I wanted to document the stuff I find at flea markets. All of these are things I found and have either reused or plan to reuse in projects.

There are Skylanders figurines with interesting shapes, including a dragon one that I repainted. I also picked up plastic shapes like fake rocks, mounds, bushes, and logs. Some I used almost as is (the rocks and logs worked great).

I found barriers too. The small ones I mounted on cardboard to make fences, which turned out well. The big ones I sometimes cut up to salvage the textures for making wood pieces.

The different figurines got turned into statues or I painted them directly. The herbivore became its own figurine. And that little house in the bottom left? I covered it with fake planks and turned it into a cottage.

I keep finding this Skylanders bases as well. You know, the portal thing where you put the figurines? It's basically already a perfect summoning circle. Wouldn't take much to turn it into something awesome. Pretty sure there's space underneath for LEDs too, so I could add some cool colored lighting effects. It's been sitting in my box for years. Really need to convert it into a proper summoning circle with lights one of these days.

When I saw this Roman assault chariot from Playmobil I immediately thought it would be perfect for a conversion project. I'm thinking either a goblin assault chariot or a static goblin tower.

I'm picturing wooden protection panels where each plank is a different size - really messy and chaotic looking. This could totally work as a goblin piece.

I made this element for my asylum scenario and reused it later in a distillery scenario. The idea was to create a very large barrel or tank with liquid inside.

At its core, it's really just a cardboard cup that I sanded and surrounded with popsicle sticks. Of course we're going to embellish all that a bit, but there you have it - that's what it's made of at its very foundation.

I taped the popsicle sticks to a support so I could have them all next to each other. That made it super easy to scratch the surface with a Swiss Army knife to create the wood grain marks.

Way easier than doing them one by one. Plus I only needed the marks on one side, so having them all fixed in place meant I could work on them in blocks all at once.

I checked the height and it's roughly the same as a decorative ladder I got from an Mantic crate.

I added small pieces of cardboard on top to symbolize metal plates. Just crumpled up some cardboard and glued the elements so they overlap each other. This makes it really easy to hide the joints where you'd see the cup underneath.

I also added a hoop around it - just a strip of cardboard with a few small steampunk-style decorations to give it a metallic look.

The size is perfect! There's enough room to fit a figurine inside. We've already reused it in a couple of scenarios where a monster gets stuck inside.

Here's a painted version before I added the Nuln Oil on the metallic parts.

We finish with a few beauty shots of the completed element with a miniature next to it to show the scale a little bit.

They're the bats from the Warhammer Quest base box.

I've had these for decades. Got them when I was a teenager in the original Warhammer Quest box. Never painted them properly back then (or if I did, it was pretty terrible).

Looking at the photos now, I realize they look a little goofy, but that's always been how giant bats were depicted in Warhammer Quest, and thus, in my mind. I'm happy to have finally painted them 20-30 years later!

The classic photo of the work in progress.

And a few photos taken from the sides.

In my asylum scenario, at one point the players find a closed door. They're told not to go to the other side because there's this weird sludge on the door itself. There's even an eye in the middle that's crying. This turns into an encounter against this door that they have to break through to get to the other side.

At first I didn't think to make a specific terrain for that, but I actually had this piece in my bits box that ended up being perfect for it. So I mounted it on a wall and painted it.

There's a second version with this face and this big hand that comes out of it. When the door starts to animate, the wall progressively advances and is ready to completely engulf the players.

Here are a few additional photos so you can really see it from all angles. It gives the impression that the wall is advancing to try to catch the characters.

Here's a picture showing the two versions of the wall. They normally stack on top of each other with the head at the top. At the bottom, the protrusion is supposed to be a knee sticking out, I think. I'm not sure which game or toy this figure originally came from.

Quick update on a monster painting project I finished last year.

I like to paint my monsters in batches of 10-12 at a time so they look cohesive with matching color schemes. For this group, I grabbed a bunch of really weird and bizarre miniatures and painted them as otherworldly creatures. Think creatures from The Great Beyond in Pathfinder - that kind of vibe.

I went with blue and purple as the main colors, with a little touch of red here and there.

The big creature on the right is a plastic toy. Normally those pustules are eyes - I think it's from a movie or cartoon but I'm not sure exactly what. I thought it would look pretty cool once repainted like this.

The figurine in the middle that looks like some kind of butterfly is actually metal. No idea where it's from, but honestly it looks really poorly sculpted. Doesn't seem like it was made by a professional - more like what someone without great sculpting skills would create.

Behind those, there are quite a few little Pokémon figurines that I repainted in different colors to make them look like creatures from the Great Beyond. I have absolutely no experience with Pokémon though, so I have no clue what they're normally supposed to represent.

I think I already posted an article on this blog explaining how I made this house. It's one of the very first projects I did. That post has quite a few beauty shot photos of the house itself.

So if you look at the underside, the main structure is actually a wooden toy my daughter used to play with when she was little. Instead of throwing it away when she outgrew it, I just glued bricks all around it - both on the ground floor and upstairs. Then I added wood pieces made of foam in different spots, and put tiles on the roof.

It was a great way to practice all the basic techniques I learned from watching Black Magic Craft and other YouTube creators. Really helped me nail down the fundamentals by starting with an existing frame instead of building from scratch.

