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We've had some cool kitbashes on here lately, which got me to thinking about this guy I put together a few years ago. The head and arm are from an Oathmark dwarf sprue (with a mustache added to the face and a bead added to the top of the staff). The body is from some Star Wars miniature of the Emperor's Royal Guard. Not sure about the exact line (it was prior to the Legion stuff and originally had an oval base). If anyone knows the exact line, please clue me in. Anyway, I was going for a very archetypical wizard. I think I hit the mark (my working name for him is "Generico"). I do feel like he's got some personality, though. He seems like a stern old coot. I could definitely see him painted on the side of a sick 70's van.

The body is from a tehnolog roman and the arms, head and shield are from an oathmark dwarf infantry sprue! It was a very fun kitbash and a qucik paintjob 🙂 Thanks for looking!

The necrosis carnex is an undead creature from 3.5e located in monster manual 4. It’s similar to a flesh golem, being an amalgamation of several corpses with multiple limbs held together with cold iron bands. They also have the ability to unleash negative energy in order to heal undead allies and damage living creatures at the same time. I was also interested in this monster since it can be created by player characters, giving necromancers in an evil campaign new possibilities. The problem was that I’ve searched the internet all over and could not find a good miniature for it, so I decided to create my own instead. I started with some zombie miniatures, particularly miniatures 77342 and 77053. From here I cut up the body parts I needed. Doing this only used three of the 8 miniatures that came in the pack; however I was careful to avoid using pieces that had clothes covering the limbs or torso and tried to create the mini as accurate to the picture in the monster manual as I could. It is said that no two necrosis carnexes look the same so in theory one could make others using the pieces left over, in which case I think I could have made about 3 minis total from the two zombie packs. After this I glued all the limbs onto the torso as best as I could match the original image. I had to cut and re-glue several limbs to get the angles right so the mini would stand properly (I tried heating, shaping, and cooling first but found the limbs went to their original position too easily). I also attached some pieces of wire in order to create the ribcage on the front as well as some of the smaller limbs/attachments. After this I went to work with greenstuff. I filled in the gaps from where limbs were attached and smoothed out the flesh. I also created several strips that I laid over the top of the mini to create the iron bands that hold it together. Last I placed a few tiny rhinestones I had on the largest band to create giant rivets binding the metal to flesh. After this all that was left was to prime and paint the miniature. There are a few things that I would have done differently if I were to build this miniature again. First and foremost I would have cleaned all the flash off of the miniatures before doing any cutting. Trying to remove it from tiny hand and leg pieces was incredibly difficulty so having clean models to start would have saved a lot of time. Second, I would have added the greenstuff in two phases, letting all of the joint filler and body sculpt cure before adding the cold iron bands since this would have prevented the two parts from fusing and left more of a distinct seam between the two.

Hasslefree specializes in characterful badasses, and I thought it good to paint a few of them up like my merc Frank Russo. Meet the Major, Ekaterina, Rowen, Alex, and Tank, along with their previously posted colleagues: In several cases they have been modified or accessorized. My FLGS had some leftover GW Bitz they were kind enough to let me plunder, and between that, a GW scout walker's leftover bitz, and Bombshell tool sprues there were plenty of canisters and accessories to go around. Here is the Major. (Hasslefree designation Major Hoare.) I added the gas tanks and the hose to his weapon. One canister is pyrophoric, the other, an extinguisher. The Major is acutely aware of which is connected at all times. I assume the cigar is a futuristic electronic device, for that would be most unsafe otherwise. Ekaterina appears to be one of Hasslefree's analogues to Black Widow. I added some canisters and a Bombshell machete. Rowen here really sold me on this project. Love that dynamic and confident stroll, and the flippy hairstyle. They are very secure in who they are, even more so with a portable GW missile strapped to their back. Alex has access to guns and grenades but prefers sharp blades. [This mini, unlike his colleagues, comes in like six pieces; pin and glue accordingly.] And of course there is Tank. Tank is not Hasslefree, but rather a leftover GW scout walker pilot. I've posted in the past about diversity in minis, and resolved to follow through on that by giving him a souped-up wheelchair/personal mobility device with some extra bells and whistles. Tank sees your wheelchair-inaccessible stairs and is prepared to turn them into an accessible ramp of smoking rubble. GW parts plus parts from a toy car I found under a refrigerator. And lastly, a repaint of Bombshell's Maelee, to get her in line with the Task Force dress code. Also added a couple pouches and canisters. Together they make a formidable team, good for spacefuture or cyberpunk settings. What sorts of mayhem mightn't they get up to...for the right price, of course?

