I tried to make a bonfire or pyre (the kind you'd use to burn a witch in a scenario), but I messed it up a bit. It ended up looking more like a pile of debris or scatter terrain, like what you'd see where a ceiling collapsed or in a ruined house.

The base is plastic to give it some volume. I added wooden planks made from popsicle sticks and cement, plus some stone pieces made with gravel.

I still use it from time to time, but honestly it takes up quite a bit of storage space. It's pretty tall but doesn't really add much to the battlefield. It's just scatter terrain that takes up space and isn't particularly beautiful or evocative. I think it's the kind of thing I should redo and get rid of.

Just finished painting these Warhammer Quest rats I've had sitting around since I was a teenager! Pretty happy I finally crossed them off my to-do list after all these years.

What I really like about these minis is that they hit a sweet spot. They're big enough to look imposing without being dire rats (you know, those gigantic ones with spikes and crazy fangs). And they're individual models, not a swarm.

They're perfect for representing those level 1 low-threat enemies that still feel like a coherent challenge when you're just starting out.

The initial Warhammer Quest miniatures come with feet molded directly onto hard plastic bases so they can stand on their own. I removed those plastic parts and mounted them on traditional sized bases instead.

For the base texture, I applied a slightly wet filler mixture and used a roller to create a tile pattern. The effect isn't perfect since the roller didn't catch everywhere, but I used those gaps to my advantage to make it look like tiles half covered with mud.

For the painting, it's speedpaint. On each of the rats, I tried to mix two different speedpaints while it was still wet and blend them a little to try to give a bit more subtlety to the fur. In the end, since the sculpture is so small and my colors are so similar, it's barely noticeable.

This post is a placeholder to explain how I make lava bases. This is the first time I've done it, and I did it here for Devils. I think I did pretty well, so I want to document this to be able to do it again in the future.

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I started by making my bases as usual, the kind I normally make that look a bit like mud. It's a mixture of filler paste with gravel and glue that I put on the base. Originally I hadn't planned to make lava bases, I had planned to make normal bases, so I started like that.

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I'm working with Real Colors Markers from AK brand. I have two colors: a yellow one (reference RCM004) and a very dark gray, almost black anthracite one (reference RCM001).

With the yellow marker, I started tracing where I think there's lava. I generally follow the contours of the central island where my character is, then I make lines going to the edge. I try to make sure the character isn't sitting on an island in the middle. While I mostly follow the relief, I sometimes add small islands of earth even when there's no particular relief, just to get that lava effect.

So I do all of that in pure yellow, and then everything else that's supposed to be stone, I do with the black marker.

The cool thing is that from a distance, the lava effect already worked really well even before the first dry brush or adding orange. Just the yellow lines and brown contours were enough. Then it was just about adding more detail progressively.

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Next step: I took Wolf Grey from Vallejo and did a fairly light dry brushing on all the stone parts, which gives a slightly ashy appearance that works really well. I applied that to absolutely all the stone areas.

Then I grabbed some Game Color Carne Marron, which is a kind of slightly reddish brown that looks a bit like reddish mud. The important thing is that it leans a little more towards brown than red (I tried with a deeper red initially, and the drybrush just turned pink). With that, I did a dry brushing from the bottom of the islands towards the top, starting from where the lava is and going upward. This gives a nice effect as if the slightly glowing lava was illuminating the stone blocks.

I also applied it on all the areas with flat stone surfaces. I did a very quick brushing from the outside towards the inside on the edges, which means that on the large stone blocks, the center just stays with the grey dry brushing.

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So at that point I started using some less orthodox techniques. I grabbed a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen Brush in Scarlet Red (it's kind of orange) and followed all the outlines of the stone islands on the yellow parts.

I pushed the orange a bit more towards the center because from what I've noticed about lava, there are rarely large expanses of yellow. The yellow seems to really only be in the super hot center, so I preferred to have the orange advance a little further in. For this part I didn't do a straight line along the edges, but rather a lot of small lines perpendicular to the edge, to make it more natural.

