I will confess, most of my personal free time is taken up with the pursuit of painting miniatures for the D&D game I run and painting minis for the board games I play (games like Mansions of Madness and Gloomhaven for instance).
Not all the board games I play have miniatures, sure, but the ones I gravitate towards do. And if we are continuing with the confessions, I’ve chipped in for funding to a number of board games on Kickstarter solely because I liked the look of the monsters they come with.
What sparked this decent into hoarding miniatures and stockpiling board games? Dungeons and Dragons. It was the gateway drug that shifted my focus from playing computer games to tabletop games. But there is more to this than just painting miniatures and playing the games.
Along with mini painting, there is a crafting aspect to the hobby I love. Scratch building a little hut for a hag to live in, converting MDF scatter terrain into something more realistic looking, and now learning Blender with the goal of designing and 3D printing my own miniatures in the future, all have come about because one night a few years ago me and some work friends all sat around and pretended to be something else for an evening.
In this blog post, I wanted to share some fancy photos I prepared, and some candid snaps of the ‘work’ from this side of my life because, well, because I bloody love it!
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| A figure from Warhammer. One of my later pieces where I tried to paint in the lighting effects using a technique called 'object source lighting'. I painted this Chaos Lord purely because I thought he was cool. |
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| A 'Terminator Captain' from Warhammer 40k. I actually had this model when I was in school when I first attempted the hobby and decided to repaint it and give it some love and attention. |
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| Some pieces of an amazing set from THMiniatures. I back this project on Kickstarter because one can never have too much scatter terrain to play around. |
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| From the same set, this bigger piece had a well. Here was the first time I tried using epoxy resin to create a realistic-looking pool of stagnant water. It looks wet, but its rock-solid! |
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| This is Hinamatsu from the Malifaux game. I loved this model when I saw it and made the extra effort in getting the painted mask even and looking neat. |
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| Star Vampires from the Mansions of Madness game. Anything with tentacles is cool. I love that game, even though my character goes mad every time. |
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| Spirit of the Forest from Reaper Miniatures. A wonderfully detailed model with a friendly face. One of the few models in my collection I don't see my D&D players fighting against... but you never know with them guys. |
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| The Dark Jester from Legends of Signum, with my premium modular dungeon tileset from My Dungeon, and some set dressing from Mantic Games Terrain Crates. Composing this, and the following photos were a lot of fun. |
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| Death Mage Necromancer from Games Workshop, because you can never have enough evil-looking dudes. |
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| Two of my custom ordered minis from Hero Forge. I played as the mouse folk character briefly in my D&D game and the wolf in Samurai armor was something I had simply wanted to see for years really. |
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| Star Vampires have gotta eat. |
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| A Blighted Dryad from Reaper Miniatures walks past a Witch's Hut (which I made entirely out of cardboard and dressed it with a few spare bits). |
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| Here you can see the friendly face of this mini, and a bit more of the Witch Hut I made... albeit its a bit blurry. |
Note: Taking these photos were, in of themselves, a creative project that came about purely because I started this hobby. In preparation for this blog post and taking these photos, I realised that I wanted to take photos like this more because it was so much fun setting a little stage, lighting it, and taking some snaps.
Lloyd Harvey
www.lloydharvey.co.uk
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