I already documented the entire build process for this bell tower a long time ago. This is really just a small post while I'm going through all the photos I took to make sure I'm properly sharing the beauty shots I made of this piece. It was one of the biggest builds I've done.

This one is quite interesting to me because it represents the bell tower of Tarnopol, a place described in "Mariemburg, Sold Down the River", a guide to Marienburg for Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing Game first edition that I loved. It's this bell tower where orphans live, and it left an impression on me, so I wanted to recreate it.

This build was nice because there were quite a few techniques I was discovering while doing it. Wood, foam bricks, very easy stone painting and very easy wood painting too, with flocking all around which holds really well. It's super solid.

It's a build I appreciate a lot, even though it's simple and I don't really know when I'll need it. I like it a lot because it evokes something for me.

Quick documentation of a batch of dragons I once painted. I figured it would be good to have a dragon miniature of each color in case my players ever encounter one.

To be honest, in over 10 years as a game master, I've never actually had my players face off against a dragon. But I still think it's such an iconic and mythical creature, so I wanted to try painting them according to the different color schemes that exist, and tell myself I have a miniature for each of the dragon types.

Collecting dragon figurines can get pretty expensive. Most of mine are actually secondhand. I usually find broken ones, missing a leg or wing or something, but after buying enough of them over time, I've accumulated spare parts to frankenstein together my own creations. Kind of like Sid from Toy Story.

The red dragon is apparently a pretty common plastic figurine (I've found more than one), but the wings are always broken. So I grabbed wings from another toy I found cheap at a junk store. It was a Lego knockoff where all the pieces come apart, so I salvaged the wings and glued them onto the poor red dragon.

The blue dragon you see in the middle had a similar fate. It was a toy that was missing the legs and I think it was missing an arm, so there too I glued arms and legs from the same fake Lego figurine that I had already used on the red dragon. It gives it a somewhat hyper-muscular look as a dragon. It's not my most successful creation.

This one was originally a Skylander figurine, it was a Spyro the dragon figurine. I cut off Spyro's head because it was way too recognizable and way too cute and instead I glued on again the head of that dragon as a spare part.

Finally, the black dragon is a fairly cheap plastic dragon. It was complete but the wings looked really ugly so I think I cut them off. Instead, I glued on some shriveled wings that I had salvaged from another toy. I really like these because they have a look as if they were really old and damaged.

I also got this black dragon figurine from Monster Hunter in a really dynamic pose with excellent sculpt quality. I picked it up on AliExpress for pretty cheap, thinking I could easily mod it into something even better. Since the pose is so dynamic, I mounted it on a special plastic base I had that already has a mountain sculpted on it.

Here is a small family photo once the bases were made. There are a few others in the pile you can see in the background. There's a zombie dragon that comes from the Zombicide board game that I've had for a long time, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to paint it too.

The green dragon on the side is actually an emerald dragon. The sculpture is really cool because there are actually pieces of emerald pretty much everywhere. I mounted it on a base where I wanted to make it look like it was walking on a partially destroyed city.

A few others. The Green Dragon is a recovered toy. I didn't make too many modifications on it. I just glued the arms in a fixed position because otherwise they could move.

The mini tarrasque in the back, I don't remember where it comes from, but same, it's a cheap little plastic toy. The red dragon in the back comes from the Dungeons and Dragons board game, and the one in front is a Monster Hunter figurine.

As you can see, I totally went off the original colors! The blue one was my black dragon from Monster Hunter, but I really love the blue and yellow contrast, it looks amazing.

The black dragon in the back was originally red. It's the one that was missing wings and where I glued new ones on. With the slightly greenish base, it looks like it comes from a swamp, which I really like. Very thematic for a Black Dragon.

The red dragon from the Dungeon & Dragons board game, I stuck with the traditional red color and it works really well.

And then there's the little plastic toy that I turned into a green dragon.

Everything was painted with speedpaints. They're incredible for transforming cheap plastic toys into something that looks impressive on the table or building a nice collection of dragon miniatures.

I've already posted articles on this blog about how I made different types of furnaces, like a large rectangular one and some other somewhat strange devices. I've made a few others too, and this is another attempt to document that process.

Not much to say really. The main structure is plastic baby toys, the kind that fit into each other and babies can chew on. They have an interesting shape though. I glued them onto heavy metal washers so they stand upright, then added plastic flower pieces on the edges and bottom to make them look like drainage pipes.

And here they are, the same ones after going through the painting process. I started with a black undercoat on everything, then did a metallic dry brush on the metal parts, and an orange dry brush on everything for that rusty look.

After that I dabbed yellow paint on the parts where paint is supposed to be, but I deliberately didn't follow it perfectly. I think I also manually added a few rust lines with very diluted black paint, and finished with a thick brown wash over the top for that extra rusty effect.

And there you have it, my rusty baby toys!

Just a quick post to document my current collection of Mimics. I really love Mimics. They're super fun to paint. The half-decor aspect and those big purple parts make them very enjoyable to work on.

