Epaka

The other beasties! The Leech Wrym, and the the Sea Giant!

Sea beastie for Dreadfleet completed: Behold the Bone Hydra!

Love the purple robes. Regal Evil....

By Crom, nice work brothers! I must say, I'm not overly proud of my paint job on the Warlock... Had to dig around to find a pic. I think I was in the home stretch of finishing my Conan painting when I did a rush job on him... Looking back even a year or so, at least I can see that I'm getting incrementally better at this mini painting stuff. :)

Thanks @Not Quite Dead! The ship wheels with skeleton design are used to make turns with the ships. You align the wheel on either the right or left front of the ship base and rotate the ship accordingly. The thing that looks like a ruler with a dragon/serpent skeleton is actually three sections long, totaling 18 inches, with two joints that can be pivoted and locked into place at 45 degree angles. This is used to measure movement, as well as determine range and firing arcs.

Already tweaking them...

Slowed down recently, house renovation took over my life. But getting the navigation tools done now. Will probably tweak a few things, but almost there...

Wow! Fantastic work @garbetsp!

Got the major pieces of scenery done. Now for the small bits and sea monsters. Building up to tackling the ships eventually...

@Ken, you can see how it worked for me on the pics I posted here on the OL. Perhaps an even better technique is to paint the robes with a very light blue, and then just dry brush white highlights over that. That’s what I did with Ares. It’s very hard to ‘paint’ on washes without getting brush streaks, especially on light colored paint. Can’t wait to see what you do with your MB minis, please post here when you can!

@Ken, a side note: I can strongly recommend the color washes from Vallejo. I had a set from Army Painter, and they would get chunky sometimes so didn’t seem as reliable as Vallejo. I’ve only been using the color washes regularly for a year or so, as opposed to always reaching for a standard brown shader. The black washes are really potent and will make everything very dark, but it’s great for making shaded areas and details extremely noticeable. With color washes I’m constantly finding a lot of cool uses. For some of the Mythic Battles minis like Zeus, who have a white robe or toga, using a blue wash over bright white paint gives a great effect. I also have used the grey wash over white hair to make a good looking head of old hair that has gone grey. I’ve found that mixing a bit of red and umber wash with gold metallic paint can make for a good brass or bronze color. Also, mixing blue wash with silver paint makes for a cool blue tinted metallic effect. For the Conan dragon and the MB Hydra, I used layers upon layers of colored washes on top of white primer and got nice effects that would be hard to do with paint alone. Anyway, just my 2 cents. Again, great work on Thoth!

@Ken, wow! He looks great. Most minis I paint would not hold up very well to such a close-up photo. Your Thoth really handles the scrutiny well. Impressive!

Thanks so much @Not Quite Dead! These are really fun to paint so far. Assembling and painting the gorgeous ships will be challenging and fun as well I presume. Look up the game if you want to see some stunning fantasy pirate minis, especially the ones painted by experts. Here’s a few more pieces I knocked out last night:

After wrapping up painting the core box of Mythic Battles, I needed to work on something different before pressing on with all the stretch goals I have yet to paint. So I am getting going on my copy of Dreadfleet from Games Workshop. I picked up a copy recently for a very low price. Now... I know that Dreadfleet is out of print, unsupported by GW, not popular, and not even a very well reviewed game. But that didn’t matter to me. It’s the first pirate genre mini-based game I’ve seen that really captured my interest. The minis are absolutely incredible and I love the blending of high-fantasy and nautical themes. I’ve started by tackling some of the terrain before I test my abilities with the ships. Here’s the first piece I’ve done:

Still have some touch-ups to do, and then need to hit him with some matte varnish, but I figured he’s close enough to finished to share a couple pics. Along with some of the Cthulhu Wars ‘minis’, he’s definitely the largest figure I’ve painted. Tons of fun to paint something so large that I can actually paint the eyes decently.

