Community Spotlight: Dungeon Delving, Glen Gallivanting & A Floating Fortress

Come and join us for another delve into the Projects to find the best of the best from the last week or so. We’ll be getting stuck into lots of great-looking miniature wargaming painting and hobbying this week…

…always let us know what YOU have been working on and share it across the site.

A Dungeon Saga Saga by flatbattery

First up, we return to Panithor and Dungeon Saga, which flatbattery has been powering through, getting the creeping undead in the core box finished and ready for the tabletop. Here we have two differing groups of fundead but both capable of wiping the stones with any adventuring party that makes their way into the wrong dungeon. The dwarf revenants are nice, a pair of heavily armoured hearthguard protecting the king. Keeping with the theme of fast and easily identifiable, the King has his golden armour and vivid red cape, while his bodyguards are more sombre.

With the trolls, the undead are now complete for the first set of scenarios that make up the Trial of Tyranny. The zombie trolls are magnificent, and this is a set of miniatures that Mantic really need to be doing more with, the details are superb for boardgame plastics, and Flatbattery has spent the time making sure all the gore and glistening intestines contrast against the pale rotting flesh.

But really, this buttbutt is to encourage a return to the project for flatbattery. At the end of July, with the trolls done, it was onto the heroes, and he started with one of the fan favourites, racist elf, Madriga. Taking cues from the art, he's done some beautiful work in rendering out that artwork onto the miniature. I think changing up the brown leather gloves for red as a nice spot colour adds a lot of interest to the figure. Meanwhile, the white and gold on the bow really stand out. The only trouble is it's been 3 months and I've not seen any more of the heroes. So this button is on the condition that you give me some more updates FB.

The War in the Willows – Chapter One by Hutch

Next we take a stroll down the riverbank and get lost in the fog. Actually, we looked at this project back in January and gave it a golden button for the work on the figures but I want to showcase what this project is really all about now that it is complete. It starts with the practical challenge of getting a playable Burrows & Badgers warband together for a campaign, and by the end the models have become characters.

David Capon's Rise of the Necromouser campaign, which is available in the project as a PDF, develops from a fairly simple "hunt the Necromouser" premise into a much more involved mystery involving the Stillwater Irregulars, strange stones, visions, undead creatures and eventually the Necrowmancer. The most successful part of the campaign's storytelling is that the game results continually feed back into the fiction and art that Hutch has included in his project.

By the final battle, the Misfits aren't just a collection of miniatures built for a campaign. They have become a recognisable group with individual personalities, relationships, history, equipment and a shared home – which gives the final confrontation considerably more weight than the opening game. I love how even their Den upgrades become woven into the story as the places they visit between scenarios and games. Even if you have no intention of playing B&B this project is one to visit and just bask in the battle reports and the background that has been developed.

Laputa – Castle In The Sky by nightrunner

Our last project is another return, but this time it's Nightrunner returning to his second-ever diorama, rather than us stalking him again. 25 years ago, or thereabouts, Nightrunner came across a 1/20 scale Fine Molds Laputa Guardian Robot kit. The idea to build a specific scene from the movie sparked his love of diorama building, however, all the work-in-progress photographs were believed lost to the internet until a chance clear-out rediscovered the password for the website that contained them, and so we are gifted this delightful project.

The first creative decision was actually a narrative one: the robot's supplied pose was relatively static, and Nightrunner didn't yet have the experience to dramatically re-pose it. Instead of trying to force an action scene, they chose a quieter interaction between the robot and Sheeta, designing the entire diorama around that relationship. I believe he is sending her off to become the best Pokemon trainer of all time, I may be mistaken though.

The exquisitely subtle painting on the figures is helped by the setting. A verdant garden filled with a riot of shapes and colours, many of which are natural. Nightrunner did a terrific job in combining the real preserved flowers along with the shop-bought modelling terrain pieces. Many of these are contained in handmade plant pots made from sewing thimbles, electrical components and other bits and pieces, with putty used where necessary to transform them into more convincing miniature containers.

While I've used the completed photographs to draw you in, Nightrunner's project has some great advice in various modelling aspects, from reposing the robot to making the pots and flowers. For a project older than some of our viewers, it shows that quality is never too old, and all the techniques still have tremendous value despite the growing brrrr and whirl of 3d printers these days. I can't wait for the addition of Pazu in the future, so maybe it's true what they say art is never completed, only abandoned.

What Are You Painting Right Now?

Every week, we’re absolutely blown away by the incredible topics that are put into the Projects; it’s getting more difficult to choose Community Spotlights! We love your work and we hope to see a lot more of it in the future!

If you fancy getting your hobby fingers out and showing off your newest paint job, terrain piece or even greatest gaming achievement, we want to know about it! We don’t mind if you’re a newcomer to painting or a veteran of the brush; everything you do inspires us to create more and more content together!

What do you think of the entries this week?