I combined parts from various minis, had a lot of fun freehand painting the shield

So this is my first complete kitbash, this one is made of parts from five different kits. I've made it to be used as a ranger for my Rangers of Shadowdeep warband. Hope you like it! With the rest of the gang:

I had some fun putting together some Stormcloak and Imperial proxies. The official minis that are being produced for the Elder Scrolls look really cool but aren't in the scale I use. The Stormcloaks are fireforge Russian infantry heads and usually Frostgrave barbarian arms and bodies. The legionaries are fireforge Russian bodies with victrix roman heads (apart from the archer whose head is from the Oathmark humans sprue). There is also a victim of theft entirely made from the Fireforge peasants sprue.

I'd got some of the Warlord imperial roman legionnaires free with a magazine. They are tiny for 28mm, with minis like the Oathmark dwarves towering over them. I've used the minis for spare parts but took an Oathmark goblin wolf rider head to make this heavy hobgoblin or goblin infantryman. The kit was a 'roman veterans' one with heavier armour and more battered shields than the more prevalent getup of a roman legionnaire. The paint job took about 30 mins ex drying times. A dark grey primer, drybrush of metal parts with Scale 75 black metal, skin with Scale 75 sandalwood, Vallejo dark red or chocolate brown details, then an all over Vallejo black wash. Think I will make more of these.

I made this model at a Reaper Bones make & take at Historicon 2015(?). I really enjoyed making him and thought he turned out well and had plans to paint him one day......and then the Secret Sophie came along and my recipient wanted a cool monster or creature and I thought this model fit the bill in spades. The main model I used is KAGUNK, OGRE CHIEFTAIN (https://www.reapermini.com/search/ogre/latest/77105), armed with a demonic looking whip, using a sarcophagus lid as a shield (https://www.reapermini.com/search/crypt/latest/77137), legs from...something (gryphon maybe), spines from a small dragon, and some various heads as trophies around his waist. I decided to name him Takzez and have given him two brief write ups - one as a bad guy and one as a good guy. However, I do want to have the receiver to have something to himself and he can let me know later if he'd like me to share that info or not later. But in the meantime, here he is. Apologies for the photos, I rushed as it is already late. I do wish I'd had more time to work on his skin and legs, although the skin turned out tons better than my first attempt at it. Oh wow, I am going to hit that inner bottom corner on the shield with a was a few times before I send it. C&C welcome!

2nd attempt at creating a steam-punk elephant-women mad-scientist, representing a PC in a game I am running. Since such a model does not exist I made one. It consists of the following parts: The base model I had printed through HeroForge I pinched the cables and coils from a warmachines model I found on ebay. Finished it off with some lightning I had laying around from the previous attempt (I think it was creating action figure dioramas, but I have thrown out the packaging long ago). Nothing on the model is Reaper, but I painted it with Reaper Paints. I had a lot of fun trying out all kinds of configurations with poster tack until settling on this combination for the rigging. The only thing it is missing is her faction symbol on the shield, but I wasn't sure how to make a stencil small enough. If any has any technique for adding coat of arms to a models, outside of trying to free hand it, I would to hear it. Here are a few pictures. The other model is for scale, and is just what I had handy.

I was recently introduced to the post-apocalyptic car game Gaslands, and while I still haven't played any games yet, kitbashing these cars is just so much fun.With that, I give you my first finished car, the scrutable Razorback.

Bit of a kitbash here. The chap with the spear is from Alternative Armies. The others are a mix of Warlord orc heads (previously Wargames Factory) with two frostgrave arms and bodies, one Oathmark goblin, and one Oathmark dwarf heavy infantryman. Have managed to get a really quick palette going for speed painting orcs. I prime them by brush with Vallejo dark grey primer, then use Scale 75 black metal for the armour, Vallejo hammered copper for decoration and metal details, dark red for cloth and dark brown for leather. The skin is Vallejo Model Colour Heavy Warm Grey. Then the whole model gets a black ink wash and I pick out teeth etc in light grey. These models took about 90 minutes altogether, ex drying time.

