Tag Archives: miniature design concept

Fleet Scale Success from Eli Arndt!

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Since August I have been watching the progress of Eli Arndt’s tiny Fleet Scale Mecha designs and I am pleased to be able to say that Eli giving me the chance to get them into production has turned out brilliantly.  This month will see them released in their own part of the 15mm.co.uk website along with a special Barking Irons Online article for them all about their presence in USEME and how to make best use of them overall in gaming.

FS01 Sprue

FS01 Fleet Scale Mecha or 6mm Power Armour

FS06 Sprue

FS06 Fleet Scale Mecha or 6mm Power Armour

These are some of the smallest wargaming pieces I have ever dealt with and on average each of them is 6mm or less in size.  That said some clever mold making and production sees them in white metal which was then painted by Eve Hallow. They will be released as single miniatures and as value sprues which are a little cheaper.  There are nine different, and they are different, mecha and from the paint schemes I asked Eli for Eve has done a super job (I heard him gibber when he handed them over that never again…too small!).

O.G.Joel has a draft of a 6mm rules set for USEME and these will fit in lovely.

Well done Eli!

GBS

777th Croaked Line – Finished Painted Sets for Flintloque and Release

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There is just a week to go now until the release of the 777th Croaked Line and since I posted the second part of the three that make up this arc about the Undead Toads a lot has happened.  In the last week or so I have taken delivery of two painted sets, both by pro-painters, each with a vision of just what these new and unique miniatures should look like.  There is no official uniform or flesh tone for Zombie Todoroni as it has never existed before so there was a free hand for both Rob Alderman and Eve Hallow to do their thing on a set each.

I have many images of the two sets but I am saving most of them.  Here is one shot of each of them so as not to disappoint or to spoil next week.  Eye Candy!

Eve Hallows Zombie Toads

Eve Hallows spooky and bloody ‘burtonesque’ 777th Croaked Line.

Rob Aldermans Zombie Toads

Rob Aldermans recently and long dead Bella Lugosi militia inspired 777th Croaked Line.

Along with the official release on Alternative Armies which will consist of a core set, trooper blister, recently dead blister and full unit too I have arranged with Craig Andrews over on Barking Irons Online to provide news of the release and an article about the characters of the set with lots of great images and a scenario entitled ‘Deep Freeze Toads’.  A bonanza for Flintloque players who have suffered my lack of attention at the expense of 15mm sci-fi of recent months.  I will not gush for long here in this post as this will happen in the article but I adore both these Flintloque sections.  I adore Rob’s clean lines and crunchy flesh while Eve’s use of bright skin and blood spatter combined with stark black and white skeletons is superb.

So until next week..which do you prefer?  Which will be the official uniform for the Croaked Line?

Its been a great build up but my role here is all but done…its Barking Irons turn now.

GBS

A Mercenary Dream Realised for HOF

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It has been a big, big year for 15mm science fiction miniatures on 15mm.co.uk and that means its been a big year for it for me too.  I have commissioned and accepted more than fifteen packs for the HOF range (and accepted two dozen SHM miniatures too) and while most of these have now been released some are still to come.  Of those still to come the next ones on the release schedule have been spoken of before on this blog the Rim Mercenaries.  So it really is a mercenary dream realised.

These are coming out this Friday and were designed by Elton Waters.  I plan an article on Barking Irons Online about them and the theory of the expansion and a little discussion about WHY more Rim Mercenaries and how it ties into the USEME series and O.G.Joel.

GBS

777th Croaked Line – Green to White Metal (pt2)

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Carrying on from the first part of this posting about the 777th Croaked Line for Flintloque and Alternative Armies I present to you all the end result of the molding process.  White Metal miniatures!

Below you can see all of the poses in this brand new regiment both front and back views.

Vampyre Officer, Skeletal Liche, Skeletal Standard Bearer, Zombie ‘squeeze box’ player

Rear View of the above four

Zombie Chef, Decayed Zombie Private, Fresh Zombie Private, Skeletal Zombie Private

Rear View of the above four

Poor Dead Luigi!

Going from the top we can see all of the white metal loveliness.  These are ‘tins’ that is master mold castings which are then used to make the production molds which will make all of the miniatures which will go out to Flintloque players all over the world.   These are brilliant miniatures filled with character and inspiring a lot of adoration even at this point.