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For the next phase, I took another marker, a STAEDTLER from their Lumo Color Permanent range. I went with red this time.

I used it to retrace the outline exactly where the stone and lava meet. This adds a really nice red edge right at the point where the two surfaces touch.

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Then I covered all the lava with Zealot Yellow speedpaint. It gives it a slightly orange tint but you can still see through it. The Zealot Yellow Speed Paint helps unify everything and softens the rough layers nicely.

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Final phase here: since the Zealot Yellow tones down the yellow areas a bit, I grab my AK Marker yellow again. In the spots where there are large lava expanses with yellow inside that got toned down, I make tiny little pencil strokes to create small dots in the center.

It's a bit rough, not perfect, but a few seconds later, working base by base, I take a brush and just wet it (no ink, no paint at all). Then I spread out what I did with the Marker so those visible splotches get softened. This really helps bring out the yellow in the center of the lava and gives it that molten look.

The trickiest part is that you have to work super fast. Sometimes I don't even do a whole base at once, just small bits at a time. Right after applying each bit, I spread it with a wet brush because the marker dries incredibly fast and the effect doesn't work as well if you wait.

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Finally finished painting the contours of the bases in black. Pretty happy with how these lava bases turned out, especially since it's my first time trying this technique!

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The key is thinking about it like this: the closer to the center of the lava areas, the more yellow. The closer to the stone edges, the more red. The strong contrast between the black stone and the lava makes it work really well.

What's really nice is that most of the painting work is done with AK markers. That means I can work on it bit by bit without having to pull out all my painting gear. My work desk is also my hobby painting workspace, so when I'm on calls with colleagues, I can make progress on the parts that can be done with a marker. It really doesn't require any focus from me, so I can do it while discussing work stuff on our regular calls. I don't need to set up any equipment, I just cap the marker when I'm done, put the miniature aside, and that's it. About 90% of the project can be done this way.

Once again, for my scenario in the asylum where the character starts locked in prisons in the basement, I obviously needed prisons for that. At that time, I thought doing everything with tiles was a good idea so I followed that format, I made tiles that contain prison bars.

In hindsight, I realize they're not the easiest things to work with. I'd prefer now to just have a wall prop with bars that I can position wherever I want. That's not what I did though. I integrated them directly onto the tile and we'll see how I made that.

Here's what the foundation looks like. The structure is made of square wood pieces that I ordered by the hundreds on Aliexpress. The advantage is they all have exactly the same dimensions, so I don't have to worry about measuring, and it lets me make tiles where each square is 3cm x 3cm.

On top, I'm using textured wallpaper that I cut into squares and glue down. For the bars themselves, I take a strip of polystyrene, stick toothpicks into it, and put another strip of polystyrene on top.

Some of them have working doors. You can see the gray ones are actually made with Lego pieces stacked on each other. I trimmed off the little studs on top and only glued them on one side to one of the toothpicks, so the door can actually open.

And there you have it! After a first coat of classic stone paint on the floor and on the top and bottom of the bars, and rust made with orange on the bars themselves.

Here is one of the most disgusting terrains I've probably ever had to make, but it's for the introduction scene of the scenario in Briarstone.

The players have to climb a pile of corpses to be able to get out of the basement, and I wanted to make that element. So I gathered a bunch of old miniatures that I don't use and tried to make a pile out of them.

So I started digging through my pile of old useless miniatures. It's a mix of stuff I bought already painted at flea markets (which I don't really like since I prefer painting my own), things I painted myself ages ago, plastic miniatures like Heroclix with pretty rough sculpting, and random little plastic toys that might be the right scale but with ugly sculpts. I was looking to see if I could find enough pieces large enough to use and roughly the right scale.

And there you have it, that's what I managed to find. It's not a huge pile but I figured it would probably be enough for what I wanted to do.

