A Bit of Culture (it grows on you)

"William", courtesy of The Met

This is a 3,800-year-old knick-knack from an Egyptian tomb. Over the last hundred years, it's become a mascot of sorts for The Met.  If you take a close look at the lotus markings, they're really just made out of triangles and dots.

Painting by Charles R. Knight

These things said "Hong Kong" when I was a kid.

Uintatheriums are a somewhat odd extinct mammal.  The tusks give them a certain resemblance to hippos (they're not meaningfully related to any modern mammal).  Uintatheriums started popping up in bags of chinasaurs around the time that Gary Gygax was playing with other cheap plastic critters in his basement, but never got turned into anything iconic, D&D-wise.

Reaper 77144: Mummy for scale.

This sort of thing is what happens when I play with cheap plastic critters in my man-cave.  Acrylic paint, an alcohol pen, and a paperclip used to wire him to the Magic-Sculpt base.  The biggest time consumption came from the cleanup stage - the molds have not aged well.  One big advantage over doing this in the '70s is that I can pull up a 3-d view of the original hippo's markings while I've got the pen in hand.  He's deliberately glossy because "William" was originally glazed with blue glass.  He seems to be perfectly serviceable as a statue, living construct, or magical critter.  I kind of picture him as an immobile oracle that speaks with a lisp due to the tusks.

Bait Ball

"In the mouth of a 20' wide alcove south of the altar basin stands an idol or statue of serpentine stone, expertly sculpted to depict a writhing, amorphous agglomeration of fish, eels, octopi, and other marine monsters. This horrid thing is about eight feet high and nearly as broad, the whole forming a globular mass standing about four feet from the altar basin." - Temple of Elemental Evil

Translating from the original High Gygaxian, serpentine is a semi-translucent green stone.  It sort of looks like jade, but is available in much larger quantities.  Gygax being Gygax, the inanimate object is going to try to eat you.

Theodore, Bugbear with Big Stick, posing for scale.

I snuck in a nightcrawler just because.

This one's FIMO soft, a polymer clay made by Staedtler.  The base is Magic Sculpt so that I had somewhere to grip it before baking.  Magic Sculpt has no objection to the temperatures needed to harden polymer clay.

Stone Lions

 So I went to the dollar store to buy toys again.  The thing about dollar store toys is that they often weren't schlock before the production team's bean counters got a crack at them.  This tigger appears to be a direct casting of a 3-up wax sculpture intended for a pantograph.  At a guess.  Added a beard and tail tuft before I remembered the camera.

 Covering up that nasty join line at the neck.  Using a foil filler because Magic Sculpt ain't cheap.

 Magic Sculpt mane.  Basically do a pattern of flowing locks, then add the grain.

 Looks a lot more like a lion with the stripes covered.  Folk Art "Wrought Iron" for the base coat.

 Finished painting using the same technique as the stone columns.

"Grr.  Aargh."

Fang and Claw, guardians of the Gate of Sorrows

Beaky Beast

So Chinasaurs have a certain charm, mostly based on childhood nostalgia.  The printing said "Hong Kong" back when there were two Germanies.  Turns out that Magic Sculpt will stick to this plastic quite readily, making them excellent armatures/conversion fodder.  He looks big enough to be threatening without getting into kaiju territory next to this 25mm Grenadier figure.  Bigger than a Destrier, smaller than an elephant.

 I was kind of at a loss as to how to paint him - ended up with a scheme inspired by an online picture of a box turtle assaulting a strawberry.

I really need to add a Godzilla roar when this one gets clicked on.

Gamewise, he usually just gets the same stats as a Stegosaurus or a giant lizard, although Dragon Turtle wouldn't be so very far off if we needed a breath weapon critter.

Fluffy Rex

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So I have some thoughts on feathered dinosaurs.  The ones that come to the backyard feeder are considerably more temping to the cat.  But the environments that they can live in are pretty much anywhere that you'd find a mammal.

 Weirdly, these Dollar Store toys are about the right scale for D&D type miniatures (25-32mm):

Tyrannosaur scale chart

They're also absolutely fabulous armatures for the money.  I had to do a couple of unsavory things with a knife and a couple of wedges to get him to stand like a proper theropod,  but otherwise that's just a texture layer.  Y'know, the fun part.  Well, besides plunking him down on the game table.