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If you keep the momentum up, that pile o' shame will start shrinking

May be best to paint what you feel like, rather than what you feel you "have to"?

Yeah, for sure. I guess the only things in the list I am not enthusiastic about on some level is the remaining Elves. I am enthusiastic about finally having an Elf force, but I really don't enjoy painting them. The Hobbit minis I am also a bit wary of, if only because they are highly detailed and individual.

Everything else, I kinda look forward to doing, particularly if I let myself relax a bit and don't worry about doing my "best" job. We'll see how it goes. If I hate it, I am gonna put everything into storage and start fresh, for sure.

Hiding your shame pile and having a clean workspace can do wonders for productivity.

I wish you the best of luck Da Boss That happens to me too, where I run lower and lower on space in my work area and it affects how well I an get what I'm currently working on done. I agree that getting stuff done and off the table felt good. For me, it was realizing my anual "year in review" progress post is what motivated me, but I realize that won't be to useful in late January. Stuff like the elves that you aren't looking forward to, but are part of a larger group, may be motivating to think of showing use the entire finished force together with those elves. Either way, good luck.

Thanks for the encouragement guys! It is true that maybe I should just ... tidy my desk like a normal person. I probably will do that but I am gonna see how long I can sustain this first!

Sitting half finished for ages on my table have been these bits of Dungeon Furniture. Just a couple braziers and a cauldron and offering bowl. Very simple paint jobs, grey stone and brass, with orange or green paint mixed with mixing medium to make a glaze for the fire and the bubbling broth. I could have painted properly on these surfaces, and maybe that would have looked better, but I wanted to make use of the transparent plastic that they engineer into these pieces. Kinda unsure if I really like that practice or not...


Then the Fire, Water, Air and Earth Elementals. Water and Fire just got medium + orange or turquoise paint, earth got grey-light-grey-off-white, earthshade and then gemstones picked out, and air elementals just got their little base nub painted stone. Really, REALLY easy, but now they are done and I think they look good. I actually want to use these in my Stormcast army which is gonna be elemental themed, thinking Air and Fire can sub in for the hunting hawks and Earth and Water for the Gryph Hounds.








Again, not sure if I really like the clear plastic for these but hey, it's a lot easier to paint than trying to replicate fire or water textures by hand, definitely looks better for air elementals, so I'm fine with it.

I like the elementals, but that earthy fist bump takes the cake

The fistbump was sadly unintentional now I can't unsee it.

Cracking on with my desk of shame, finally tackled a few minis I have been procrastinating on for over a year.

First, Demogorgon! This is a Demonic Lasher from Reaper, and the whole thing is one solid metal cast! A hefty chunk of metal, and really sturdy. I kinda love the simplicity of it. It's "small" by modern standards, but actually the right size for Demogorgon if you read the old materials or indeed the modern size accurately. For some reason in the Out of the Abyss adventure he is Kaiju sized, but the statblock says Huge. I see him as being the "leader" of my beastmen forces, the demon lord of beasts, mutation and madness. In game terms, I will be using him as a Slimey Beast, which is basically the Age of Fantasy version of a Jabberslythe. It's got a tongue attack to represent his tentacle arms, and a madness gaze that has always been part of Demogorgon's power set in game. The sculpt is simple and clean and was actually fun to paint, I mostly stalled thinking about what to do with the tentacles, and I am happy with what I decided in the end. The mandrill snouts are fun!






This shaman looks better in person, I promise. He is very dark, and it didn't come across well here. His cloak looks cool. I like the model now that he is DONE, but I hated painting him. So many dangly bits, so many difficult to reach details, and not really a very interesting pose on top of it. The combination of the head dangly bits, the dangly skulls, and the detailed interior of the cloak was just a nightmare to deal with. Done now, not doing another one!




Last of all is a Frostgrave Gnoll Barbarian. So, execution wise this paint scheme is not great. But I am happy with the scheme. I want my Gnolls to look like real Hyenas, so they are getting tan fur with dark brown spots and grey snouts. On this mini in particular this didn't work out great due to the giant bone he is carrying, but he has needed to be done for a long time and I am chuffed to have finished him. The Gnolls are going to be added to my Beastman army as "hunters" for Age of Fantasy, which are ambushing units, as well as Raiders, for the missile troops. I will also be using the ranger and his hyena as the packmaster of a pack of Chaos Hounds. I love Gnolls, and my favourite adventure the Caverns of Thracia has a bunch of them as one of the major bad guy factions, so I am excited to get these painted up.





