Cowabunga! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Two posts in a week, that’s a pretty good start to the new year! Even though it’s just a small project, it’s a fun one. I recently rewatched the original 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie (the only one really worth watching in my opinion). And as so often happens to me when watching or reading something, I wondered: does anyone make minis of this? After a quick Google search I found out that, of course, several people do.

I particularly liked the minis made by Brother Vinni, so I picked up the four brothers and their master Splinter. They also have April, Shredder, Bebop and Rocksteady figures and Foot soldiers, if you want some baddies for your Turtles to fight.

The minis are cast resin and come in several very tiny pieces, of which by some miracle I didn’t break or lose a single one! There was a little air bubble in Michelangelo’s elbow, though, which I needed to fill with some putty. In the large macro photo’s below it’s pretty obvious, but in person you can barely see it.

I wasn’t quite sure whether to paint them all the same bright green as in the 90’s cartoon or to use a different shade for each character like in the modern comics and cartoons. In the end I chose the latter and I’m happy that I did.

So, quoting the cheesy theme song from the equally cheesy 90’s cartoon, here are in order:

Splinter taught them to be ninja teens...

Leonardo leads...

Donatello does machines...

Raphael is cool, but rude...

Michelangelo is a party dude!

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More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint: I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again. Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario. Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

Roman watchtower

After wrapping up my wee Roman army with my Roman cavalry unit last month I needed a bit of a change of pace. Designing and scratch building a Roman watchtower to go with my army seemed just the thing. Most models of Roman watchtowers you find online are based on stone examples like those found along Hadrian’s Wall or in southern Germany. I, however, wanted to build a tower more like those found along the Dutch part of the limes , the border of the Roman Empire. As stone is pretty hard to come by in this tiny flat country of ours, watchtowers were either made entirely out of timber or had a timber frame with inset wattle and daub sections. I particularly liked the look of the reconstructed watchtower at Vleuten-De Meern, with its dark timber frame and yellow wattle and daub. As you can see, my tower is quite heavily influenced by the Vleuten-De Meern watchtower, although I wasn’t too strict when it came to the exact dimensions. The reconstructed watchtower at Vleuten-...

Little Tanks & Tiny People

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