To save on miniatures, I started making the majority of the pile with just a ball of aluminum foil and glued the miniatures on top. To get them to bend enough so they'd conform to the shape and not be too rigid, I used a hair dryer to heat the plastic. This let me twist the miniatures slightly before gluing them in place.

I cut off protruding arms and legs to keep the idea of a big shapeless mass of corpses, and then I glued those cut off pieces back in other places.

I added glue on the areas where there were no bodies and sprinkled sand and slightly larger pebbles. I added plenty of glue and water mixture on top to keep it all in place, and it helps show the impression of having a rockfall with bodies emerging from it.

I started with the flesh parts using Necrotic Flesh. For everything else, I'll be using speedpaints.

This post is going to be about some photos I took when I first started crafting. It was already a few years ago, back in 2021. I remember thinking at the time, "I've wanted to do this since I was a teenager, and now I'm finally going to do it for real." So I followed tutorials and started making stuff.

These are photos of the very first things I made. I was super proud of them back then, but honestly, they look a bit cheap to me today.

Here's my table from back then. I didn't really have a dedicated space, so I had to use the living room table. Every evening when I wanted to work on stuff, I'd put down a tablecloth and paint. I did everything in batches, so all the pieces I had built got batched with Mod Podge and black paint together.

Back when I first started with this hobby, I stored all my constructions in the living room. I had requisitioned some shelves and squares of our IKEA furniture to organize everything. I kept my things in boxes and took them out one by one to work on them, which was a lot of effort.

Once I finished with the projects, I would stack them in a corner of my desk (actually still in the living room corner). Now I finally have a dedicated workshop space for this, and it's so much more pleasant to work with.

During this time I discovered that flocking is actually a secret weapon for creating scenery. First, it helps fill in gaps and hide spots where we didn't do the work properly. But on top of that, just adding a bit of grass or a few leaves instantly gives an impression of scale and makes everything feel alive. The transformation between without flocking and with flocking was magical to me.

This is a bunch of stuff I picked at a yard sale! Let me tell you what I did with it all.

• Starting with the red-roofed house: honestly couldn't do much with it since it was already in pretty rough shape and didn't hold together well. Pretty sure I just ended up trashing it.
• The yellow-roofed house was actually a garage, and I turned that into a forge! Used the base and added a bunch of bricks around it. Came out pretty cool.
• All those dragon pieces you see? I reassembled them into complete dragons and painted them.
• For the green and blue building parts, I used one to make my necromancer tower. The other one is still sitting in a box waiting for a project.
• The blue and red cylindrical pieces became boilers and various other things.
• There are some figurines that I might have repainted. Everything else is still sitting in my bits box.

That all came from a board game. I recovered everything because the sculpt on the tower is really quite good, and it's already a tower without much effort.

I recovered the boats thinking that one day I could use them as a framework to make my own boat myself, which has still never happened. I still have those pieces years later.

The thing is, I only do role playing games and not really wargaming, so having a tower isn't that useful. But I don't give up hope of one day finding a group to do wargaming and being able to use it.

Here are a few photos of work in progress projects. In the second photo, you can clearly see the black garage I mentioned earlier that I managed to transform into a forge.

Then the house with the stairs running around it, I never ended up doing anything with it in the end. I'm even not sure if I kept the piece.

And for the arch, I initially wanted to make a large scene with an arch and a menhir in the middle. I ended up just putting the two parts of the arch on individual bases and it's much more useful that way.

Here's a potentially useful set of pieces I recovered from a Megablocks game, I think. There are some things I have used to make bases, and others that I kept because I found the texture interesting.

And here is my complete collection of scenery at the end of 2021, when I moved into my new house where I had more space to display them.

For once, this post will be a mix of many things. Lots of photos I took as I went along crafting, without there really being an underlying theme above it all. But I wanted to share a little bit of the state of my workshop throughout the different productions of 2024.

