Kitbashing and Speed Painting Custom Miniatures

So it’s been a while since my last update, but I’ve been working a lot of overtime and haven’t had much time or energy for heavy crafting. What crafting I have done has been smaller scale projects like these since none of my big projects have been going particularly well (maybe I’ll do a Shop Log about it or just start the major project articles again once I work through the issues I’m having, I don’t know). In any event, I did manage to pump out some customized miniatures over the past month or so since I last posted here and I’m about to take you through my process.

I’m a big fan of the youtube channel Miniature Mashup, and even though I don’t play any tabletop games, I'm not exaggerating when I say that could watch him convert Heroclix miniatures into different creatures for hours on end. In fact, I often have. So much so that I thought it would be fun to kitbash some Heroclix of my own, since they’re incredibly cheap, make great raw materials for custom minis, and I have a bunch of them in my junk drawer.

The first two Heroclix I set aside for customizing is this Hollywood (missing an arm since it was used in a previous build) and Charlie-27. I also had some sprue bits leftover from a Stargrave miniatures set that I put together earlier this year and some vague ideas about what kind of characters I wanted to make.

But before getting into any of that, I needed to remove the Heroclix minis from their bases. I think I used a metal paint scraper and managed to pry them off without too much trouble. The glue is so weak on some of the Heroclix that I’ve messed with that you can pull them off of their bases by hand, though I don’t really recommend it as the plastic on the miniatures itself is fairly soft (as opposed to the hard plastic on the bases).

For the Charlie-27, a simple headswap with one of the spare Stargrave helmeted heads was all that I needed. The other one was a bit more extensive, as I replaced the arm, heard, and one of the hands with Stargrave sprue bits. The other details that I kitbashed on, like the ammo belts and the sword scabbard across his back, were spare parts leftover from some Reaper Bones minis.

Going with the Slap Chop method of speedpainting that I blogged about once before, I primed them in flat black in preparation for the zenithal dry brush passes.

Once the black primer was dry, I dry brushed them first in a Vallejo light gray and then in Liquitex titanium white heavy body acrylic.

It was at this point that I noticed my one guy needed something extra to aesthetically unify the arm and other bits that I glued onto him, so I sculpted him a quick shoulder pad and a strap across his torso and back using Magic Sculpt epoxy clay. Not only did the added shoulder armor tie the Stargrave replacement arm into the overall design a bit more, but now the sword scabbard across his back actually has something that it looks like it attaches to. Once that was out of the way, I used some black brush-on primer to cover the added sculpting and touched up the areas of paint that had rubbed off in the process (which served as a reminder to strip the factory paint off the Heroclix next time). Then I repeated the Slap Chop zenithal, dry brushing the areas with light gray and then white.

These two minis were done prior to my purchasing an Army Painter Speedpaints starter set, so I was still working with my handful of Citadel Contrast paints at this point. It was after I laid down the contrast paint basecoat that I decided to deviate from the typical Slap Chop/speeding painting methods and hit some of the high points with some opaque paints in areas where I thought the contrast paints looked too dark and murky. I lightly dry brushed over the parts I painted with Guillman Flesh with Vallejo Sunny Skintone and all the armor, guns, and other metal bits with various metallic paints (mostly Runefang Steel and Vallejo Gunmetal).

I know it kind of defeats the purpose of using translucent paints and letting the undercoat do most of the heavy lifting, which is the whole idea behind Slap Chop and speedpainting in general, but I don’t think I compromised any of the built-in highlights and shading by doing this and I’m overall much happier with how they look.

I also used opaque black paint to paint the camouflage splotches on both of their legs before going over those with the translucent green contrast paint (Creed Camo, I believe).

Also at some point, I glued them onto custom bases and painted them first with the textured Citadel Astrogranite technical paint and then dry brushed over that with a lighter gray (which might have even been some Apple Barrel Granite Gray craft paint that I got for 50 cents and never used until now. I finished these first to custom miniatures by giving them a protective clearcoat coat of Vallejo anti-shine matte varnish that was thinned down and sprayed from an airbrush.

I had the Hollywood head set aside for a couple days or weeks when I got the idea to stick it onto the body of a resin recasted Corvus Belli Infinity miniature. The original Infinity mini was made out of metal and came with a set of Vallejo paints, though I ended up making a silicone mold of the mini and churned out a small army of the things (which I hope to paint all of one day). This mini had a separate pair of arms holding a rifle, but instead of those, I used an arm from a different Infinity miniature that I molded and recasted (who you will see later in the article) and a hand holding a pistol that I took from a Two-Face Heroclix. The pistol ended up looking not-so-great since I assumed that it’s overall blobby look was the result of the blobby factory paint, but no. The pistol was just sculpted as a round blob.

