I thought it might be fun to organize a painting challenge where you could paint nearly anything you wanted.  Thus the Might & Magic Painting Challenge was born.

You can click on the various pictures and galleries.  Some will take you to larger versions of the pictures.  Others to the miniature on the artist’s blog or some other page related in some way to the miniature.  There are a few Easter eggs here and there for readers who might be interested in such things.

Thank you very much to all of the kind people who participated.  I had a lot of fun checking out your art and looking at your pages, and I learned a few things along the way too, such as some tips on painting tattoos and skin tones, and a little about the Italian navy.  If I left anyone’s miniatures out, please let me know and I’ll update the round-up with your work.  Ciao!

The first completed model that came howling out of the wilderness before mid-March was Hearteater from the inconceivable Wudugast of Convert or Die!  I love his jawbone axe and agree with Wudu that he is “ready to lead his followers on a hunt into the wilds of the Bloodwind Spoil.”

Toward the end of the month, Wudugast also completed a Blackstone Fortress Traitor Commissar.  As it common practice at Convert or Die!, our good Commissar was graced with a somewhat painful, at least for Wudugast so I understand, head swap.

Instead of being merely fallen to Chaos we have this happy fellow, who looks slightly drunk to me (on power, ardent spirits or perhaps both?) and certainly more than willing and capable of “leading his regiment on a capering daemon dance into damnation” and infernal alliteration too.  Good work if you can get it, for sure!

The second offering for the month that came in was the “mighty Helljack” Kharybdis by Argentbadger of The Bovine Overlord for his “Cryx force for Warmachine.”  Silver Badger reports this lovely, tentacled monstrosity is “focused on melee” and has an “amusing ink spray,” which I suppose keeps with the whole nautical motif of this helljack’s namesake.

Here we have Kharybdis with its bonded warcaster, Aiakos.  Argentbadger (I keep wanting to type Ardent rather than Silver) tells those of us who are uninitiated into the mysterious of Warmachine that you don’t have to play them together in a game but the helljack  “does get a slight benefit from being in Aiakos’s battlegroup.”  I’m sure those who would defy Cryx are glad for that!

Dave, who produces the outstanding blog,  The Imperfect Modeller, writes that he likes “painting all sorts of figures but none more so than the occasional wizard,” and I’d said it shows with this magician from Reaper Miniatures named Vinharis Tenspire.

The miniature has a lot of details and Dave does some great freehand work, which really adds a lot to a piece that was already pretty awesome.  The striped hat, the starburst designs on the hem of his robe, writing on the bits of paper tied to his staff (magical notes or perhaps simply reminders to pick up milk?), and so on.  The little familiar is cute, and there is so much going on with the base.  He looks like he’s casting a spell probably from the middle of his sanctum or secret laboratory that seems in utter chaos with all of the papers, books, jars of dubious, past experiments and so on scattered every which way.

Dave paints all sorts of different types of miniatures (he strikes me as a bit of a polymath) and I especially like his dioramas too.  As I type this he is currently working on a waterfall piece that is shaping up to be quite spectacular.

Turning from the fantastic to the historical, we have John and his fine historical miniatures blog, Just Needs Varnish!  He decided to share with us some recent additions to his 1/600 and 1/700 WW2 Italian Regia Marina coastal forces.

My personal favorite of John’s new naval forces is the colorful Driade.  Perhaps this is because, as John points out, there “is the somewhat tenuous link to magic … since dryads are tree nymphs and this is the closest I’ll ever come to painting something that, to me, could be considered magical!”

Or maybe it is just the colorful lifeboats and whatnot?  I think I like John’s rationale better.  Whatever the case, I enjoyed checking out John’s coastal forces and learning a little about some of the ships of the Italian navy during WW2.

