Category Archives: Miniatures

Jolly Friar with Dog

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For my final submission for Tom’s #paintanadventuringparty challenge on Instagram this year, I only had one character class left: the monk. This old RAFM monk with dog is no longer available anywhere I can find. He’s such a great miniature, I thought he was due for a repaint.

I briefly considered painting him red and green and basing him on snow in honor of the Christmas holiday, but why ruin the utility of such a great sculpt? I decided to keep the colors pretty much the same, but maybe add a little shading and highlighting, techniques unknown to me back in the 80’s when I originally painted him. I kept the dog more or less the same, too.

He has such a great face. I generally don’t bother much with faces beyond the typical trio of flesh-colored paints and a wash, but in this case I added some rose to his cheeks and nose. This fellow look like he enjoys his booze.

Rather atypical of me to have completed a challenge so early in the month, but I’m making up for all the lost time this year.

I love this challenge, whether I call it Character of the Month or Tom calls it #paintanadventuringparty. I think I will continue it into next year. This year I used all old-school miniatures for the challenge, next year I’m thinking I will try something new: no humans! So, every character class will be represented by a demihuman race: elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, maybe even half-orcs and half-elves. Maybe.

No tortles, tieflings, dragonborn, half-giants, tabaxi, aasimar, kenku, warforged or anything else equally stupid, though.

I have standards.

My first “commissions”

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That Cthulhu Jawn is an actual-play Call of Cthulhu podcast set in 1980’s Philadelphia. I discovered the podcast through Instagram and It’s a lot of fun. George, the GM, contacted me a couple of months back and asked me if I do commission painting. He’d seen my IG account and liked my work. I was quite flattered that anyone would think my stuff is good enough to pay for, and I told him so; but I offered to paint some miniatures for him for free if it wasn’t too big a job. It wasn’t.

George wanted these two miniatures painted for his players’ characters in a different game (I can’t remember what). I think they’re 3D prints from HeroForge. I didn’t think to take any “before” pictures. so this is the finished product. George picked the colors.

Anyone who knows me knows I need little if any excuse to paint a dwarf, or at least a dwarf miniature. I like this guy.

The minotaur was not so much fun. I admit I’m not really a fan of this miniature, but once I started rolling it came together pretty quickly.

The axe handle had broken off at some point below the hand , leaving him with a comically-short, massive cleaver. I fixed it with some plastic rod and green stuff. (The benefit of never throwing anything away is that I had the correct diameter rod at hand.)

One of the questions I never thought to ask is why these two very different characters are adventuring together. They seem an unlikely pair. Now that I think about it, the dwarf’s gun and wrench and the minotaur’s weird jet-pack thing give me a Spelljammer vibe. Maybe I’ll ask George if I remember.

As you may know, the last few months have been somewhat trying for me. George had to wait a bit for his miniatures, but at last they are finished and are winging their way home to him via the United States Postal Service.

Also leaving Dead Dick’s Tavern after an extended stay: Owen’s miniatures! This almost four-feet high stack of Plano boxes contains hundreds of classic Ral Partha and Grenadier miniatures, as well as a fair amount of other manufacturers. Several years ago (for those who don’t want to follow the link), my good friend Owen gave these to me; as he was done with painting and just wanted the space. I’ve been holding onto them ever since, hoping he would take them back. I even painted a few of them and posted them here to taunt him with his own miniatures.

It didn’t work. He really was done.

A couple of weeks ago, he asked if I still had them. Of course I did. He said that if I was ok with it, and if I still wanted to get rid of them, I could give them to his niece. She grew up watching her uncle play roleplaying games and paint miniatures. She’s in her 30’s now, running games of her own.

Of course I was ok with it. I’ve always said these were never my miniatures. They were Owen’s miniatures, I just held onto them for him. I told him that if I couldn’t give them back to him, then I would gladly pass them on to the next generation of Owen gamers, and I did.

But I kept a few.

Amberlynn, Dragon Slayer

As anyone who still comes here knows, I have had precious little hobby time over the past few months as irritants both personal and professional have plagued me without mercy. One thing I’ve managed to keep up with (the ONLY thing, really; as my last two posts show) is Tom’s #paintanadventuringparty challenge over on Instagram. Tom’s challenge is pretty much the same as my Character of the Month from last year, only without the back stories. I’m also choosing to paint only old-school miniatures, because that’s what I want to do.

