I’ve previously spoken about my adventures with the Reaper Miniatures Bones range. This eclectic range of good value plastic miniatures has something for everyone, except of course when I wanted a big dinosaur for my latest project.
So I am wanting to do something with dinosaurs and probably Nazis. A Jurassic Reich if you like, for pulp gaming. Possibly, just possibly this might replace my ‘Flash Gordon’ cast for the 7TV Pulp day, though I am still procrastinating on this. (Always good to have choices though.)
Now there are now shortage of options available out there (including a rather wonderful range of dinosaur riding Nazis from Eureka Miniatures). Furthermore there is even more choice if you look beyond the world of miniatures into the realm of toys (something I enjoy doing often). However I wanted something quite specific – a big brutal looking T-Rex. Many of the toys out there have problems with scale and not unreasonably tend to look a bit toy like.
A few years ago Wizkids the chaps behind the incredibly popular pre-painted Heroclix collectable miniatures game decided to dip their toes in the ‘proper’ miniatures market with the release of a range of licensed Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder figures. This in of itself was not new, they had been releasing ‘blind booster’ style collectable pre-painted figures in a similar vein to Heroclix for many years. What was different this time was that they would be unpainted. In effect they were tapping into that wider hobbyist market of role-players and wargamers who wanted to paint their minis and saw this as a key part of their hobby. As far as I can tell these ranges have proved very popular, like Reaper Bones are priced well, unlike Reaper Bones come pre-primed and most importantly for me the range includes a great big T-Rex.
This guy is from the Nolzur’s Marvellous Miniatures range of Dungeons and Dragons figures (personally I can never remember dinosaurs being a big part of D&D in my day, but hey ho).
First impressions were good. Wizkids have gained some notoriety in the past for the quality of some of their Heroclix sculpts, but this really didn’t compare at all. Detail was crisp and clean, there was no sign of any flash or mould lines and the grey Vallejo undercoat was applied well (consistently, not too thick and a nice light grey shade). The tail was supplied separately and pushed to fit (although I did use super glue to fix it in place). I probably should have used a little green stuff to fill the gap between body and tail, but to be honest, for me, it was acceptable without.
Upon opening the blister the first thing that surprised me was that unlike Reaper Bones the plastic material is quite hard. Now whether this was a result of the bulk of this particular model I can’t really say. However it certainly felt a bit more like the harder plastics you would associated with wargames miniatures rather than the PVC like Bones.
I set about painting using an airbrush to apply a dark green base coat and then highlighted this (again using an airbrush) with a lighter green. I added shade by brushing on Army Painter Green Tone wash and picked out the mouth and tongue with flesh colours followed by a wash of flesh tone from Games Workshop. The model was finished off by applying ochre to the teeth and claws and painting the integral scenic base in various greys. I was impressed that the model came with both an integral base and a round plastic base to glue this to.
All in all I am pretty pleased with the result and will certainly check out more of the unpainted Wizkids line in future. (I couldn’t resist a rather nice looking Orc on Dire Wolf to paint up – having half an eye on Saga Age of Magic which is released later this month).
So this is the first addition to my ‘Deutsche Dinosaurier Korps’. In terms of addition dinos I will be playing around with some other toy and model kit purchases over the next few weeks and adding some Teutonic wranglers into the mix also.
Twisted Pinnacle 