I've got some Werewolves and a wee minotaur drying, so I will snap them later. Working on GW plastic Minotaurs now, which will be the last of the "traditional" beastmen before I get the Gnolls and hounds done. After that I will add some Bird People (Aaracroaka and Harpies from Nolzur's) and Centaurs the Beastmen force will be finished, which is pretty cool.
Here's the List for Age of Fantasy:
Shaman (Wizard 2) 55
Minotaur Boss with 2xHand Weapons 115 (Kromac the Ravenous in Beast Form)
10 Hunters with Great Weapons 130 (Gnolls with Great Weapons)
10 Warriors with full command 215 (Gors)
10 Elites with full command 225 (Bestigors)
10 Harpies 160 (Nolzur's harpies and bird men)
3 Minotaurs with Great Weapons 180
10 Raiders with bows (Ungors) 140
5 Raiders with Bows (Satyrs) 70
10 Raiders with Bows (Gnolls) 140
5 Havoc Hounds 105 (Gnoll tracker and hyena, chaos hounds)
5 Havoc Hounds 105 (Chaos hounds)
10 Centaurs 310 (Centaurs, those new hard plastic ones)
Hunter Chariot 145 (kitbash, planned to make from big skulls from the Cygor, chopsticks, coffee stirrers, 2 spare gnolls and 2 spare chaos hounds)
Cyclops with throw rocks 210 (Cygor)
Minotaur Giant 165 (Dragon Ogre Shaggoth)
Slimey Beast 190 (Demogorgon)

Pretty massive army. What I love about it is having different types of beastmen mixed together, Gnolls and Birdmen and Minotaurs along with the traditional Goat Men and Centaurs and a bunch of Chimeric monsters. Gotta make them a suitable Herdstone and stone circle to defend I reckon!

Demogorgon is a gorgeous mini! I always liked Demogorgon.

Beastmen! At the gates! Get the boiling oil!

I wanna do a siege game soon, so maybe my wife will do just that.

Been working on more beastmen, but before I post the finished pictures I got motivated to finish my last batch of home made resin dungeon tiles. They have spherical magnets inside so they "click" together and don't slide around on the table, and you can drag them around easily.

I made some "blanks" that I wanted to make into water tiles, so here is my test piece
1. Paint it teal

2. Splodge on some lighter teal

3. Dapple on some even lighter teal

4. Apply a layer of clear acrylic caulk to the top and rough it up a bit.


I think it looks cool. Obviously it is VERY blue, almost cartoonishly so, and water underground wouldn't look like that, but I think it reads better on the table if it is obviously water. I've made 7 resin tiles and am gonna make 3 more larger foamboard tiles to fill it out a bit, and that should be enough for a lot of sewer encounters or any pools or canals in dungeons.

That water tile turned out looking so beautiful! It's looking like a gem. That roughed up caulk added so much. Do you think the caulk will stay that crystal clear over time? Also a siege game sounds fun, I hope you get to do it.

Cheers! I did a pond like a year ago, and it is still clear, so I think this brand of caulk I'm using stays clear. Dead cheap as well, and way easier to work with than resin. I found the idea from a guy on Youtube called Red Beard Baron.


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I put a big burst of work on last night and got the rest of the resin tiles done and also made a couple of foamboard tiles of a bit bigger size.
Can't imagine I'll need bigger than a 40x40 foot area of water in my dungeons so I think this is enough. It can also do a fairly large sewer map, including a big pool for a junction or something.

I'm very pleased with the blue and the water effect from the caulk. It's still a bit tacky, I hope it settles down soon to be a bit less so.

Here's a close up on my foamboard tiles:


And here's the whole set:


With this, I suppose my dungeon tile system is nearly fully done. I have 24 more basic tiles and 11 spacers to do along with a couple more walls, but then I have as many as I think I would ever need. Maybe at some point I will make a couple more 4x4 tiles for bigger spaces, but I've got 9 4x4s, 60 single tiles, 8 diagonal half tiles, 4 big circular tiles and 8 small circular tiles, 17 tiles worth of water, 4 stair tiles and about 20 spacers. The walls were a cool idea but I think in practice I won't use them much, I have enough for a 9x9 room.

The only thing I don't have is cavern stuff. I just feel that is much better done with a battlemat and markers, maybe some cave themed scatter. Making a bunch of irregular tiles is always gonna be much more fussy, and they'll also be fussier to use on the table. I think the tile format really only works well for square rooms and so on.

I'll try and do some big layouts over the next week or so to show off what the set can do. I'm delighted with it, but obviously COVID means I won't have a chance to use it for a while.

