Blazing Skeletons and Gargoyles

Some more pictures of painted minis from the Castle Ravenloft board game.

The first one is the Blazing Skeleton - basically, a skeleton that's on fire and throws out fireballs for its attack. This model was actually made out of a clear plastic which gave me quite a quandary.  On one hand, I wanted to try painting the fire but on the other hand, I didn't want to paint over the clear plastic and lose the transparent effect of the clear plastic.

In the end, I only painted the skeleton portion of the min and left the fire unpainted.  Looking at the results now, I'm not sure it was the right choice.  Humm.

Kamehameha!

That is a fireball between its hand - believe it or not...

The Gargoyle was a super simple paint job as I wanted to try and get a dirty stone effect.  All I did was, after priming it white, to hit it with a wash then give it red eyes.  The plinth the Gargoyle is standing on was done with several layers of gray and actually took more time than the Gargoyle itself!

Check out the red beady eyes

Might have gone a bit heavy on the wash :)

Spiders and Skeletons

Some more pictures of my painted miniatures from the Castle Ravenloft Board Game.

I wonder if those markings mean its poisonous

Giant spider is giant

To be honest, the spider is a bit meh.  I used a black primer for the spider which caused the blue paint to come out very dark (as you can prob see in the picture).  To counter this, I tried to use a lighter blue to add highlights but the effect wasn't very convincing.

One of the classics - an undead skeleton...

...armed with a sunburst shield

I'm actually reasonably happy with the skellies.  The good thing is that skeletons are actually quite easy to do (simply paint and wash) which leads to quick and easy results.  I also tried to give the base a kind of stone dungeon feel - failed miserably but hopefully, it doesn't detract too much from the skellie.

Wolves

After wrapping up the Dark Angels space marines, I went back to painting the miniatures from the Castle Ravenloft game.  What I've not mentioned before was that part of the reason I started this new hobby of painting miniatures is because I've been playing the Castle Ravenloft board game with some friends.

I actually bought the Citadel Starter Pack (which contained the marines I posted before as well as a brush and some paint) as it was a good way to get some basic tools and instructions on how to paint minis.

So with the Dark Angels space marines done, it was time to get back to the board game.*

This is meant to be a wolf in a ghostly blue colour

Three wolves (duh)

A werewolf - done in the same blue as the wolves

A back view of the werewolf

While I'm reasonably happy with the wolves considering that this is the first time I went "off instruction" to paint a mini, I have to say that I'm really not very happy with the werewolf.  What I was trying to do was to highlight the werewolf to show light bouncing off the fur - which I failed miserably at.

Still, the bright side is that under dark lighting, it doesn't look too bad.
:)


* Actually, I tried to paint some of the rats in the board game after doing one of the Space Marines.  However, that failed so miserably that their horrible visage shall never haunt the halls of this blog!

Ocean Park

We went out to Ocean Park during Chinese New Year.  As you can imagine, the place was packed to capacity with the influx of tourists from Mainland China.  In fact, it got to the stage that even walking around the park was a chore.

No surprise that the park actually had to halt ticket sales for several hours due to the crowds!

Gordon on the cable car

We were actually very lucky to get a good picture of Gordon on the cable car.  For most of the trip, he actually had a slightly worried expression on his face as a result of the height.

Family picture after getting off the cable car

Scaring the jelly fish

One of the great things about Ocean Park is that it lets you view lots of different animals.  In that sense, its a lot better than Disneyland which is completely focused on rides.  One of the exhibits is a jelly fish museum at the end of which is a screen with screensaver jelly fish projected onto it.  The cool thing is that if you move up to the jelly fish, they will react to your presence and swim away.  As you can imagine, the kids spent a bit of time there.

Selling fruit in Old Hong Kong Street

No trip to Ocean Park is complete without a visit to the pandas

Camping out

One of the extracurricular activities which Gerry has taken on is the Boy Scouts.  Most of the activities are for the kids only but recently, they did offer a family outing in the form of a camping trip.  Which seemed like a good excuse to get out of the flat and do something different.

The good thing is that Gordon was also able to join in the fun

Although he did find the games quite challenging

Gerry, on the other hand, breezed through

Although it looks like he is about to fall off, he also handled this one fairly easily as well

Outside our tent with his prize for doing well in the orienteering

Dark Angel Space Marines

Quick update on the painting front.  You may recall that I took up a new hobby in October last year.  Well, after approximately 3 months, I finally managed to get round to finishing off the Citadel starter paint set.  You can see the results below but, as you can clearly see, they are pretty much identical in terms of style and painting ability as the previous space marine I did.

I have now started to paint up some of the miniatures from the Castle Ravenloft board game.  Considering my glacial speed, I have no idea when those will get finished but I will share them on this blog as I go through them.

I also intend to try and get my mitts on some painting tutorials to try and improve my technique.  The below mini's were okay but my lack of skill and knowledge around painting really showed when I tried painting some models without clear step by step guidance!

Also - if you are my dad - don't worry, I will put up some pictures of the kids next week.

You can tell this is a captain by virtue of the eagle on his helmet

Back view of the captain

One of the squaddies - I quite like the gun on this model

Back view of the squaddie

Another squaddie - apparently a twin of the one above!

Another trip to Disneyland

Gerry's school is celebrating its 194th birthday this year.  As part of the celebrations, the school arranged a school outing in Disneyland.  Naturally, we took the opportunity to also take advantage of our annual pass and took Gordon along as well.

Arriving in Disneyland with Gordon

All aboard!

Gordon getting ready to go into the 3D philarmagic show (which he enjoyed)

Taking a ride on Dumbo, the flying elephant

Gerry in his school uniform driving us home