I had this mini on my table for a long time. The sculpt of it makes it hard to paint. You cannot attach it to a base or you won't be able to access the underneath, so you have to manipulate it while painting, and wait for the paint/washes to dry on one side before doing the other side.

Here you can see the top part drying after a red wash.

An Otyugh from Wrath of Ashardalon. Great mini to have when your players start exploring some sewers. The ability of the Otyugh to telepathically communicate could lead to some great RP.

As for the mini itself, I like how it turned out. Being a sewer creature, I could be sloppy in my paint job. Very rough drybrush of red and brown, picking up the teeth and details with a bone color, and using a very bright color for the tongue. This is a trick I learned after having painted too many boring miniatures: pick a very bright color for one detail, that will attract the eye.

This is a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath from the Mansions of Madness boardgame, but also a very nice miniature full of details to practice.

Here is a picture when it was almost finished. I just had the base to dry brush, but I realized it was missing something. It was too... mundane (as much as an horror from the great beyond could be).

So I repainted the tongue in a bright color to attract gazes.

Those are playmobil rocks textured and painted.

This is the original piece. I sometimes find some in garage sales. I only added a layer of modeling paste on them to give them rock texture. I wait for it to dry (usually overnight) then sand it to make the surface smoother.

Then it's black priming, grey dry brushes everywhere, brown on the bottom, and some green here and there.

I kept the holes open as I plan to repaint the playmobil trees that come with them later.

I find that they make great scatter terrain pieces. The only issue is that some of the small "steps" are too small to properly accomodate a miniature. Only the big one could, but as soon as I'll start adding trees they won't have enough space either.

Anyway, that's one of the cheapest and easiest terrain I did.

With no real plan in mind for how I would use it, I decided to try to repaint a plastic toy to see if I could make it look much better.

I think I forgot to take a picture of the gun before I started... well, too bad. Once again, it was found for 1€ in a second hand shop.

I started with a black primer and a white dry-brush. I did the dry brush to better see the various edges of the weapon, but also hoping it would improve the latter highlights.

Brown dry brush. I did it with a small brush so I would not put too much brown on the metal parts.

Now metal drybrush on the metal parts. I used a similar brush, but a different one. When I drybrush, I usually use several brushes as I can never manage to get rid of all the paint from one color before using another. And if I use water to get rid of it it's even better because then my dry brush is not dry at all and it creates lots of smudges marks everywhere.

I did a second brown drybrush, slightly lighter on the raised areas and the engraved parts.

Then painted the details with some gold on the metal and chestnut on the wood.

I painted two Chtonians from the Mansions of Madness boardgame. I put them on a regular round base so I can use them in other games as well.

I thought they would be pretty straightforward models to paint but it was way less easy that I anticipated. First, the worm body is full of recesses so I had to be careful for the wash to not pool in weird places. Painting the inside of the tentacles also proved harder than anticipated.

I also realize, seeing the pictures, that I really should have removed the mold lines here.

I don't know if you're familiar with this toy. It's a Vulli Tree, and has been pretty popular with kids in France for at least three generations.

I never had one myself, but I recently found two of them in a second hand shop for 2€ each. I bought one for my daughter and took one for me.

Being second hand they were missing some stickers and plastic parts. But by buying two I was able to make an almost-complete one for my daughter and keep the bare one for me.

This is how it looks once opened. As a terrain piece, I didn't want it to open at all. I had in mind an old wise tree like you can see in GoT, so I had a plan to paint it white with autumnal leaved.

I had never done this kind of thing before (painting trees, especially not white-barked and in autumnal leaves so I kinda expected it to not look as great as I envisioned but.. as I always say when DMing: "there's only one way to find out").

First step was opening it and removing all the pieces from the inner mechanism. It would make the whole structure lighter and less noisy.

Here it is, with all the "useless" parts removed.

As you can see, the upper part is pretty empty. My plan was to fix the top part with some glue, but also fill in the gap between the canopy and the first floor with some expansive moss (not sure of the exact term).

I filled the top ridges with glue from my glue gun. Gluing the central square was actually an error, as I would need it to be mobile for the next step.

This is the expansive moss I was talking about.

I put some on the rim of the first floor and then attached the canopy on top. I should have tester the product on some cardboard first because it didn't expand as I expected.

I made fake coins out of used Nespresso Capsules.

I had so many of those capsules to throw away every month I figured I should be able to do something with them.

So I started opening them, throwing away the coffee still inside, cleaning them, drying them, flattening them and gluing them two by two.

My 2yo loves playing with those.

Here they are, cleaned and drying

Those mult-eyed beauties are two Shoggoths, from the Mansion of Madness game. I put them on simpler bases (made out of used Häagen-Dasz ice cream pots), so I can use them in other games.

Those were pretty simple to paint and very enjoyable as well. I decided to pick a very weird color scheme of green, pink and yellow. They are creatures of the great beyond after all, they could be any color. I mirrored the color on the two miniatures.

They are mostly painted with dry brushing. The body received two coats, a first very rough of a darker tone, and lighter brushing with a lighter tone later. The tentacles received the same treatment: dark rough first, and lighter one on the tips later. Eyes are painted yellow with a wash matching the body color (in retrospect, the green wash works better than the red one here).

Here they are, two beauties in an aerial view on my desktop. This is right before the wash.

Giant bugs from cheap plastic toys. And a crocodile thrown in the mix as well. I think it's a Kinder toy.

I think I should have made the crocodile lighter. I'm happy with the bugs, mostly, but if I had to redo them I would use a darker version of the main color of their shell to paint the articulation instead of the bone color I used. Also, I would find another color for their claws and teeth as well, it does not work so well here.

Otherwise I like the way the shells seem to have a slight sheen.

Here they are right before priming. I glued them to poker money markers using a glue gun. This allowed me to warp some of their limbs in place. I also applied some textured paste on the base at this stage so it would get primed as well.