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I bought a gross of small dinosaurs online a while back for conversion fodder. They turned out to be made of Bonesium, so you PVC enthusiasts might be interested. @BlazingTornado tagging you because you make a lot of SCS Direct / Wicked Duals posts. @Glitterwolf tagging you because at least two of the tags fit your interests. We'll start with a scale shot. The base, tack, and saddle bags are all Magic Sculpt. The tentage up top is small strips of old t-shirt soaked in PVA glue (get it wet first) and rolled up. The beast is probably a bit overloaded, but I wanted to convey its cargo-carrying nature with, well, cargo. Important takeaways: Magic Sculpt and other epoxies DO NOT STICK to Bonesium. They do stick to themselves, which means that the saddle girth isn't entirely decorative - be sure to properly cinch it. PVA sticks to Magic Sculpt if you have a big contact area. Shown next to the original recipe. These critters come glued to a plain square base that's easy enough to pop off. The pegs are a good place to run some florist wire or other structural enhancement between the feet to hold the pegs in the sculpted base. The base is an old school cavalry base shape - it's half of a circle on each end with a straight insert equal to the circle's diameter. 3" x 1.5" just to mess with your grid. I normally cut bases out of food packaging cardboard and lay Magic Sculpt on top of that. It was textured with a broccoli base, making the texture inverse broccoli (which surprisingly does not result in either dessert or chicken nuggets). I painted him up as a reticulated giraffe because a( giraffes are fun and b( the reticulated pattern is actually a lot more forgiving than a solid brown or grey would be.

So I've been at grandma's after new year's eve and found a bunch of these metal kinder surprise toys. Scale-vise they are around 28mm heroic, so I've decided to give them a quick speedpaint, using some dollar-store acrylic paint and brushes :D, I wonder if they will look any good on the table during play :) Next to a bones orc

Now, MOST of us have a clue where the monsters came from, at least in a rudimentary sense. Tolkien invented the orc as we know it, and the giant spider in fantasy; Robert E. Howard seemed to have a thing for giant snakes. We know that centaurs came from ancient Greece, dwarves and trolls from Scandinavian myth, goblins from Western Europe, dragons from more or less everywhere, and so on. No, don't correct me; I'm bein' general here, and approaching a point. I'm kinda curious, though: Where'd some of the weirdier critters come from? It is legend among the Gamers and the Geekosphere about the bulette, the owlbear, and the rust monster. The legend has it that Gary Gygax, or perhaps Dave Arneson, back when The Game was just getting off the ground, had difficulty finding miniatures to represent various dungeon denizens. Keep in mind that historical miniatures, at the time, were relatively easy to find, (Knights, Archers, Men At Arms, and characters in general) but fantasy gaming as we know it did not yet exist. No mythological monsters! So Gary or Dave, or whoever... cheated. And several inhabitants of the first edition (and later) Monster Manual had some rather peculiar origins. In the picture, at center front, you see what became the Bulette, whereas to the left, there's a Rust Monster and to the right, an Owlbear in brilliant yellow. In the seventies, you could get these critters in bags in the dime store or on a spinrack in the drugstore, anywhere that sold cheap toys from no-name manufacturers. They were usually marked as dinosaurs, but this particular mob resembles no known prehistoric creatures; the majority of them seem to be knockoffs of monsters from Japanese TV shows like Ultraman, Spectreman, and other ancestors of the Power Rangers. Gary himself spoke about using plastic dinos in lieu of dragons, and the AD&D Monster Manual has the majority of dinos known to pop culture as of 1975. So Gary noticed them at the dime store, bought a bag, and pitted them against his players. And these three creatures became the dreaded Rust Monster, Bulette, and Owlbear, as well as becoming obscure but treasured collectors items among the lords of geekdom. Which means that all the owlbear miniatures being made right now are all because of a cheap Taiwanese knockoff toy based on a man in a suit monster who appeared on a Japanese kidshow back in the sixties. Or seventies. Or whatever. It could be that this thread will be doomed to obscurity. I rather hope not. I'm hoping that others will add to it with critters that started out as obscure toys that later achieved a sort of immortality as modern gaming mythology. Do add to it. I'm still more'n a little curious.

So I was at this store where they're selling off Skylanders toys at a steep discount... like a buck or two each. And I got to looking at this angry looking tree... I found that it had much in common with Jason Wiebe's "Spirit of the Forest." But bigger. Regrettably, it was painted to resemble a sort of World of Warcraft Pokemon. And so I bought a couple and began an experiment...

