A Week in the Life of Muninn

Quick real life news: I've been accepted into a graduate teaching program at a local University, so starting later this month I'll be working toward becoming a middle/high school teacher. May God have mercy on my mentor teacher.

Back to your regularly scheduled nerd post.

Now that the Night Wolf commission has been sent off to its new home I've been able to shift my focus to other minis.The most pressing project is painting characters for my newest D&D game. There are five PCs in all, and for once it was easy to find minis for all of them. I still have to purchase two of the minis, but one is already painted, and two others are prepped and ready.

I was even able to save a bit of money by finding Bones versions. I still hate the floppy, warped, bendy  weapons so I swapped them out.

This ranger is Reaper's Deladrin, female assassin, but the swords come from a pair of loose GW Lord of the Rings elves I found at one of my game stores. The blades are a little long for short swords the character is supposed to wield, but I think they look pretty good.

This one was a little harder. The character concept is a Bard bowman, and there aren't a lot of non-ranger human bowmen minis on the market. I found this guy, Reaper's Eando Kline (not yet for sale), amongst my recent Bones kickstarter minis and decided to fill his empty hand with a bow. You can see instead of pinning the bow in place I just cut away the back of his hand and glued the bow in place. I then used greenstuff to replace back of the hand.

Finally, I've also been getting ready for this May.

My May Mini challenge is about 2 months away, so I've been prepping all the minis I might want to paint. If you recall, the challenge is to complete 31 minis in 31 days. This will be my 4th year of the challenge, but somehow I still have a ton of minis to choose from.

You can see there are a lot more than 31 minis here. Part of that is because I like to have backups. I set out a plan for which miniatures I'd like to paint each day, but sometimes work goes long, or the kids get since, and I need an easier mini (the servo-skull in the lower right hand corner, for instance). So I won't be completing *all* of these minis, but any of these minis could be completed in May.

One big change this year is that they're all Games Workshop minis. It's still a rather eclectic mix of minis. There are fantasy, 40k and even a few Specialist games represented. I've owned some of these for almost 20 years, but there are a few I purchased a few weeks ago.

There are a few conversions too. Here's an Amber Wizard I completed a few nights ago. I'm happy with how he turned out.

The upper body comes from the Empire Deathclaw box, the legs are from a Chaos Marauder, and the top of the staff is taken from the Empire Battle Wizard box. Aside from the obvious kitbash I also has to reshape part of his cloak because it was modeled to look like it was hanging on a high-backed saddle. I also trimmed the gem from the back of the snake staff. Ideally, he'll get painted during "Fantasy Week" in May.

Hope you enjoy the little preview of things to come. It should be a busy month.

~Muninn