Nice work @rhogg27184! Keep at it, it’s always a great feeling for me when I wrap up painting a game. I just finished up the core box for Mythic Battles, so I can at least try it out finally (whenever the 1.5 update gets to me). I still have a lot of minis to do for MB, since there were so many stretch goals. I didn’t get any of the expansions though, other than Corinthia, or else I’d be a long way from done!

Great work! Really excellent... As for his legs, they look good to me. Almost looks like he has dirty feet, which would be fitting for a barefoot master thief. Eyes look great too!

Ooooohhhh.... Red Nails would be an excellent option. I’ll be onboard for whatever they come out with tbh. Just from a practical standpoint, I’d like to have molded plastic player dashboards like they did with Batman. Would help with gem management.

Had fun painting him, but I gotta say that Heracles might be my least favorite mini that I have for this game. Admittedly, I didn’t get the majority of stuff that was offered during the KickStarter campaign. I’m not saying that the sculpt is bad, but for me this design missed the mark. Heracles is the only MB sculpt I’ve seen that looks slightly cartoonish vs. realistic. His proportions seem to be a caricature of a steroidal, overly buff, muscleman. It’s just missing the detailed and serious artistry of the rest of the MB minis. At any rate, it’s not a bad mini and I look forward to seeing what he can do on the game table!

I tried to follow the game art as usual, but I was not skilled enough to make good looking glowing eyes and mouths on these bad boys. Another cool sculpt for this game! I’m closing in on having the core box painted up, just in time for 1.5 rules, and I can’t wait to finally get this game to the table.

Ares wanted to see if he could get a head!

@rhogg27184, and based on your excellent Conan minis, I am very much looking forward to your MB paint-jobs!

Finally had some time to get back to painting minis during my otherwise crazy busy summer. So, what else would I do but Hail Hydra! Usual disclaimers apply, I paint for the table, not a display case or contest. Even though my hand isn’t always steady and my overall technique is still a work in progress, I’m usually happy with my color choices (I rarely deviate much from the game art, as I like the minis to match the printed material if possible)... Anyone else tackled this beautiful beastie yet?

Be that as it may, Monolith refers to the miniatures in Conan as ‘32mm’. Also, as much as I love the huge selection of miniatures in Conan, they cannot really be described as consistent when it comes to scale. Even just with the minis representing Conan himself there are big differences in height. Never mind the fact that the Villagers from the Corinthia Expansion tower over everyone! Lol. Correct or not, I see ‘32mm’ used as a descriptor of mini size quite a bit around the miniature gaming industry. It seems that there really isn’t an ironclad standard for mini sizing. Reaper Miniatures calls their various lines of minis 25mm. Games Workshop seems to use 25mm, 32mm, and 40mm as sizing standards. At any rate, regarding the new Shinobi7 (S7) game; I’m such a hopeless Conan collector that I went ahead and pledged for the game. The mini designs look cool enough. They aren’t breaking any new ground, especially with the main Conan mini - who really looks like he is based on a 90’s comic book rendition of Conan, as opposed to a literary one. I do like the design for Valeria, and some of the others look nice too. As for the game itself, I’d also say that it isn’t breaking any new ground. Seems like a very simplistic ‘dudes fighting on a board’ kind of game. There certainly doesn’t seem to be much excitement around the game over on KickStarter, as there was for Monolith’s Conan campaign. I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t even manage to reach it's funding goal! We shall see.

I dug out this old pic of my Sabertooth mini, though I’m not overly proud of my paint job... I absolutely agree with the assessment that he is definitely very underpowered. He’s a joke in fact. In my opinion, he should have a higher armor rating and perhaps a couple skill icons, like Terror and perhaps Circular Strike. My gaming group was pretty underwhelmed by the scenario he was featured in. ‘Ol Sabertooth himself was killed off way too easily, and after that the OL is hard pressed to kill off his targets. It’s worth another try I suppose. Seems that the OL would have to keep the tiger on the move and well away from being attacked as he’s so wimpy and vulnerable. If it still didn’t feel balanced, perhaps increasing his hit points would help.