That works really well!

Oooh yeah, layouts. Me like. Tiles are looking great!

I could never quite settle down on a particular style, so many competing pros and cons to sift through.

Layouts are here!
After a long time working on it, I now have a set that I think is pretty much done! Maybe I will add a couple more diagonal tiles to it to finish it off, but all the resin tiles are done for now and the water tiles are certainly finally done that increases the versitility quite a lot. I've thought about it and I've decided caverns are definitely gonna be battlemat plus scatter, because none of the advantages of tiles really apply to caverns in my opinion. I've made walls that clip on to this as well but only 12 or so and I don't think I'll use them often, they get in the way during play.

Here's the whole set! At it's widest point this is 32" across, each tile is 2"x2".


The water looks awesome I think. Obviously VERY blue but I think it looks so lovely I don't care about realism. This evokes water much more clearly!




I think this is enough for pretty much any game. If the dungeon is especially massive (and it bloody should be!) then I would just cannabilise the rear to make the front as we went.

Here's a sewer set up, it's a bit wide but if I wanted to narrow it I could just use the floor tiles for one half and water for the other.




Finally, I wanted to show something that is really important to me with this set. I want to be able to do complex interior set ups including interior walls with this, and the spacers are key to making that work. This is the map of the ground floor of a wizards tower in the campaign I am running. If you look, you can see that this tower has a series of interior walls and so on. Normally, that sort of thing is a pain to make with tiles or requires special wall pieces. My system makes it easy to make walls using the negative space created by adding spacers to corridors.


Here's my version:

The only thing I'm missing is a couple more diagonal pieces to fill in a few gaps, and maybe a spiral staircase instead of the straight one I've got. But apart from that I can present the map exactly as it is in the adventure, all the dimensions are the same. And this is really quick to put together, just throw the tiles down and when you need to make space for a wall just stick a spacer in to push things into the right orientation. I've used this in play and it is very fast and easy, even faster than drawing stuff out, so I think it is really useful. The spacers only work because they magnetically stick to the other tiles, and that's key to the functioning of the whole set. If they sat loose they would always move and slide around, but because the whole set interlocks magnetically, it holds it's shape beautifully once set up.

Great to use my Dungeon Saga furniture too, as well as a few bits and pieces from the D&D range.








I think this is probably my favourite project I have ever completed. I designed and executed it to fulfill certain criteria:
1. Modularity - I wanted everything to fit together in one system
2. Ease of use - I wanted to make this maximally easy to use at the table to ensure it actually got used
3. Aesthetically pleasing - I wanted it to look good
4. Affordable - I wanted a solution that didn't break the bank.

Casting the tiles from resin, using the magnets and using the spacers all helped to achieve those aims. A simple but effective paint scheme has it looking good.

I might post some pictures later in the week of some megadungeon layouts from Dungeon of the Mad Mage, hopefully with monsters this time! (The only monsters on this level of the tower were some elementals lurking in the braziers, a beetle swarm in the barrels, and some skeletons in the secret room.)

Definitely looks great. Excellent work!

Cheers! This week was rough. Been trying to paint for 30 minutes every day but definitely missed my target every day til Thursday.

But! I just grabbed the two minis I've been looking at. They're not part of any project in particular, but I thought eff it and just grabbed the Green and Blue Slaad. Slapped some washes and inks on them and the Blue started looking awesome straight away. I used the PP Turquoise ink for his skin and shaded it down a bit with Nightshade. His belly is mostly just nightshade with a blend in of the turquoise. Orange eyes, black spikes and a purple mouth. Really refreshing and fun and he looks great! Love the vibrant colour.
Just gotta milliput up the base and paint it and he's done after a touch up on his spikes and teeth.



The Green Slaad is a bit more complicated because he's wearing rags. I also think the green I used didn't colour him as strongly as the lovely ink, so he looks a bit washed out, but not too bad after two coats. He'll probably look better when I block in the other colours.


As usual, Nolzur's monsters are really fun to paint. These two are also lovely characterful sculpts. Slaad are such fun monsters and the available minis for them up to now have always been pretty bad, but these guys are really lovely. Tempted to pick up another Blue and a trio of Reds when they become available, which is probably all you'd ever need to run encounters with them. I have a grey and death slaad too, and might knock them out soon just to have a little set.

Trying to relax and enjoy messing around and it definitely worked this time. Unfortunately, quite a lot of my Nolzur's backlog is hero minis, and I don't tend to enjoy those quite as much! But I'll see what I feel like doing going forward. I'd like to finish them all up to be honest, they are really nice for games.