From the Italian Royal Navy we shamble over to Mcmattilaminis, who has a blog of the same name, and his lovely poxwalkers!  He decided to experiment with Games Workshop’s Contrast paints and these pictures are the result.  (He also lists some interesting Contrast paint Youtube videos in his poxwalker post that might be worth checking out.)   I think his living dead turned out grand and I’d be proud to plunk eight or nine thousand of these rotters on the table in a friendly game of 40K.

Mcmattilaminis sees poxwalkers “as the lowly embodiments of Nurgle’s might, and there’s at least a little magic involved as their disease-ridden bodies are blessings from a [the!] plague god.” I quite agree and given how dangerous poxwalkers can be in large numbers, I’d say they embody both Might and Magic quite nicely indeed!

Next up is this bruiser, an ogre painted by Faust of Double Down Dice.  I have to say that this guy is ugly in all the right ways.  Faust reports that his ogre is named Morg N’ Thorg and like almost all star players is a freelancer.  In Morg’s case he “will play for just about every Blood Bowl team out there.  Except for the Undead, who he hates.”  Faust also notes that this guy doesn’t play for peanuts so he doesn’t see a lot of use in games because he costs a lot of points to field.  (Now we know how he comes by all of that gold!)

I wonder if the team gave him the number 100 because he said, “Morg N’ Thorg want biggust nummer onda teem!” If Blood Bowl is anything like the National Football League the numbers normally only go up to 99, but if someone were to object and I were one of the coaches, I’d say, “You tell him he has to give up his number!”

I didn’t think so.

It isn’t as far a journey as you might think from the hot-blooded pitch of Bloodbowl to the cold-blooded jungles of Lustria.  I’m sure Maenoferren22, Potentate of (3D) Printing, Lord of Lizardmen and owner of the blog Bogenwald would agree.

We offer, for your consideration, a Scar Veteran riding a re-purposed Allosaurus.  Maeno said that he “decided to give him a spear as he is on a big bloody lizard and a little sword wouldn’t reach anyone on the ground.”  Seems legit to me and what is more, that is pretty cool spear so there’s that too.

I thought Maeno’s dino harness came out looking good.  He used green stuff for the straps and then made the decorations by fashioning molds out of molding paste then putting green stuff into said molds.  I like he end result and I agree with Sir John, who commented in Maeno’s “Lizards and Moulded Greenstuff” post that the sculpting “looks like it’s all meant to be there!”

I have happily followed Azazel’s Bitz Box for quite some time now, and what strikes me the most about his work is how when the painting bug hits him, he can churn out vast quantities of high quality work in a very short amount of time.  Apparently Azazel learned about my painting challenge with two-and-a-half days to go, so he painted up this ginger-haired Mantic dwarf berserker lord.

I was curious how Azazel did the tattoos.  I liked how they looked somewhat faded as real tattoos might over time unless you are careful of them.  (I somehow don’t see a dwarf berserker lord remembering to rub lotion into his body art and making sure he doesn’t get too much sun, but you never know.)    Azazel told me achieved the tattoo effect by using a Vallejo paint called “Periscopes,” which he thinned and mixed in a touch of flesh tone.

Nice, but Azazel wasn’t done yet.  He also finished this Rackham Forest goblin chieftain from Deuteros Games and posted it on the last day of the challenge.  Azazel reports that this was a fiddly model with a lot of detail and “it would have been so easy to continue stretching out the painting time for another couple of years,” but he wanted to finish it in part because of the painting challenge.  Glad I could help in some small way, and I think your goblin looks great as is!

Finally, we wrap things up with the rust monster and four dwarves I decided to paint for the challenge.  I purchased these miniatures from an Etsy seller who calls his shop NorthernIcewerks.  I enjoyed painting them very much and plan on using them in games such as Dungeons & Dragons and Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Thank you again to everyone who participated in my first painting challenge.  I’m doing another challenge for April with the catchy name of Paint the Crap You Already Own!  What project(s) are you going to be working on?  I’m thinking I might finally get Poxwalker #18 done at long last.