side won't come a-calling uninvited when the player characters show up?

Every circus needs an animal trainer act, and while I could have done the standard pith-helmeted explorer-type, FireFox, Female Super Hero (50041) here has a sweet costume *and* a whip. (Besides beastmastery and superhero work, this gal would also make a good luchador.) Decided I'd do well to follow the sculptor's intent and kept a fox color scheme. That works well with red hair, and red hair works well with green eyes and pale skin. The costume itself is incredibly low-cut and with lapels that would make Jack Kirby proud. Will that scandalous cleavage get unwanted attention from the coarser elements of the crowd? Probably; but she has a small army of beasts at her command, AND a whip. And it sells tickets. The bear is a Nolzur/Wizkids beast, as are the panthers.

The knife-throwing is a staple of traveling circuses, and hoo boy if Reaper's Jack the Ripper (50012) isn't the best carnival blade-hucker I've encountered. Look at that spindly frame, that ludicrous top-hat! Look at that gaunt smile--the smile of JOB SATISFACTION. He is here to put knives EXACTLY where he wants them to go, while keeping the audience guessing at just how sane and in-control he is. Our boy here would definitely be played by Doug Jones in the live-action remake. And any knife-throwing act is improved by a good-looking assistant to imperil! Yvette, Magician's Assistant (50125) fits the bill splendidly. I used pencil for the fishnet stockings. She's a good Zatanna-esque figure and radiates showmanship. The targets are wooden discs I slapped paint on and stabbed with a knife to make them look used. One of them has some painted-over bloodstains. Mister Stabbs is a professional, so don't think it was an accident.

well, the sun came out (still raining, but the sun is bright. I love this country) So i was able to get some decent pictures of my lady. Comment, critiques, cash and checks all gladly accepted.