A friend of mine recently received a bunch of resin minis he'd ordered from Brother Vinni (of Russia) last year. He sent the bulk of them off to someone else to be professionally painted, but he had a few left over that he was willing to let me give a go at. The intent was to paint these up as Fallout miniatures, as (great minds think alike!) my friend has been interested in running a Fallout-themed game. (I think originally he was going to do something at GenCon or some other big game convention like that, but the minis ended up getting here a year late.) A large part of my work consisted of just trying to assemble the things. They're resin figures, highly detailed, without the disfiguring bubbles that have characterized certain expensive resin figures I've dealt with in the past. The resin is slightly flexible but delicate, prone to a lot of flash (very filmy), and there are lots of parts. The "Mr. Gutsy" robot knock-off was the worst, at 9 parts (3 delicate arms, 3 delicate eye-stalks, main body, lower body, and flight rod), so I've set that aside to work on much later, once I've tackled the bulk of the figures and can feel as if I've made some sort of progress. The female figures are challenging, as the limbs are very thin, granting very little surface area for pinning their arms to the body (and OF COURSE the arms had to be separate pieces). These troopers (scafrifle & scafgatling) from Brother Vinni's "Nuclear Sandlot" line look blatantly like the Brotherhood of Steel in the Fallout series of games. For "scafrifle," parts consist of main body, 2 arms, 2 shoulder pads, and head. The weapon is a pretty clear attempt to represent the laser rifle from Fallout. One was missing a shoulder pad (far left), so I faked one with putty, but I couldn't quite manage to duplicate the "tab" with the hole through it ... so I guess this fellow had some "battle damage." Minor pose variants are possible since the head and arms are separate pieces, so one could get several of these guys to form the bulk of a Brotherhood of Steel force. I ended up adding some small bits of wire (not shown) to the top of the laser rifle for the final version in order to make it look just a little more like the game model. For "scafgatling," parts consist of main body, left arm, laser-gatling (recognizably patterned after the game model), helmet, backpack unit, and 2 shoulder pads (though these are slightly smaller for some reason than those used for "scafrifle" rather than just using the same ones over). Although the backpack unit has a bump that's apparently meant to fit into a hole in the figure's back, it didn't fit for either model, and I had to shave it off in order to glue the pieces on. Aside from which way to face the head, there really isn't much possibility for posing, since it's a two-hand weapon and one arm is fused with the body, but this is supposed to be a "support weapon" anyway, so I figure one could get by with just one for a squad. (Well, apparently TWO, but I didn't make the ordering decisions here.) The gatling gun and left arm assembly is especially clumsy, as there's nowhere for the gun to rest against, and the left hand didn't seem to line up quite right with the presumed location of the "handle." A tiny crumb of putty in the gap between gun and leg is helpful to give glue an anchor point. Brother Vinni's "veteran" looks like nothing so much as the iconic NCR Ranger depicted on the cover of "Fallout: New Vegas." The figure comes with an empty right hand, and a left hand holding an SMG, yet the bag also included a sprue with two revolver hands (one right, one left), making for an easy conversion to get the figure to hold the Sequoia pistol that's a mark of the NCR Rangers. ... Okay, not REALLY so easy after all, as the hands of the figure have protective wrist guards, so I ended up having to chop off the empty hand at a slight angle, and do the same for the replacement gun hand to get it to mesh and look at all right, and pinning the tiny hand and wrist was a very delicate operation. Brother Vinni's "sniper" looks very, very Fallout-ish ... but for the life of me, I can't actually place just what this guy is supposed to represent. This figure comes with a small backpack/ammo pack that's optional (and I considered NOT adding it, because the back texture of the armor is fairly interesting), and likewise the two tiny shoulder pads with the figure could just as well be left off and he'd still look great. I'm just painting him up as some sort of generic "mercenary" type without any particular faction insignia. The three guys to the left are the "Nuclear Adventurers" (n-adve), and come as a group. There are no instructions, and it's a slight puzzle to match up which weapon arms go with which figure (as two of them have two-handed weapons, and there's only one way to arrange them so the wrists line up properly). I really like the figures (yay, gas masks!), and they nicely capture the look and feel of Fallout adventurers or raiders or generic adversaries, without being blatant property rip-offs. (It helps that they actually have backpacks, knapsacks, and other indications of inventory that are often woefully lacking on representations of typical PC types. "Where do you keep that thing, little buddy?") Oh yeah, and at some point I ran out of 1" diameter washers, so I ended up using a few 25mm round plastic bases instead. I ended up using Instant Mold and some impressions of terrain bits to make "rusty techno-plating" and "cracked earth" textures for bases -- plus to give myself enough of a layer to drill into for pinning the feet down of the minis. In a few cases, I was able to keep enough of the resin "flash" on the bottoms of feet to embed them into putty (if it was still uncured at the time I started assembling), but most of the time it was easier to just drill and pin. For a few figures, I added threads of putty (for cables), bits of sprue (for misc. techno/junk thingies), or whatever other bits I had lying about, for variety. The rightmost figure in the picture is a more generic power-armor (or "armour") trooper, though his face plate looks suspiciously reminiscent of the Enclave. (The odd thing is, Brother Vinni already has a blatant Enclave rip-off in the form of the "Ant Soldier," so if that was the intent, why not just go ahead and add the antennae/head-cables and make it official?) Due to the similarity, I'm painting him up in dark armor and going for Enclave imagery. I haven't yet resolved as to whether or not I'm going to attempt adding a couple of loops of cable to the top of the helmet for the full Enclave look. This figure was actually much easier to assemble than the "scafgatling" figure: the gatling and attached hands notched into place with the arms fairly easily, and the backpack fit in place properly. The tiny shoulderpads were (as with scafrifle & scafgatling) a challenge to trim from the sprue properly, but even they fit a little more easily on the shoulders. I suspect this must be a later sculpt, building upon experience with the earlier ones. Lastly, my friend picked up two "Hooligan Girls" (hool01, hool02) from Brother Vinni's "Action Girls" line (most of which are NSFW). These were among the rare models actually bothering to wear clothes while leaping into combat, although they didn't look particularly appropriate for a post-apocalyptic setting. The one on the left came with the SMG and brass knuckles, but I opted to give it a gas mask and neck-strap via some putty, for more of a nuclear-wasteland-survivor vibe. The middle one came with a baseball bat and an empty left hand, but I used the leftover left-hand pistol from the Nuclear Sandlot "veteran" figure so both Hooligan Girls would have short-range-and-melee options. Both figures consisted of main body (with head attached), with two separate arms (joined mid-arm, at their shirt sleeves), so there's some very slight posing possibility by varying the positions of their arms ... and I suppose the arms might be interchangeable between the two Hooligan Girl figures for a little more variety if building a "gang." The one on the right is one of another 3-figure set from the Nuclear Sandlot, billed as "Post-Apocalyptic Citizens," and they rather blatantly look like Fallout vault-dwellers. (A view of the back would make that even more obvious, as the back of the belt has the "Vault-Tec" look from Fallout 3 & New Vegas ... though that particular aspect didn't seem to show up in the Fallout 4 vault-dweller jumpsuit design for some reason.) The rifle arm and left hand (holding binoculars) are separate pieces, but there's no room for alternate-posing without some conversion work. The right left is slightly bent, with the foot resting upon a stone, and that was pretty easily incorporated into the base. Overall, the figures are of fairly nice quality. I'm a bit put off that it took as long as it did for the figures to actually be delivered, and that there was a part missing, but they're nicely detailed. Assembly was a bit fiddly, but since it was resin, it was nowhere near the nightmare I had when trying to assemble pewter boutique minis for a friend (e.g., Relic Knights "Kisa" with those super-thin multi-part ARMS -- what sadistic person decided to break up the mini THERE?!?).

