This is the original toy I bought. There is some mecanism inside that make it change height when you press it.

First step was to open it and deactivate the mechanism, then glue all the parts together so it would stay in the most elevated position.

Were I to repaint it again, I think I would try something more daring and attemps some lava effect in the cracks of the wall and a fire effect in the eyes of the metallic face. In its current state it looks too much like a stone structure while I could have it be a more prominent piece.

Here are shadow elementals made out of various fire-themed HeroClix miniatures. I intend to use them whenever my players set foot in the Shadow Plane in my current campaign.

Here are the original miniatures. I tried to grab everything I had that had some flames on it.

This is the first test. After a black priming I tried a pruple dry brushing on the flames, followed by a lighter blue one. I fixed any mistakes with black, and applied some light gray drybrush to make the edges pop a bit more.

The test miniature worked great, so I started working on dry brushing all the others with purple. As you can see, I was pretty rough in my attempts and a lot went on the torsos as well. That's ok, I'll clean that later.

And with blue added. Once again, only a dry brush.

Here are some of the prominent noble NPCs in my current Ptolus-inspired campaign.

Seeing this picture made me realize that I should cleanup the bases a bit, like painting a clear black rim around them, not letting the drybrush show.

I rummaged through my box of HeroClix miniatures to find some specific ones that could represent some of the important NPCs of my current campaign.

My PCs are in a capital city, with intrigues from the major families (inspired by Ptolus).

Wilson Fisk is supposed to represent Drake Scarnetti, the local Kingpin (as fits his mini).

Doctor Doom is Zander Madlaav, a warrior that seems to never age and apparently was already here when the city was founded.

The guy in a wheelchair is Ethram Waldemar, richest guy in town. His wheelchair should actually be magically flying, but I couldn't find a mini for that.

The black one is Lord Dedric Boroi, head of a family heavily involved with trade with the Shadow plane. The Skeleton one is his alter-ego there.

I gathered a bunch of minis that might pass for ghouls. Emaciated humans or mutated humanoid and painted them with pale flesh with a red wash on top. Some of them actually turned out pretty scary.

Some of the sculpts are very weird looking, and the sculpting is pretty rough. You can actually see the sculpt marks here and there, like it was done by an amateur.

Because of that I thought I should paint them in a pretty horrible colorscheme, something that would be lenient on the appendices not being perfectly proportionate.

I did a quick and dirty flesh dry brush, followed by a red wash, and I finally picked up some details, like the black eye sockets or yellow teeth

This is Gormiti toy found in a second-hand shop for 1€. I had to check online to know what it was, but I could directly see it had repaint potential.

Even with the orange colors, I could see that it had some great texture already. I needed to fill glue the doors and fill the recesses, though.

I added some shields on the front to keep it in line with the underground Duergar fortress I had in mind.

Most of the holes are filled. I even filled the round hole on the top with my glue gun. I think I need to buy and learn how to use some green stuff, it would make this kind of filling much more adequate.

Here you can see two PCs that teleported right at the bottom of the tower, behind the two guards.

Here is a dump of all the minis I started during 2020. I will move them into dedicated posts as I make some progress on them.

This is mostly cute small toys that I'm sure I can repaint and give them a darker look.

Lots of Heroclix, and a few other minis found here and there on garage sales. I usually wait until I have a batch of 6-8 similar minis before painting them.

Here you can see flame elementals, ghouls, bat things and various other horrors.

This is a cheap plastic toy. Slightly larger than the usual scale but I think I can make it an interesting named skeleton.

Ghouls on the front row, some minis I think I will turn into rival NPCs in my current campaign

Ghoulish things and dead halfelings

I managed to get my hands on a used copy of the World of Warcraft board game and got a ton of great minis from it.

I painted a squad of Duergars (mostly) from the plastic Dwarf sprue from GW. I also added some official Duergar miniatures from Wrath of Ashardalon and a few other dwarves I had lying around.