Here is a test run of a dungeon I created for my players to wrap up a campaign we had in Magnimar. It's heavily inspired by and very slightly adapted from Jelinda's Gauntlet, which was made by Wyloch. It's a dungeon that plays with time travel mechanics.

The players go through the dungeon twice: once in the present and then once in the past, where the events they witnessed previously now impact what they're doing in that moment. I wanted to test if I had enough tiles to pull it off. I had almost everything, but still needed to craft a few more pieces.

This time it's a set of tiles and scenery pieces that I made for a different campaign, the one where they're in the Briarstone Asylum. I painted tons of stuff from Mantic Crates. My workbench was packed with a mix of things I was actively building and pieces in the painting stage.

Once again, a very eclectic side here. I've got tiles I made for the different corridors of the asylum, and then there's something the players discover in one of the very first rooms: a pile of corpses they have to climb over to get out of the basement. They only encounter it once, but I figured whether for a role-playing game session or for wargames, a pile of corpses is something that should come in handy pretty often.

I also spent a little bit of time organizing my Bitsbox. It was full of plastic pieces that I had salvaged from Warhammer miniatures that I had when I was a teenager. At some point in my early twenties, I started trying to paint them again but I wanted to only do conversions, meaning cutting an arm from one place to glue it to another, etc. So I had dismantled a bunch of miniatures and that's pretty much everything I had salvaged. But since it was a mess, I spent some time sorting it into a box with a compartment for heads, a compartment for legs, a compartment for torsos, etc.

Today I realized that back then, I really enjoyed the creative aspect of converting miniatures using parts from different models. It was something I loved doing.

Nowadays though, I find it much easier to just get miniatures directly. I find plenty at garage sales, and the overall quality has improved so much. There are way more sellers than just Games Workshop now, and I can get really good miniatures for cheap. So I'm less motivated to build custom ones.

I don't really do those sessions anymore where I'd swap arms and parts between different miniatures to create something unique. But I know that feeling might come back someday, so I'm keeping all those extra bits just in case.

A lot of different minis. I actually just discovered speedpaints when I took this picture and it made me want to paint lots of things. So there are plastic Gormiti figurines, things from different publishers, old figurines I'm repainting. I tried everything basically. It became so easy to give a second life to anything through speedpaints that I just went to work on everything I had.

Here are some photos of my painting steps! I started painting kobolds using skink miniatures from the lizardmen army. The speedpaints made this pretty easy to do, and I was really proud of the idea to use skinks for kobolds. I think it works pretty well. Painting the dogs directly with speedpaints works very well too.

And it looks so good once everything is painted! I was really amazed by the quality of what you can do with speedpaints.

Painting all that took me about a week, working two or three hours in the evening after work. I was able to finish all these miniatures, but it would have taken me a year, maybe even more, before speedpaints. And the quality is totally acceptable.

Well, what was bound to happen finally happened. I spilled a bottle of speedpaint everywhere.

The paint wasn't coming out, so I kept pressing harder and harder and harder until the whole cap popped off. Turns out the ball bearing inside that helps mix the paint was stuck in the opening.

In those cases, you're not supposed to press harder, you just shake the bottle so the ball bearing moves somewhere else. I didn't know that before creating this mess, but now I do!

Here's another photo of my workbench showing different creatures at various stages of completion. It's a mix of scenery work with trees, some miniatures that are almost done (like the mimics in the background), and others just starting out where I've only glued them to the base and haven't even primed them yet.

Some other family photos and other creatures, once again painted with speedpaints. I realize that really the technique that changed everything for me with speedpaints is that the first time I used them, I didn't know you had to do speedpaints on a rather light undercoat. And so I had done it on miniatures that I had undercoated either in black or in gray, and it hadn't worked very well.

This time however, it's my second big batch of speedpaints, and really the mass effect works just by using the speedpaints directly. The quality of what it produces is really superior to what I would have been able to paint without speedpaints.

