The Minotaur and a tale of butchery and salvation.

During the last month I've had some hobby time out partly enforced by work commitments and partly lack of motivation. So to get out of my slump I painted up a conversion I completed some time ago. Now I have realised recently that I've always subconsciously divided my work into two distinct camps; convert the fuck out of new plastic or carefully collect and paint old lead. I give no value to plastic but hold the lead in a high regard, mostly because of nostalgia and of course the fact that it is oop (certainly from Citadel anyway). So I thought it was time to change that, I'd always been inspired by the lead conversions from White Dwarf back in the day, so let it be my turn to return to something I thought nothing of as a teenager in the 80's. Time to break out the jewellers saw and the pliers and get to work...

Now I didn't approach this willy-nilly, I chose a lead model that I wanted to paint up (i.e. it is one of my complete collection of the Citadel Minotaur Lords) but one in which the sculpt is a bit shit and could be improved upon by me. With this sculpt I always felt that the head looked odd without a neck and that the arms were disproportionate (i.e. Too short) and strangely tethered to the sides of the body (no doubt due to casting constraints) so I chopped it all off and ended up with this:

A new pointing arm from an Ork was added to give him the look of a leader and a mid-hammer minotaur head that had a bit more menace about it:

Now I didn't want to completely discard the chopped off pieces and decided to re-use them on the conversion. With the head I thought that it would be fun to make a three headed minotaur with the new head in the middle and the old one (and a re-mould of it) on the other. I'm a sucker for symmetry. So I used the Instamould to get a cast of the head:

And filled it with milliput initially:

Which really didn't work so went with greenstuff the second time around which really worked surprisingly well: 

I also re-used the club which I had earlier cut off; attaching it the belt behind him:

And re-sculpting the haft with some milliput:

Here with the two heads re-attached and banner pole inserted:

And some additional work on the pole, garden wire wrapped around the paper clip to help me sculpt a gnarly old tree and a plastic vulture perched atop:

The final greenstuffing on the banner pole and some old-school mushrooms on the base:

And then decided to add some plastic horns and a bell to add some more detail:

Now of course there was another source of inspiration with this build; John Blanche's esteemed minotaur banner bearer which also has multiple heads and a myriad of other conversions:

So I too went to town on the banner design, following a more obvious route of Greek Mythology for the banner image:

I think it's an improvement on the original.

Now onto the rest of my collection of Minotaur Lords...

What's coming up (Aka the "bottleneck")

I have too many ideas and too many projects on the go, so sometimes I realise that I've done a whole load of collecting, converting and prepping and neglected to actually paint anything. To be honest, it's the painting which I find to be the most laborious part of the entire process, I find all my creative energies best directed to the prior stages. This often means that I have a load of miniatures that are sitting, literally primed, in my "ready to paint box". (I also have a "wip conversion" box, a "to strip" box as well as an even larger box with miniatures bagged up into units or some other grouping that I will now call, quite simply, "my lead box").

However I do enjoy the sense of satisfaction when I've finished the painting stage (although there is then the chore of basing still to go!), so I'd better get cracking and start making inroads into this bottlenecked part of the queue...:

A nice collection of Oldhammer models, all primed and ready to have some paint applied .

And here's a breakdown of each group in a bit more detail:

As you can see, these thugs are right at the front of the painting queue. Skin tones applied and I've even completed the dreaded and tedious "wood" stage. 

Continuing my retinue table challenge, these represent the option for d4 cultists plus either the chaos sorcerer or warrior addition as a leader. The central models are from the Red Redemption range and the two models flanking are two of my favourite Nurgle champions - I'm actually really looking forward to painting these two! 

Yes, some 40k! These are from Foundry and stand proud alongside the official Oldhammer miniature from this year's event. This is the start of some sort of gang (I'm still reading up on my fluff - any suggestions?)

A winged Minotaur conversion, very much inspired by Dale Hurst's Tzeentch warband from an early White Dwarf. He may well revive the zebra skin pattern effect too..

The completed Nurgle Dragon Ogre conversion.

A converted Beastman standard bearer (the original was damaged, hence the head swap and addition of a standard). The other guy is a converted champion of chaos, the mutations taken directly from a pre-rolled character from the Lost and Damned champion table).

Some more dungeon stuff; barrels and pillars (they're actually cake pillars).

Oh and here are the two miniatures which I'm painting for two of this blog's followers. 

Is there one part of the hobby that you prefer, enjoy less and how do you organise your myriad of projects into an orderly queue?

A pile of old lead

So behind the scenes of the finished painted pieces I share here, here's a small accumulation of some of the lead that is waiting to be painted for my Retinue Table challenge:

(Actually not all of it is lead and there are a few newer figures in there too - including a part converted Shaggoth for the Dragon Ogre entry and a Skaven character) and you may also notice some Foundry pieces in the zip-bags to the left which I recently purchased; they will be used as Mercanaries/Bandits and Human Runaways.

The more eagle-eyed of you may notice from this photograph that I am missing the full compliment of 6 Orcs, a Troll, 2 Marauder Goblins and a Minotaur - well I'm still trawling ebay for 2 specific Orcs; the Troll is currently being painted, the 2 missing Goblins are painted as is the missing Minotaur!

With the summer holidays here I hope to get a few of these finished over the next few weeks, but it is also expected that I will be swapping a detail brush for a roller to decorate our living room, I know which I'd rather be doing.....