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Archive of the Idea of the Week: Figures

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* Giraffe Men

* Legions of the Priests

* Cyclopses

* Character Builder Daleks

* Undersea Conversions

* Anime Bikini Girls with Guns

In a Kingdom of Blind Men ...

Well, I think these guys would be king pretty much anywhere you go, but a fistful of cyclopses can go a long way. These are pretty easy conversions, being based on the concept of recapitations that we frequently use. Since we end up with custom sculpted heads (Don't worry ... I can't sculpt, either. There are two "cheats" to make it easy.), I didn't even bother with mucking about to reposition some of the arms for variety.

So, for giant cyclopses, we need giant figures. The base we are using the the HeroClix Awesome Android figure. You can usually find it in the bottom of the "dollar-clix" bin at your FLGS. En masse. Since we are using a "big" fig like this, the complexity for sculpting a tabletop quality figure is much lower than a "regular" 28mm figure. Along with the decapitated body base we have a couple of other parts. The heads will be made with Crayola Model Magic clay. This stuff is not the best sculpting clay in the universe. It's not great for high detail. It stays soft (but keeps form) when air dried (which it takes a while to do). But it's cheap and good enough for big, lumpy volumes of stuff. Perfect for misshapen cyclops heads.

In the front of the pic, you can see how we get away with using the clay. While the heads are OK with big, sweeping forms, to get a good model you really need detail for the eyes and teeth. So, my two "cheats" for using MM clay. For the eyes, we will use beads. Your FLCS (C=craft) should sell big pound bags of various cheap plastic beads for cheap. These will make a good solid eye. For the teeth (always a pain), I just collected a bunch of the plastic nibs I cut off other pieces, right off the little thing I collect them in to throw them away. The tiny bits of plastic will allow you to make teeth that look good without detailed scukpting. We can get away with this because no one expects (or wants) cyclopses with nicely ordered, well groomed teeth.

[1] Put a roundish glob on the head. I also apply some adhesive to the neck to hold the thing in place after the clay dries.
[2] Stick in a bead for the eye. Be sure to leave the string hole pointing forward. Instant iris! [3] Smoosh it in around the eye.
[4] Smoosh up a nose. Also, pick his nose with a toothpick and you get nice nostrils.
[5] Cut open a big, wide mouth, and stick in some teeth.
[6] Now smoosh the mouth to a semi-closed position
[7] Finally, scrunch down the head. Notice how he goes from "cartoony" to "grumpy" with this small effort.

I glued (regular PVA glue) a piece of paper towel over his Speedos into a more loinclothy piece. Once you prime the figures with spraypaint, the loincloth will be rigid enough to paint. Just a basic painjob for these guys and not a lot of futzy detail. The whole point is to draw attention to the one eye, so I didn't want a lot of stuff to distract from that. All in all, I think this ended up being a nice project for the cyclopses ... and their little dog, too!

Exterminate! Exterminate!

OK, so around July these guys came out as a part of a Dr. Who toy line. The overwhelming majority of the figures are nice for what they are, but not what I would want to game with -- they're a little too chibi (OK, the chibi cybermen are cute). The Daleks, however, are really nice, and very ... well ... Daleky. (So is the TARDIS, but that will have to wait for another time.) So, they are nice figures, but they're toys, so can you really game with them? What about the scale?

Well, what about scale? Sure, there are tons of erudite missives about scale, treatises about how scale is measured and what the ratios mean, and references on just which means what to whom. But, by and large, wargaming, and especially the "28mm crowd" have an unresolvable mess. In general, just what 28mm is and how it is figured out and applied not only varies by manufacturer, but also within 28mm lines from the same manufacturer. So, about the only thing you can do is just compare figures side by side. So I did.

Since these are "compatible with popular building brick system" toys, I have provided three options of construction: (A) full up, (B) minus the base, and (C) compressed/no neck. The graph paper in the background is 5 grids to an inch. One of the great debates about model scale is where the lower measuring starts. I was tempted to line up the bottom of the feet, but, really, in gaming, you have to put the figures on a table, base and all, so I thought that would be the best line up. I went with some of the popular lines of minis that I have to give the most relevant comparisons. Click the links and see what you think.

change Dalek
change figure

The big issue is, if you checked out the Amazon link to the toys above, is they are $20 for five. Obscene. Way beyond my "a buck a figure" rule of thumb. But they're Daleks. If I can make an exception for monkeys in power armour, I can make one for Daleks. I did buy two sets but don't see any need for more than ten. Besides, ten Daleks is all you need to take over a whole galaxy ... right?

Besides ... they paint up nice.