Taking advantage of the nice weather to both varnish the minis I've finished painting and prime the ones I'm about to start. The dragons you see in the photo, I've painted about half of them. The other half is still in this state, even two years later.

Here I worked on scatter terrain for catacombs and cemeteries. I wanted to create outdoor tombstones, coffins, and those sarcophagi you find in crypts. These are pretty classic elements for RPG sessions, especially the sarcophagi. Plus they work great as scenery elements that players can hide behind or climb on, so I needed some.

I figured the coffins could be useful scenery too, and we actually ended up using them in a campaign where the players had to transport a corpse from one place to another. I haven't used the tombstones much yet, but I'm still happy to have them ready.

In the Strange Aeons asylum map, there's this machine room where the floor is made of metal. It makes noise when you walk on it, so I wanted to create a tile that represented that feeling.

In the end, I think my players never actually went there, but I had fun experimenting with how to make a tile that gives you the sensation of walking on metal.

For the base, I didn't use the same cardboard as for the other tiles because I wanted them to have similar thicknesses. Instead, I used corrugated plastic sheets on which I glued a large sheet of chicken wire. I colored the different squares to have an indication of which tiles I was going to fill and which tiles I planned to leave the wire mesh as is. I also made walkways and pathways, which will become metal planks, but for now I made them with small pieces of wood.

I stuck cardboard tiles in a somewhat checkerboard pattern at different places so there would be tiles at different heights.

And in the others I put smaller tiles. The idea for me was to manage to create something where we can continue to see the mesh underneath.

And then black and an orange dry brush to create the rust effect. I think I added another silver drybrush after this one.

Here's a group of kobolds I painted for when we were playing Kingmaker. At one point, right at the beginning, there's the possibility of going into two different dungeons. One is a kobold dungeon and the other is more of a gremlin type dungeon.

I didn't really have any kobold miniatures. The one I had was the basic Reaper Bones one, but they're really tiny. So what I did was use skink miniatures from Games Workshop. I assembled enough of them and painted them red to make myself a unit of kobolds.

For the special characters, the shamans and the captains of the kobold unit, I used Heroclix miniatures that I painted either in the same types of colors, or with entirely different colors to make them stand out from the others.

And as a little pet, I used lizards from an old sprue, an old Games Workshop blister of lizardmen from the 90s, that I still had from when I was doing a lizardmen army.

I started by applying an almost complete coat of red speedpaint (I think it's poppy red) and then I applied a slightly orange dry brush on the scales on top, very light. It doesn't matter if it overflows a little bit. I painted the crest in yellow. Then I covered all the metallic parts in black to add metallic paint on top later.

For the weapons, I tried to vary the different types of metals a little bit, mostly because I wanted to test what I could do with speedpaints. My technique was to start with a first layer of silver and then add different speedpaint colors on top to tint that silver with different things. With certain colors, it makes bronze, with others, it makes different types of metal. I found that it worked quite well for them.

I don't remember exactly which color corresponded to which version, but I tried to mark it on my paint pots. I wrote a small M with a marker to remind myself what they do for metal that looks good so I can try it again later.

Obviously, as is often the case in campaigns, my players never actually made it to this dungeon. They were heading that way, but along the way they got jumped by a kobold patrol that really messed them up and scared them pretty badly. So they decided to put off exploring the dungeon and come back later. But then the adventure took them in completely different directions, and they just never ended up going back there.

For the lizards, I documented the different speedpaints I used on them to test the various reds and blues. The basic speedpaint box has a lot of different reds and blues, and it's hard to get a sense of what each color looks like just by looking at the bottle. So I took photos of each one I tested.

This is Hargulka. She's a troll, I think I based her on one of the encounters that are in the Kingmaker Adventure Path.

The miniature comes from Reaper Bones. I think I painted it before I knew about Speedpaints. There was a strange reaction with the paint or with the Reaper Bones, but once I applied the varnish it became a little bit sticky. I don't know exactly why.