This is Amberlynn, Dragon Slayer (not to be confused with Amber Lynn, who is someone else entirely). She’s from Ral Partha’s Fantasy Personalities line (03-106), and in case you can’t tell, she’s a Sandra Garrity sculpt.

Like many of my old-school metal minis, she was never painted (until now). I needed a paladin for the challenge. She looks the part. Besides, I realized I was a little short on the female miniatures so far this year.

Here she is sans background scenery.

And finally, here she is doing what she does best, slayin’ dragons; in this case, a Grenadier Red Dragon, sculpted by Julie Guthrie.

Not much else to say, really. I’m hoping to get a few more posts out by the end of the year. December is when I traditionally clean up my “side pile”; but that seems unlikely. I just want to get SOMETHING done. This was supposed to be the year of pop culture, and it’s turned out to be the nine months of pop culture! That sucks!

Next month: only one more character class to go in the challenge…can you guess which one? Also: more gaming announcements, and hopefully something else, too…

Dark Elf Sorcerer

Hi, I’m The Angry Piper. You may remember me from such things as being active in the online hobby community and having a blog, once.

Jesus. Another month from hell. I hesitate to say things are getting better, because I said that last month and shit went south again immediately after I did. I’m not one to knock wood; but I’m coming around to the idea of embracing superstition. It can’t hurt, right?

In the meantime, I’ve managed to keep up with one challenge, at least: Tom’s #paintanadventuringparty challenge on Instagram. To be honest, if I wasn’t nine for nine already this year, I wouldn’t have bothered. But why break my streak?

This bad boy is from Grenadier, a Dark Elf Sorcerer sculpted by the great Julie Guthrie. I’ve decided to call him a wizard for the purpose of the challenge. I also decided to paint him with a bright palette, because who the hell is gonna stop me?

I’ve had this guy for a while. Since 1988 (or 1989, I can’t make it out). He was even painted once, but he was painted primarily glossy crimson. Spiffy, huh? I stripped him for repaint about a decade ago.

I feel like I should do something better with the staff, but…nah.

Check out the widow’s peak on this guy! Full-on Eddie Munster!

Picture this. Old-school D&D. Your first level Magic-User has 2 hit points and one random spell, and it’s Read Magic. You meet an Owlbear and you die.

Grab some dice and a new character sheet.

Once again, I’m hoping to make a return to normalcy here at Dead Dick’s next month. I still have a lot of Pop Culture miniatures I would like to get to by the end of the year. Thanks for sticking with me.

Dark Lord

It has been a hellish couple of months, both personally and professionally. I have had little time to do anything hobby-related; but hopefully that’s behind me now. One thing I have managed to keep up with is my Character of the Month for my buddy Tom’s #paintanadventuringparty challenge on Instagram. It’s a good thing it’s only one miniature a month; because that’s about all I’ve done in September.

This old-school miniature comes from Superior Miniatures, from their Wizards and Lizards line: Dark Lord (a.k.a. “Wizard with Dragon”), sculpted by Ray Lamb. I purchased and painted him long ago (in the 80’s, in fact), but stripped him of his Testors enamel some years back, always intending to repaint him, And now I have.

There’s no way you could make this guy look like a good guy; so I’ve decided he is a good representation of a Warlock, a magic-user who gets his power from a pact with something infernal. I decided on a pretty simple palette, since everyone knows bad guys wear black.

This is one of my all-time favorite miniatures. I absolutely love this sculpt, and taking a new look at Superior’s line has really opened my eyes at how good these miniatures are. I have quite a few of them (another may be showing up here soon), and I count myself pretty fortunate.

Hopefully this marks a return to more regular posts; and an overall return to the blogosphere. I’ve missed you guys.

Bard with Bagpipes

For my Character of the Month, and for my submission to Tom’s #paintanadventuringparty challenge on Instagram, I chose to do a bard: specifically, this old-school Grenadier “Bard with Bagpipes”, sculpted by the great Andrew Chernak as part of one of the original Grenadier AD&D boxed sets.

Sadly, I don’t own the boxed set; but I picked this guy up loose on eBay a few years ago, since he was, up until then, a bagpiper miniature I did not own.

This guy has some bizarre fashion sense: a conquistador helmet, billowed sleeves, hose, toe shoes and some weird diaper-thing. I decided anyone who would dress like that would be looking for attention, so I painted him up as a troubadour in garish colors. A friend pointed out that his highland bagpipes have the traditional three drones and that his hand positioning on the chanter is pretty good–two things that are often sculpted incorrectly on bagpiper miniatures. Chernak did it right!