I like your Slaadi minis. I really enjoy painting Nolzure's also. I'm glad you are relaxing with them. I have more trouble wanting to paint PC minis, I feel like I want to wait until a player picks the mini and then paint it to their taste. Unfortunately, this means that all my PC minis even the ones being used aren't painted

Yeah the hero minis are often a lot more fiddly and annoying to paint, and with the slightly lower sculpt quality the effort in often doesn't result in a particularly inspiring result, in my case at least. But painted is always better than unpainted is what I try to tell myself!

Bit of progress on the Green Slaad. Gonna end up using him as a Slaan proxy for my Lizardmen for a bit I think! Age of Fantasy has a non-Palanquin option that fits this model well.
The paint is flaking a bit from the pre-primed areas. I found this to be a problem with these minis before. Gonna try sealing these as I am pretty happy with ow they are coming along. This guy looks a lot better with all the colours blocked in, now I just gotta do a few highlights and a last wash and he's ready to go.

They're looking good, I love the nolzurs stuff.

Cheers! Yeah it's a bit dangerous because they sit exactly in the impulse buy range and there are so many fun ones. I'm gonna try to clear out all my unfinished ones before getting any more!
On that note, here's the frogs pre-seal. I'll put a couple tufts on their bases after I give them a coat of sealant.


Really fun bunch of minis. Looking forward to doing a group of Reds and maybe one more Blue to finish them off.

I also finally "painted" my Gelatinous Cube. Just did the weapons and skeletons inside. It's a great concept for the monster and I love it to bits. The plastic is also tinted slightly purple, which is great.
If you haven't seen it, you can open it up and put a mini "inside" it to represent it's Engulf ability, which is just great fun.






Working on a Rust Monster now, and then back to some beastmen. Just wanted to take a break with some simpler minis for some easy wins.

Sometimes easy wins are the only ones you get for longer than you'd like! Take 'em when you can

That's a nice cube, I made a couple out of clamshell toy packaging and hotglue but I think that one does a better job. The bits that go inside are fancy.

Yeah I was tempted to try to make my own, in fact I tried to from hot glue, but unfortunately it went opaque afterwards (I was inexperienced with it when I tried that out). So now it's just a white ooze of some sort...

But when I saw this one I was just tickled by the playset nature of it and picked it up.

That is quite a clever gelatinous cube! I've definitely nearly lost a character or two to those in my days...

Yup, it's an absolute classic. Can't wait to use this one on a group of newbies!

Continuing on my Nolzur's binge (which is really good, because a lot of my backlog is Nolzur's...) I've done a quick and easy Rust Monster:

Weird little mini. It has really spindly legs so they put a flying base type thing under it. But these things are great for the kind of classic adventures I like to run. And he comes with a little snack pile! Adorable.

And then a Marilith! I painted her simply with washes and inks for the most part. The model has serious mold lines unfortunately and I'm not too pushed about fixing them on a 6 euro mini like this. She's gonna double as a Daemon Champion (Daemon Prince) for my Slaanesh Daemons for Age of Fantasy, so I've painted the human parts of her in the same scheme I plan for my Daemonettes. The Age of Fantasy Slaanesh Daemon Prince has 12 attacks and access to a tail attack upgrade, so that works perfectly for her. I put her on a Warp-stuff base like my other daemons. This was a really easy paintjob but I think it looks pretty good!



Gonna seal all of these tomorrow and then move on. Great to be making a dent in the stuff that's been clogging my desk for nearly two years!

Your progress is heartening indeed! Rust monsters are adorable.

For the G Cube, have you considered putting one at the bottom of a 20 foot pit? Instant engulf and hard to help them out.

Also great for a T intersection with a portcullis that slams down after you pass into the perpendicular hallways. The ooze is in one direction with the portcullis reset lever behind it!

Funny you should mention that! Doing the Cube got me thinking about pits, and I tried my hand at making a spiked pit tile. It's just a 50mm renedra base with the trap painted on. I'm no Bob Ross, but for a first attempt you can at least tell what it is supposed to be. Gonna do another spiked one, then two with bare bottoms, then a few that are just falling away into darkness. Pit traps are a common feature in my dungeon. Seen a lot of crafting channels make ones with detailed bottoms and so on but I like the fact that these are very compact and stackable.

Can you place your other tiles over top of that without it being noticeable? That would a really fun reveal moment.

That's really great pit trap artwork IMO, works extremely well