Here are some old models I have gotten some more life out. The heroclix figs. I bought for like .15 cents each (the girls I think were .50 each) I rebased them and dry-brushed them... . I also have some mageknight desert warbirds that I repainted as terror birds. And an alligator and croc from the kids toy box...

A thing I remember very well is the day my grandmother took me to see Harvey the Choo Choo Man. I believe I was eight or nine at the time. Harvey was a fellow my grandmother had worked with, but now he was retired, and was in his mid sixties, and she'd asked if she could bring her grandson to come see the model trains. Harvey was agreeable, and one day while I was visiting, we went to go spend an hour or so with Mr. Harvey, or The Choo Choo Man as his friends sometimes called him. I wasn't real anticipatory. I'd seen toy trains before. Whoopee. And life had conditioned me to expect that spending any amount of time in the presence of the Ancient Ones was going to be an exercise in teeth gritting boredom, varied only in the amount of time one was expected to sit quietly and smile and be a pleasant child while the Ancient Ones rattled on about ancient and dusty matters of no interest to a child. Sure, grandparents were great at THEIR place, but watch the hell out if they wanted to take you somewhere and show you off... Well, I was wrong. Harvey the Choo Choo Man couldn't decide if he liked HO or O scale... so he had an entire room in his house dedicated to each. He'd built great plywood tables with a control center in the middle of each with ENORMOUS model train layouts, scaled and accurate to the leaves falling off the tiny trees. He was one of those guys who'd picked up a copy of a model railroading magazine, and thought, "Yes, I could devote entire paychecks to this." In the hour or so we visited, I mostly stood in various places with my mouth hanging open. Harvey found this terribly amusing, and from time to time would move me to a different place and show me a different aspect of a layout... the cargo cars that actually dumped their cargo into cargo trucks... this one automobile that would actually drive around the block, controlled by a little doohickey in his Control Center in the middle of the table... this one area in the park where he had a little family where Mom and Dad were laying out a picnic blanket, with a baby in a basket nearby, while Dick and Jane kicked a ball around... It was all very detailed, and extremely impressive. I'd never seen anything like it before. I was quite stunned, and remember being impressed to the point where I was unable to think clearly, and fell back on Polite Grownup Default for communications... "Yes sir. Thank you, sir. Wow, this is neat, sir." It wasn't quite what I wanted to say, but I was quite sure my grandmother wouldn't be happy if I said what was really on my mind: "Holy [expletive deleted,] sir, this is [obscene adjective deleted][obscene gerund deleted] amazing! What line of work were you IN that allows you to spend this kind of money on cool [expletive deleted] that no sane adult would normally waste his spare scratch on?" For a grand conclusion, he had me stand in the control center in the HO room and slowly turn a knob to the right. As I did so, the lights grew dim... and dimmer... and a constellation of Christmas lights slowly lit up on the ceiling... and the streetlights came on... and the houses' interiors lit. When the knob finally quit turning, it was nighttime in HO land, complete with one house that had an odd flicker to its lights; if you bent down and looked, you'd see that he'd rigged a little blinky light behind a tiny TV set in a tiny living room, so it looked like the TV was flickering. Glance to your right, and you'd see a similar effect in another living room... but in red. In a tiny fireplace. I admit it; I was blown away. Later, on the way home, I was able to shake enough of the awe out of my skull to ask my grandmother some questions. "So... what line of work was he in that let him spend all that money on toys?" She told me. "And no one thinks he's weird or anything?" "He's a grownup," my grandmother said. "He's a successful person, he had a career, and now he's retired. No one can tell him ANYTHING, so long as he doesn't break the law." "And it's okay if he plays with toys?" "He's earned it." And that was the day I got ruined. When I discovered that grownups could play with toys all they wanted, so long as they paid their own bills and stayed the hell out of jail? That's the day I became the man I am today. Or at least, the day I got started. That was the day my future changed... the day my possibilities of respectability in Proper Society ceased to be. The day I realized I didn't have to jam a stick up there when I turned 21. The day I realized that adulthood is not a function of age, or vice versa. The day I realized my freedom. I can play with toys all I want, and if you don't like it, you can all go t'hell! And now, the break is over, and I'm going to go paint some Cthulhu rats...

http://www.amazon.com/Snap-Cubes-Set-Of-100/dp/B000G3LR9Y I got a decent number of these things and I'm trying to brainstorm some ideas for them besides just Sci-fi crates. They work well for crate, especially if you plug the holes with something from the jewelry findings isle. Anyone got suggestions or experience with these? They are roughly 20mm square and the bottom peg cuts off easily enough.