The original building has that hole in the roof which makes it easy for children to catch the toy. I found that it was perfect for Mordheim to symbolize a house that was destroyed, potentially by a meteorite impact.

Wanted a break from terrain work so I decided to paint some miniatures. I realized my skeleton collection is a bit of a mess - I've got the original Games Workshop ones, some from the D&D board game, and random ones I've picked up at flea markets. They all have different paint schemes and scales which bugs me.

Since skeletons are such a classic monster for games, I figured I should have a uniform group. So I bought some new ones (can't remember the brand or where from), simple multi-piece models, just basic skeletons. Got them on their bases, added my usual basing mixture, and now I'm ready to paint them all up to match.

I do my base coating in several stages. First, I base coat everything in black so that any unpainted spots don't show too much. Then I apply a bit of gray on the front, top, and back. After that, I do a white zenithal over it.

Back at my workshop, I do a white dry brush using Army Painter's Fanatic Paints - it has really good coverage. It might be overkill, maybe the gray layer isn't needed, or maybe the zenithal prime isn't either, but that's my current technique and it works well. I might remove a step later to save time, but for now I'm happy with it.

It gives a lot of color variation on the miniatures, which makes the speedpaints work really well over it.

And there you have it! This is what it looks like once I add the speedpaint on top.

I have two colors that I really like (Pallid Bone and Bony Matter) for making skeleton colors. Some of these I did directly on my undercoat, and others I did on a first layer of Bone White as a base color. That way it gives me a bit of variation in the final look.

And there they are: finished and stored on the shelf.

Quick doc on some scatter terrain I made. Basically just rocks for forest encounters.

I grabbed plastic rocks from various toy sets (Mega Bloks and others). What I like about them is they already have a natural rock shape, even though the texture is pretty smooth. They're also really solid which is great.

I glued them onto cardboard bases, then covered everything with a mix of glue, filler, and small pebbles/stones. This gives the smooth plastic surface more texture and roughness so they look more realistic.

Pretty simple project but they'll work great for adding some quick terrain to outdoor scenes.

I wanted to make some rock formation scatter terrain, and I had this idea. I could use those small pieces of plastic from some packaging I saved. I don't even remember what I ordered, but the shapes were pretty interesting, kind of irregular and going in all directions. So I figured, why not use those as a base and turn them into rocks?

And there you have it! This is what it looks like once you've added a bit of filling compound on top, mixed with a few pebbles, and applied a light dry brush over it. It's starting to look like rock formations.

I applied different colored inks on top to add some color variation to the rock underneath. Rocks in nature are never completely gray, so I used organic colors like brown and green, plus a bit of yellow and blue to break up the monotony.

Here they are drying with a few other scenery pieces I made along the way. I added plenty of flocking on top and completely soaked them with water mixed with paint and flow aid.

The flow aid helps everything absorb well everywhere, and when it dries, everything will be stuck on properly. My flocking won't come off.

I had zero trees for terrain, so I started an adventure trying to make some with whatever materials I had on hand. Not sure what the best approach is, but I figured it'd be good to have some scatter terrain for forest scenes.

I ran a bunch of tests with different materials:

• Mobile trees I already had
• Various toy trees I recovered
• Aquarium toys and plants
• Real branches from outside
• Basically anything I could find

This is my documentation of what I tried, what worked well, and what flopped.

Here you can see I tried to glue some aquarium plants around different shapes.

In the middle, the two white things are plastic tubes. I think they were originally tubes for texture rollers. I covered them with "bark" made with a hot glue gun, and glued different aquarium plants next to and on top of them.

My idea at that stage was to see if the plants, once painted, would look good enough, or if I'd need to cover them with additional textures.

I started painting the wood of the trunks and the ground. It wasn't super easy because I had to avoid painting the plants directly.

At this stage we have something that's not bad. The basic framework is a plastic toy on which I added bark myself with a glue gun and it looks good - the color is right, the base is good.

The issue is that the plastic plants are obviously plastic and they stand out from the rest. Even the canopy as it's made, you can tell it's plastic. I need to do a bit better than that.

Here, I started doing something interesting on another one of these trees. I actually started gluing flocking over all the visible areas on top. Here's the process I followed:

• Put loads of glue down
• Applied flocking over it
• Then reapplied a mixture of water, glue and flow aid so it absorbs completely and stays stuck

Working pretty well so far!

Here's a later progress shot. I also tried something interesting - applying extremely diluted black paint to the plastic plants to tone down their artificial look.

I don't remember the exact details anymore (was it black ink? dark green ink? did I dip them or brush it on?), but I know it really helped. It softened that obvious plastic appearance and made the trees blend together much more naturally.

For applying flocking on large areas, what worked best for me was to completely cover the surface with spackling paste first, then press the flocking by hand on top so it has something to grip onto. After that, I spray it with water and glue. Super messy and gets everywhere, but the final effect really gives that nice mass of flocking look.

I tried gluing it directly onto plastic plants, thinking the branches going in different directions would create a more natural effect, but honestly it's even messier and not really worth it.

If I had to do it again, I'd take balls of aluminum foil, cover them with the texture, and flatten the flocking on top. The key is really the shape itself more than having it go in all different directions.