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.

Just sharing a few photos of some dogs I painted with my speedpaints. Speedpaints are really quite magical because even on miniatures like these that are relatively smooth (at least the brown dogs), just a single coat of speedpaint gives a relatively acceptable effect. A more experienced painter could have done something much better, but I'm fine with that quality level.

Similarly on the wolf in the middle, it's also a single layer of speedpaint, and since there are lots of details, it looks even better. Speedpaints have really been a revolutionary discovery for me in the way I paint. I go 3 to 4 times faster and I enjoy it much more because I can put painted stuff of very good quality on the table much more quickly and easily.

Quick share about some furniture pieces in my collection that are actually from Disney toys. The two beds are Elsa and Anna's beds from a Frozen castle toy set. I think the chest, wardrobe and chair come from a Tangled toy.

The little figurines are completely the wrong size, but the small furniture elements are perfect scale and super practical to reuse. They're made in one solid piece of plastic, the chest actually opens so you can put things inside, there's nothing to assemble, it's super solid and works right out of the box.

It's obviously very expensive if you buy it new just for that, but if you get the chance to find some, they're perfect.

I don't really have photos of the build process for these debris pieces. I made a batch of 2x2 tiles like you see, following the Wyloch technique (at least in terms of shape with small walls, not using the same materials).

I needed to make tiles to indicate that the path was blocked, so I made big debris pieces like that. The majority of the space is filled with crumpled aluminium foil, on top of which I glued some foam bricks, pieces of stuff that came from here and there, a little bit of wood for collapsed beams, and then a mixture of dirt and spackle to cover it all.

It works well, but if I had to do it again, I wouldn't put it directly on tiles. I'd make it as a scatter terrain element that I can place wherever I want to indicate that something is blocked. Because in the end it turned out really well, but I can only use it when I'm using tiles of that specific size. I can much more difficultly use it on a battle map for example.

I'm going to document a set of doors I made.

I had started making foam tiles like you can see in this first image, but they're a bit thick. To be able to indicate that there's a door on the right or on the left, it was difficult for me to position the doors I already had. Either they clipped onto walls (but I stopped putting walls on the edges of my tiles), or they lay flat to separate two rooms, which works well on a flip mat but doesn't work very well here.

So I needed something I could put on the sides to indicate a door that can be opened. I needed those doors to be sturdy and not fall easily. I thought a bit about the right design to manage to do that and that's what I'm going to document here.

Here's the heart of what I'm making. I have this base piece, which is a wooden plank. I don't remember where I got it from, but I recovered a big bag of them from a wooden construction toy set for kids. They're all exactly the same size, about 3cm wide, which is perfect size for my tiles.

What I did was glue a small piece of right-angled plastic at the bottom. I found it at a hardware store. Not even sure what it's meant for, maybe molding or electrical wires. The advantage is that the right angle is already built into the material, so I don't have to make it myself. That's important because if I made it, it might not be perfectly straight, but with this I know it is, and it's going to be solid too.

I set up my little assembly line so I could make them all together. I start by gluing this small piece at a right angle at the bottom, which serves two purposes: it helps make sure the door stays flat on the ground, and it's a little thing I can slide underneath the tile to make sure it holds well.

Next up, I glued the wooden pieces directly on top. I searched through my collection of coffee stirrers and popsicle sticks. My idea was to be able to glue a certain number of them side by side without having to cut them lengthwise.

If I used popsicle sticks, they would stick out a little bit, so I took other wooden sticks that were a bit smaller. That way, it allows me to place them side by side. I'm really trying to simplify everything I can in my assembly line as much as possible, so the less I have to cut, the better off I am.

That's why I glued them all on top, and you can see that I made them stick out above. That way, it allows me to cut them flush once they're glued, rather than having to measure in advance.

And there you have it, with the top cut off.

I'm doing the same operation on the other side, but I also took the opportunity to sand the top a bit where I cut to make it a little smoother.

And there you have it, all the planks are glued! As you can see, I added a little piece of foam at the bottom to compensate for the width added by the small pieces of wood. The next step will be to cover all of this with foam that will be used to represent stone.

I covered everything with foam boards that I carved to look like stone, and glued different things for the handle.

And there you have it! This is what it looks like once painted. I just did the dry brush on the stone and on the wood. I'll go over it again with a black wash afterwards, which will help to even it all out a little bit better.

Here are some beauty shots of a terrain piece I made when I first started painting. The cannon itself I recovered from some children's game I found at a yard sale, though I can't remember which game anymore.

I didn't do anything special to it. The piece was already like that with a pretty decent sculpture. I just painted it. This was really at my very beginning when I was discovering dry brushing and learning how to paint metal. It was practice for me to figure out what worked well with metallic paints, which parts needed silver, which could be gold, and how to apply washes.

I think I ended up giving this piece away because it was way too specific. None of my role playing game sessions ever needed a huge cannon like that, so it was just taking up space.