Only four more character classes to go until the end of the year (did that fly by or is it just me?): Monk, Wizard, Warlock and Paladin.

Apologies to all who have noticed my conspicuous absence from this site and from the blogoshere this month. Some family health problems have occupied my every waking thought lately; and I am way behind on hobby stuff. Still hoping to get something done for Dave’s Summer of Scenery by the end of the month, although it won’t be the AMT Deep Space Nine model as I originally planned. That turned out to be a bigger project than I anticipated.

I hope to be back in full form soon.

“He ain’t a hard man to track. He leaves dead men wherever he goes.”

Time for another entry in my Year of Pop Culture. The Outlaw Josey Wales is, of course, one of Clint Eastwood’s classic Westerns; one I have seen many times and one I return to often. It’s the story of a Confederate farmer whose family is murdered by Union troops, so he joins a militia to kill Northerners. Eventually, the militia is convinced to surrender. Josey refuses, of course, and his fellow militia men are all massacred after laying down their arms.

Josey becomes an outlaw; the target of bounty hunters and the duplicitous Union regiment known as the “Redlegs” that was responsible for the massacre of his men. He finds a woman, settles down on a ranch…but only for a little while. Eventually, the Redlegs arrive and lay siege to the ranch in a bloody climactic battle.

The Outlaw Josey Wales has some of the best lines in bad-ass movie history, from “You gonna pull those pistols, or just whistle Dixie?”, to the iconic “Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’, boy.” It’s one of my favorite Westerns of all time, and if for some reason you haven’t seen it, you should.

Reaper does this “Jeb Lawson” miniature in their Chronoscope line, and it’s a pretty good likeness, almost as if they did that on purpose. It’s sculpted by James van Shaik.

Here’s my paint job.

And that’s one more for the Pop Culture theme of 2022.

I guess that’s a good thing, because I haven’t done shit on my Deep Space Nine model for the Season of Scenery yet…

Fantastic Four Job Interview: The Crimson Hound

Mr. Fantastic (MF): Hello there! Welcome. Thanks for coming in.

Crimson Hound (CH): Thanks. Glad to be here. I…uh…thought there were four of you.

MF: The Invisible Woman isn’t here at the moment.

Human Torch (HT): Or…IS SHE??? Ha ha ha!!!

MF: So…Crimson Hound. We’re looking for a fourth member, someone who can fill in for Ben here when he takes one of his sabbaticals.

HT: Like when he gets all whiny and leaves the group to sulk.

Thing (T): Whatever. It ain’t easy bein’ me.

HT: Or when he needs to go “find himself” on some alien planet.

T: That happened once. Sue me.

HT: Or when he wants to follow his dream and be a professional wrestler…

CH: Ha! You guys are cute together.

T: Whaddya mean, “together”?

HT: Yeah, what’s that supposed to mean?

CH: I only thought…

T: Think again, bozo!

HT: Yeah, think again!

CH: Look, there’s nothing wrong with–

T: Shuddup and get yer feet off the table! Ain’t ya got no manners?

CH: Oh. Sure. Sorry.

MF: Let’s focus on what’s important: Ben’s replacement.

T: REPLACEMENT?!

MF: Usually, we ask She-Hulk to step in, but…

T: She got too big fer us.

HT: Stopped answering her phone when she got a TV show.

CH: Huh. Right.

MF: So, assuming we get this vampire business cured, when can you start?

CH: Cured? You can cure me?!

MF: Undoubtedly. I’m pretty sure I have already figured out how. I am embarassingly intelligent.

CH: But the vampire thing is what gives me my powers!

MF: Oh. I see. Well, we can’t have you feeding on people’s blood. I own the patents on several dozen formulae for synthetic plasma, both terran and non-terran. I’m sure we can find something suitable.

T: Welcome to the team!

HT: Don’t touch my stuff.

CH: Wow! Thanks! I really need this job…

MF: We’ll get your hiring bonus, health and dental package squared away and show you to your luxury penthouse quarters here in the Baxter Building. There’s just one more restriction.

CH:…what’s that?

MF: You cannot, under any circumstances, make any jokes, implications or double-entendres about my powers and how far I can stretch my…well, I’m sure you know. Understood?

CH: Wait…not ever?

MF: Never.

CH:…

CH:…

MF: Well?

CH: Nah. This isn’t gonna work. Thanks for your time.

