(Lead) Mountain Musings - "Twisted Pinnacle 3D" August 2022

A mixture of sculpts by “Rocket Pig Games” and "Big Mister Tong"

This month's endeavour to condense my ‘plastic preserve of promise’ will largely focus upon several figures I’ve previously had 3D printed by the likes of “FullyCycled” and “Encounter Terrain”. These companies will either simply produce any STL files which you send them, or actually sell resin models under licence from their sculptor on the American e-commerce website “Etsy”. In addition, I also hope to finish painting a few figures produced through the online character design application “Forge World”.

To begin with though, I thought I’d simply complete the remaining 28mm Sentry Robots I recently purchased from “Twisted Pinnacle 3D” and have already finished one. The figure was fashioned by Mike Tongue (a.k.a. Big Mr Tong) and is highly reminiscent of Doctor Reinhardt's security forces aboard the U.S.S. Cygnus in Gary Nelson’s 1979 American science fiction film “The Black Hole”.

"They were captured by the sentry robots and are still on board."

With its ‘head sharing a fair similarity to Darth Vader's helmet’, the model was undercoated with a double-layer of "Vallejo" Heavy Red, before being shaded in "Citadel" Agrax Earthshade. It was then fervently dry-brushed with (more) “Vallejo” Heavy Red, and had its eyes and blaster pigmented with "Citadel" Abaddon Black." Finally, these areas were ‘picked out’ using a combination of “Vallejo” Gunmetal” and “Citadel” Nuln Oil.

Alongside my Sentry Robot I have also dusted down a handful of large(ish) models designed by “Rocket Pig Games”, which were ultimately ‘shelved’ last year following my disappointment at the underwhelming size of their 3D prints. Supposedly produced at 54mm scale, the likes of a Terror Tree, Clockwork Mastodon and Clockwork Tyrannosaurus Rex were disappointingly small when compared to some of the 40mm and 32mm figures I already owned from the same range.

July 2022 - Lots of 15mm Retained Knights have helped "Alternative Armies" make my Top Five table

Happily, my output over the past four weeks has been pretty steady and in line with the past few years overall. Much of this productivity has undeniably been due to the half-dozen 15mm Retained Knight sculpts I've completed, along with a handful of other models from The Ion Age by "Alternative Armies". These predominantly single-cast metal miniatures have definitely kept me sane whilst I've been busy 'off-camera' assembling lots of 28mm multi-part plastic Tactical Space Marines from The Horus Heresy boxed set by Games Workshop.

I don't plan on stopping with the smaller scale 'Beakies' for the foreseeable future either, as due to their size and reasonable ease of painting, they make some simple diversions from the 'solid slog' of the Thirty First Millennium. This month should though start seeing the first of my finished Sons Of Horus traitors, which will doubtless help keep my motivation going for what could be a truly massive project...