Being an Undead formation the unit code for these miniatures will be twenty eight figures strong which will be released alongside a pack of all the poses and a couple of blister codes for trooper boosters and extra dead Todoroni.  So far reaction to my asking has been that the casualty should be in the core pack but not in the unit code.  This might change.  I know Todoroni players will want a pack of corpses for their mortal troops demise on table.

I am going to save naming these miniatures and character ideas until I see them painted up and complete which brings me onto the next part of this series of wee articles.  Rob Alderman is busily painting up his own set of the 777th Croaked Line in a uniform of his choice…but…Eve Hallow is also painting up a set of the same with his own idea of the uniform.  My plan?  To bring you both versions!  As this is a brand new Undead unit there is a lot of leeway with uniform choices and flesh tones.  Rumour has it that Rob has gone for a variation on the Bella Lugosi Militia uniform and Eve has riffed on the historical uniform of ‘Kingdom of Naples’ line infantry.   We will see what is what soon enough.  I will be impartial and intend to studio photograph both sets…perhaps a vote on the Notables Yahoo Group to chose which uniform becomes the one for the official website page.

Until the flesh rots people….

GBS

Fjodin’s SHM Aliens for October 2012 – Naming Ceremony

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Fjodin’s new 15mm Miniatures for the SHM Range

I have known Fjodin (I call him Nick) really since the first month after the SHM Range began on 15mm.co.uk.  A young and fierce design talent he lives in Australia and though we have never met we speak fairly often by email and I enjoy his blog too.  He has taken a real shine to the creatures of deep space and told me quite a while ago that he intended to sculpt as many of them as he could manage so that his vision of alien life would make it to the wargaming world.  This is what the SHM range is all about.  I doubt any miniature company except 15mm.co.uk (I am very responsive to industry and customer feedback, just read this ) would have looked at what will end up being a dozen unarmed creatures of all types and said ‘we will take a risk on these’.  It is a shame that a lot of existing and new 15mm ranges consist of nothing but more ruddy human soldiers in powered armour.

My plan is to release all of Fjodin’s designs into SHM as single miniatures but also as packs for wargamers and even just painters to pick up and adore because they are quite simply lovely.  Examine the image above, each of these creatures could very well be treading or oozing across the dirt of a world under a different sun right now.  In wargaming terms they will all feature in my next USE ME project ‘Alien Safari’ which is a solo game system seeing a group of hunters or soldiers trying to capture or evade random critters.  Fjodin actually inspired me to want to write this set of rules based on these creatures.

Fjodin left it up to me to name these creatures and so I have done so right here on this blog.  They are, from left to right, as follows:

SHM44 Nessian

SHM45 Slurmite

SHM46 Avarep Cobra

SHM47 Galdor Burrower

The miniatures in the picture were painted by Eve Hallow and he did a great job I think as he had no idea and no instructions from myself or Fjodin on what these critters looked like!

These SHM codes are out at the end of this week on 15mm.co.uk.

GBS

777th Croaked Line – Concept to Green (pt1)

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Since I began this blog I have been asked to give an account of a new set of Flintloque miniatures from their deepest origins through concept to greens to white metal and release.  This process often takes six months if not near a year in some cases so it is only now that a project has come along that I have been able to detail in such a manner.  Interested?  Well you should be for this is the stuff of miniature making magic!

Back when Flintloque 3rd Edition 5026 Death in the Snow was published in 2010 the realm of the Witchlands was greatly expanded and among those expansions were more troop types and unit profiles. In the months that followed the feedback from the new book was really good and one of the most talked about subjects was ‘Undead Todoroni’.  After all had the Todoroni of Nepolise not come a long way since the late 1990’s, from a unit of militia to a whole army in their own right with cavalry, artillery and more?  With that army in the Witchlands it stood to reason that there must be re-animated Zombie Toads!  I had come to this conclusion on my own and as a result I squeezed in a mention of the ‘777th Croaked Line’ in the army structure of the Dark Czar.  This mention caught players attention and led me to a conversation with miniature designer and Toad Mad man Rob Alderman in May this year.

As you can see above we came to an agreement over what a potential set of 28mm white metal Undead Todoroni would look like.  Rob’s sketches along with his own and my own input worked out a concept and then a design tender that would meet the needs of fan’s of the shambling dead.  Over the course of a week we batted it back and forth, consulted mortal Todoroni uniforms and other Undead formations and agreed on a total of nine greens to be created.  This took Rob about ten weeks among his other tasks as a designer and working man (he is a busy chap!) with a couple of checks of progress and some images to finalise creative direction.  Once carefully package Rob sent the greens to me at Alternative Armies where they arrived in late August.  You can see them below!