The Hollywood head looks pretty good on the Infinity mini’s body though. I think it heavily resembles Solid Snake as he appears in Metal Gear Solid 4 and I’d even considered giving him a bandanna and an eyepatch but ultimately decided against it. But let’s set him aside for now…

I have multiple Skaar Son of the Hulk Heroclix and figured that the dual-wielding pose and overall bulky look of the miniature would make for a cool Ettin. If you didn't know, an Ettin is a two-headed subspecies of giant/giantkin that, due to its unique gift/accident of birth, is adept at wielding two weapons at once.

I snipped off the Skaar head and replaced it with the head of a bear-wolf thing from the Stargrave sprue as well as a Hulk head from a different Heroclix. I dremeled off most of the Hulk head’s hair to make it less recognizable as the Hulk.

Learning from my past mistake, I dipped the miniature in acetone and scrubbed it with an old toothbrush to remove the overly thick factory paintjob, revealing the semi-transparent yellow plastic beneath. Obviously I couldn’t get all of the paint off, but it was still more than enough to keep the factory paint from getting in my way.

The first order of business was to cover up the superglue and sanding marks from where I attached the two new heads, so I sculpted him (them?) a chainmail cowl out of Magic Sculpt epoxy clay.

I also got the bright idea to take some random heads off some tiny plastic knights and have the Ettin carry them like trophies. I got a bag of about 200 of these knights at a discount store a while back thinking they might be fun to customize and kitbash but they ended up being considerably smaller than even most 28mm standard miniatures so they just sat in one of my junk boxes. Due to their small size and the fact that Ettins are giant kin, the scale actually works here. To hold up the Ettin’s spoils of war, I sculpted some ropes of epoxy clay to make it look like the heads were being suspended from the Ettin’s waist.

And here’s Agent Dukash, that other Infinity miniature I mentioned molding and recasting. I had some epoxy clay leftover from the Ettin so I made some rocks and some textured ground for this recast’s custom base. These little 28mm miniature bases, I should also mention, are resin recasts as well. I typically use mini base molds (and miniature molds in general) as “dump” molds when I’m doing a bunch of casting to catch any leftover resin, so I’ve accumulated a fairly big pile of these bases.

Next up, it was time to begin the speed painting process all over again, starting with the black primer coat.

Followed by the obligatory dry brushing in light gray and then white. You can see that my two customs and one recast are accompanied by a couple Warhammer 40k Space Marines and Warhammer Fantasy Chaos Warriors. These too are resin recasts of some miniatures that I found in the attic while I was visting my family’s place and the originals are quite old. The Space Marine is from a spin-off game from the early 90’s called Advanced Space Crusade and the Chaos Warrior is one of the OG Warhammer Fantasy minis from 1990. Suffice to say, I recasted a bunch of these as well to have on hand for whenever I get the time to really practice miniature painting (so probably never).

I primarily used my new Army Painter Speedpaints to paint these, though I did use some Citadel Apothecary White for the old guy’s hair. My kneejerk reaction is that I prefer Army Painter Speedpaints to Citadel Contrast Paints because they seem so much more vibrant, but there’s a lot of things you can chalk that up to than just a simple matter of Army Painter VS Games Workshop (not the right Contrast paint colors, me going extra heavy on the white drybrushing during the undercoating phase, etc).

Like last time, I did use some opaque metallic paints to bring out some highlights in the weapons and armor and a light dry brushing of some lighter fleshtones on the skin. I forget exactly what I did for the bases, though I suspect I did a simple granite gray dry brush on Agent Dukash’s base, a coat of Astrogranite and a lighter gray dry brush for the old guy’s base, and the same for the Ettin’s base except I went over the entire thing with an Agrax Earthshade wash.

After giving each mini a final coat of anti-shine matte varnish, I took some shots of the final products. First up is the Ettin.

And then Agent Dukash, whose colors I tried to emulate based on the original metal miniature’s box art.

And finally Old Snake.

That’s it for now, though expect to see more posts that feature smaller scale (in both size and scope) projects like this in the future as I continue to work through the issues I’m having with my really big projects.