Mind Flayer's Snack Time

I've always been a fan of miniatures, even before I bought my first Grenadier Boxed Set in the early 80's. Since then my "collection" has just continued to grow. Some (my wife) might call it an obsession, though my time being able to do anything with them has continued to diminish. My friends just call it what it is, figmentia. Go ahead look it up, I'll wait.

So it has been with great despair that in the last couple of months I've had very little time to dedicate to my "stuff"; gaming and miniatures. This has lead to great periods of wackiness, as I can't get my gaming fix. When I don't game I feel like Tyrone Biggums...

But honestly, I can quit whenever I want to...

One of the side effects of figmentia is that you are either painting, or modifying miniatures at all times. Other's minds might think about how great a miniature looks, but in your mind you've already cut off both arms, repositioned them, and sculpted something on top.

My foray into sculpting has been slow, but fun. It started several years ago when a friend of mine, Frylock, started describing his character during one of our gaming sessions. Since we are such "serious" role-players we immediately concentrated on the description, and renamed him Frolock because of his big Kid-n-Play Afro Hairstyle. Hey, it was his description not mine.

This description gave me an idea, and several months later I presented him with his own custom made version of Frolock, Afro and all. It was made by converting a Warhammer Wizard, and sculpting a new head, and hair. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of the miniature at the time to demonstrate my newly found sculpting powers.

Sculpting is fun, but time consuming. So in the last few years I've only really made time to sculpt a few times.

Like most DMs would do, I quickly turned my new-found powers to "evil." The first "monster" I sculpted was used for one of my long running 3.5 campaigns. I needed something creepy for this thing. I had no miniature that would do it justice, so I decided to sculpt it. In the end only one of my players ever recognized the actual creature. Which meant that the sculpt wasn't so bad as to be completely unrecognizable. See if you can identify this 3.X era monster:



My second sculpt was done as a sculpting challenge on ENWorld (sorry can't find the thread). A group of us, suffering from figmentia, decided to do a one month challenge in which we'd sculpt something having to do with Wizards. One of the guys running the challenge was going to cast, in pewter, a copy for each participant's entry, and distribute to all. This was an interesting challenge and my entry was this Warforged Wizard, and a bunch of small wizard laboratory pieces. The lab pieces were simply too small to gravity cast, so they remained uncast. The wizard came out well enough that one of my very talented painting friends did it more justice than I would have by painting it.







Since then my sculpting has been way too sporadic, or limited to very small pieces for conversion. I want to sculpt more, it's that sometimes I just don't feel like it.

As is usually customary, last night I was up at 3:00AM, don't ask insomnia is a bitch. Without much to do, and not able to go back to sleep, I sauntered in a dreamless stupor into my basement. Sitting there, beckoning me was a block of Sculpey at my table. For some reason inspiration struck me. I normally don't use Sculpey for sculpting because IME it is much harder to "push putty" using it. But what I was going to sculpt was large enough that I didn't want to waste "green stuff" on it. All in all I think it came out pretty well, except for the left eye that simply reminds me of Marty Feldman . So the next step will be to paint it green and put it in front of my players so they can haphazardly explore the nothingness contained in the mouth. Let's see how that goes.



So it's at times like this that insomnia is not such a bad thing. The fact that I barely get 4 hours of sleep on good days means that there are times when it's 3:00AM, I can't get any sleep, and I have an idle mind. Some have said that an idle mind is the devil's playground. So I think that from now on when the insomnia strikes, the figmentia will be fed, one way or another.

I think my next project will be something equally recognizable, a certain idol with large gem eyes.