As you can see Rob followed the initial sketches and expanded on them too.  My own input kept his sanity hat screwed on tight and we worked out that in doing a full (and with nine greens it is a full unit) set we would need to provide not only troopers but also the command and the always found Witchlands requirements of a Vampyre and a Liche.  Since no Undead Todoroni exist in the Flintloque range they would also be ‘firsts’.  Details discussed included the style of dress and demenour of a Todoroni Vampyre (slick and slightly camp as it turned out), if a Zombie Todoroni cannot sing like normal Todoroni then what is the unit musician doing (playing an accordian of course!), the standard bearers flag pole topper (a homage to Mad Queen Maria’s glove puppet Mr Froggy).  As well as those we decided to vary the level of decay in the troopers (as in the rules of 5026) and to avoid bayonets as many gamers now prefer their muskets bare.  Late on in the process we decided to drop the fourth trooper and replace it with a unique and new miniature for the Undead…a Zombie Todoroni Chef!  Why..well humour of course, it is Flintloque’s goal.  The last addition was a dead Todoroni.  This figure has several purposes in that it could be a dead mortal Toad (battlefield marker) or a corpse ready for re-animation or such.

So that is it for the initial stages of this new set of miniatures.  Any questions just post below or email me direct.

This is the first of several postings on the ‘777th Croaked Line’ and in the next one I will be detailing the master molding stage and white metal ‘tins’ along with an account of each pose.

GBS

Musings on Aquafids…why so Strange?

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HOF80 Aquafid Infantry.  Strange…but Good?

On Friday 15mm.co.uk released another code in to the expanding and well loved HOF (Hordes of the Future) 15mm Science Fiction line.  Since I took over the design command of the range (back in the region of the mid thirties  of the code listing) I have tried to base expansions mainly on wargamers requests and also by reaction to releases.  Already emails have come in about HOF80 Aquafid Infantry ranging from ‘hurrah another new race‘ to ‘these are awful, why are you not making more Cultists or Retained Knights?‘.  These emails always intrigue me so I wanted to do a little posting here on the blog to tell you all why.

Designed by Elton Waters these latest miniatures added to the range were in response to r requests for a ‘fish man type of infantry’ and as normal I took the top three off the list of requests every few months and had them created.  I will not discuss the other two at this time but one was a Human pack for pulp and near future gaming and the other was a Human medical pack for primary use with HOF Fire Team and other systems.   The name Aquafid combines a word for water and one for fighter for a title that confers the right meaning.  So the system I used created the Aquafid like it did the Grey Aliens, Automatons, Cultists, Octopods, Triorbs and others.  But why the response by email?

I think that is comes as a shock (sadly) to a lot of wargamers now that a company will create miniatures by request and not just make more and more soldiers with spiky bits and big guns.  No civilians or support staff, only warriors.  I believe that codes such as the Aquafid are vital to the soul of the whole wargaming hobby.  We are a hobby of intense creativity and diversity and no where is this more clearly seen at the moment than in 15mm Science Fiction which is in the midst of a golden age of expansion.  New Races and Oddities are central to maintaining this just as they were in the 1990’s and 1980’s for 28mm and 25mm Science Fiction.  If makers only releases yet more human troops what would be the point?  Eventually we would all just be fighting ‘Ultra Modern’ without the sci-fi element using miniatures so similar to each other they all came out of the same cookie cutter (does this sound familar to you at all?).

There is a very good reason I listen to customers…they know what they want as individuals and if you list their feedback by hundreds you see a pattern.  Each time a new release is made in HOF (and in SHM for that matter) feedback comes in, orders come in and opinions are shared.  Sometimes new races and oddities fall on their faces and go no further and in other cases they sell so well that they warrent expansion.  Two good examples of this are the HOF Cultists and the HOF Octopods.  Both began with one pack of infantry poses and now have three or four (with more to come!) each for a fuller force.  Without the system I use neither of these would exist at all.

Will the Aquafid spawn a support pack, a command pack or others?  Are they too strange?  Only time will tell. But now you know my thoughts and perhaps now they are not as weird as they first appeared.

I welcome comments and feedback on miniature design ideas and I always will.

GBS