I really enjoy painting squads of the same monsters together. It allows me to test and improve on a given technique, and also in terms of gameplay I know that I have enough miniatures for a given encounter.

I wanted to take a comparison shot of before and after applying a Wash (I don't remember if it's a Nuln Oil or Strong Tone).

Here are the Duergars in their home, when the PCs intruded.

This is the Draco-zombie from Zombicide Green Horde extensions. I tried to paint it as Void Dragon from the Tome of Beasts but kinda failed:

If I had to redo it, I wouldn't use such a strong wash on the bones (I think it's the Dark Wash from The Army Painter. I think the Strong Wash would have been enough.).

During Battle

Here is the final battle, when the PCs entered the room, floating in space in a giant globe. The Dragonkin at the end is trying to invoke the Dragon.

Their way is blocked by an Orc warrior.

Spells are fired, Kobolds are helping, Orcs are falling in the goo and attacked by oozes.

Finally the orcs are defeated, but now the globe is breaking and the platforms starts to drift in space while the Dragon appears.

Separated by a broken bridge, our heroes try to win a mind contest with the Dragon while its hoard is slowly dripping into space.

I backed the Mantic Games Terrain Crate kickstarter a few years back and received a lot of dungeon furnitures. Chests, debris, tables, chairs, bookshelves, and more.

Here are a few pictures of them, when used in my games.

This was an old arcane library, forgotten for centuries, and under a permanent silence spell. Some of the furniture were actually mimics, and the big boulder was animated and made regular cycles around the room.

This was on their way to the library, the previous corridor had its gravity reversed. The green shell represents a Kobold follower, IIRC.

In another game. It really gave some depth to a bland flip mat.

Here are some of the miniatures I painted this month, with no peculiar order.

Grells

This are Grells from the Wrath of Ashardalon board game. I found a second hand box of that game where many tiles and rules were missing but all miniatures were there.

I tried three different brain texture, the pink with deep blood red in recess is the one that works the best (top) I'd say. I also tried some rust and ragged effect on the metal parts, but it's hard to see.

Overall the minis are a pain to paint as it's pretty hard to reach the inside of the tentacles below them.

Priests

Some priest types. The Dragonkind was used in my campaign as an evil rival trying to bind a Void Dragon to his will. The PCs managed to defeat him and bound the Dragon to one of them instead. The top one as been used several times already as a generic cultist. Haven't used the bottom one yet.

Warriors and Orcs

The human on the top is a failure. I'm not sure what I was trying to do with his cape but it ended up as a pinkish red. I still haven't mastered how to paint capes, I'll need more practice.

The two red orcs work pretty well though. I needed some strong orcs for a final encounter, so I decided to have them red instead of green. I also painted their skin with drybrush on black priming instead. It gives them a very detailed and strong look that I dig.

The bottom druid miniature was pretty complex to paint. The sculpt itself has a number of issues that you don't see until you start painting (like having no elbow for example) and some parts of the skin/cloth/fur mingle with no clear delimitation.

Barbarian Kyra

Kyra, our Cleric didn't had a custom HeroForge mini, so I painted the mini she had been using since we started the campaign. Not a very accurate representation of our plate-mail cleric, but it works well.

I tried highlight for one of the first time and it turned out ok. The belt... not so much. Not sure what happened there nor if I fixed that later.

Gibbering Mouthers and Spectator

Other miniatures from Wrath of Ashardalon. I was really happy to buy that game because they are great monsters to fight but it's pretty hard to find a miniature for them outside of the official D&D range.

I tried two color scheme here, one flesh and one more red. I think the fleshy one turned out better.

Dhax, the Spectator in the background was also very interesting to paint. Mostly because I could use the Deep Green from Vallejo Model Color line which is like the best green I ever saw. Dhax also turned into an interesting opponent NPC, trying to cut a deal with the PCs. And his ability to reflect spells back to the caster proved really interesting when Lem tried to charm him.