I am running a D&D game with my friends using the new Ravnica setting. The world has a very unique look, and one of the player characters in our group is an steampunk/elephant-man/mad-scientist. I couldn't find any miniatures remotely resembling that, so I made my own out of a reaper Avatar of Strength and some warmachines loose pieces I got on ebay for cheap. I have never done any kitbashing or sculpting before (just made it up as I went along) but I feel it turned out pretty cool (even though I am pretty lousy painter). Couldn't wait to show it off a little here, even though the lighting is really bad in here at night for pictures. Painted with all the cheap Reaper HD I picked-up during the sale. Question, comments, feed-back appreciated.

Reading the thread below gave me the idea to organize a friendly 'KitBash' competition. Something like... everyone chooses a CAV and converts it in some meaningful way. Competition runs for a calendar month. We post a before and after image and then @CAVBOSS picks the winner(s). Just something fun to do really... Any interest...? Now that the CAV Secret Santa is winding down I'd be happy to manage the little bit of 'admin' the contest would require. J--

Merry Christmas all! That's the American version of English, and is what most of us around here will hear this holiday season. However, My Mother is Swedish, and over there, they say "God Jul" (Pronounced Good Yule) Lot's of the pagan traditions of Yule still in the Swedish Christmas Traditions... I know that there are other people who hang out here whose native language is not English, and others like me that have family traditions that likely include using the old home tongue, so I would like to know what some of them are! Post away, and let us know where from, and what Language! George

Well, I decided to finally throw my hat in here, and use this forum to help me get serious about this work. When CAV KS fulfilled core set, I got 2 partial kits, that reaper was awesome about replacing with complete ones...however, this left me me with some spare parts. This is what I have to work with so far: All I got so far is to dismantle the little arm, take the gun portion to add to the body of the unit elsewhere, and the pentagon type piece to bulk up the underside of the torso. It will likely still be a chicken-walker style, but a little beefier...not sure where else I'm going from there. SO! Blindly forward!