Bruno still hasn’t posted any new Crimson Hound content. He deserves this.

Mistress of Darkness

Not to be confused with the Mistress of the Dark who recently made an appearance on Roger’s site, this is an old (1989) RAFM miniature that is no longer in production and doesn’t seem to be available anywhere anymore. She is my Character of the Month for Tom’s #paintanadventuringparty challenge over on Instagram. I’m calling her a sorceress.

Here’s a secret: I didn’t paint this miniature: I REPAINTED her. Way back in 1990 or so, I painted her using those wonderful Testors enamels I still have nightmares about. She actually didn’t look too bad, all things considered.

I remembered to snap a picture of her before I repainted her; but not before I added her to this base.

As you can see, I went with a more “Egyptian” theme to her this time around as opposed to the Frazetta-style in which she’s so obviously sculpted. I was likely inspired by all the Egyptian goings-on in The Old Ways Podcast’s Masks of Nyarlathotep game.

Only five more character classes to go for the year: Bard, Monk, Wizard, Warlock and Paladin. Which one will be next?

Guess what? I know the answer to that.

Droogs

Continuing the Year of Pop Culture (thought I forgot about that, huh?), may I present Alex and his three droogs: Pete, Georgie and Dim; the protagonists of A Clockwork Orange (the book) and Clockwork Orange (the film). Clockwork Orange is best known to the general public through the infamous 1971 Stanley Kubrick film starring Malcolm McDowell as Alex, a role that would forever typecast him as a psychotic villain (although Caligula didn’t help his career much in that regard, either). Erudite folks like me have also read the novel by Anthony Burgess. Watching the film is difficult for many people as it originally received an X rating due to the violence and strong sexual content. Burgess himself seems to have hated it; I can only speculate the reason may be because there was not enough distance between the character and the audience. We were able to watch, in graphic detail without the shielding of words, every horrific act Alex and his friends visited upon others. Despite Burgess’s feelings, the film is quite faithful to the book; at least to the version of the book that was, until about 25 years ago or so, the only version available in America. Until then, to the rest of the world, A Clockwork Orange ended quite differently. Now the American versions contain the elusive “twenty-first chapter”, which finally offers the complete tale of Alex.

In an unspecified future just around the corner, Alex and his small band commits acts of astounding depravity and atrocity on a nightly basis: rape, robbery, assault and battery are all activities they enjoy. They’re really not nice guys. Eventually, their crimes lead to murder, and Alex is sent away to prison, where he undergoes aversion therapy to cure him of his savage impulses. Alex is given a slow-acting drug in his food and then made to watch pornographic and/or violent films depicting the kinds of things he enjoyed; i.e. rape, beatings and general mayhem. The drug makes him severely nauseous; soon he begins to associate the sickness with the activities he watches on film. After a while, Alex can’t even think about the things he used to enjoy without becoming sick. He is pronounced cured, and set free.

The weird thing is that although we (hopefully) deplore Alex’s behavior, we eventually come to care about him and identify with him. Alex actually becomes likeable; no mean feat considering his character. And so, after his release, it’s with something like sympathy that we watch the “new” Alex receive his comeuppance at the hands of those he has wronged, powerless to fight back against they who would have their revenge.

The question at the end of both the book and the film is, “Is Alex cured?” The Kubrick film leaves that open to speculation, but the clear implication is no. The complete book, on the other hand, gives a definite answer. If you’ve only seen the film, you haven’t got the whole story.

The appearance and outfits of Alex and his droogs differed a great deal between the book and the movie. In the book, the gang wore black outfits with white cravats, and each one wore a unique novelty codpiece. In the film, they wear white boiler suits with unique hats. In addition, three of the droogs wear some kind of makeup: Dim wears lipstick, Pete wears eyeshadow under his left eye, and Alex has his iconic false eyelash on his right eyelid.

These miniatures by Crooked Dice are clearly representations of the character depictions in the movie, and like most Crooked Dice miniatures, they’re awesome. Painting them was very easy, as you might expect. Prime the boiler suits white, wash black and highlight. I I tried to include the makeup as well.

Despite the subject matter, Clockwork Orange is one of my favorite films with one of the greatest soundtracks in movie history. I first encountered it in college as a Psychology student; I had to watch it (and other highly controversial films, like Titticut Follies) while studying aversion therapy and negative reinforcement techniques. I’ve probably seen it about a dozen times, with the most recent viewing a little over a year ago on Netflix.

Up next: More Pop Culture!