Tag Archives: Pulp Figures

Painting, Pulp

The Thugee’s Bronze

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This sculpted bas-relief is by Bob Murch of Pulp Figures fame, and is included in his Mad Guru set of Thugee. I own most (possibly all, I’ve lost track) of the PF Thugee packs; they’re among my favourite figures from Mr. Murch and regularly appear in our Pulp Alley games. (Thugee previously on the Warbard here and here!)

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A bronze bas-relief of Kali, Hindu goddess of death, change and rebirth. Click for larger, as usual.

The bronze relief, though, has sat around unpainted and ignored for at least a year until it fell into the current round of “clear off the painting bench” mania! The main colour is GW Dwarf Bronze over a grey primer, then a coat of GW Gryphonne Sepia wash/ink. A very, very thinned green ink over that for a bit of verdigris here and there, and finally a few highlights back with straight Dwarf Bronze. (Note that all my GW paints & washes are from the previous range, not the current GW paint/wash range, and I’m afraid I have no idea what the current equivalents of these colours are!)

The base is just a scrap of plastic sheet and a bit of Milliput with some flagstones scratched into the putty to tie it in with the flagstones already on the pewter. The whole thing has come out very nicely, and really shows off the incredible details of the piece, with the six-armed Kali with her necklace of skulls, skirt of human hands and forearms, and one foot on the body of her consort Shiva. (Good stuff on this Wikipedia article about Kali, btw.) Mr. Murch did his homework!

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Nine

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Second-to-last round of the 7th Lead Painters League over on the Lead Adventure Forum, and it’s more Pulp Figures for me, with a cadre of suspicious characters lurking in a back alley somewhere!

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Suspicious Characters! 28mm Pulp Figures. Click for full size, as always.

These guys will be great fun in our Pulp Alley games, I’m sure. I’ll be doing up a League for them as soon as I’m back in Victoria and back into my usual gaming haunts!

Off to the last round of the LPL today! It’s been a lot of fun to participate, even if real life has kind of cramped my painting schedule.

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Seven

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Round Seven of the LPL is up, and here’s my entry. These guys are 28mm U.S. Navy gunboat sailors from Pulp Figures. I used the famous movie The Sand Pebbles as my source for the uniform colours, as I’m pretty sure Bob Murch did when he sculpted these figures.

The all-white uniform is striking, but hard to do and keep interesting. I used a couple of shades of Reaper Master Series paint – they have a very nice triad of off-whites – and these sailors have come up very nicely.

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28mm US Navy gunboat sailors from Pulp Figures. Click for full size, as usual.

Over on LAF the LPL is continuing for another couple of weeks, go check out the current round!

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Four

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Last week’s LPL entry moves from the Lost Worlds of Round Three to the mysterious corners of the Indian subcontinent with some 28mm Thuggee cultists, also from Pulp Figures.

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The Dread Thuggee. Click to view larger.

These murderous chaps come from three different Pulp Figures packs. The three right-hand figures – the leader, acolyte and sword-bearing bodyguard – are all from PBT-24 The Mad Guru. The swordsman is from PBT-21 Thuggee w/ separate assorted Weapons & Picks, and finally the rifleman is from PBT 23 Thuggee Fighters w/Martini Rifles. I’ve got another six or so figures to finish, as well as a couple of neat scenery bits that come in the Mad Guru pack.

Most of the skin tone comes from W&N Burnt Umber acrylic artist’s ink, applied nearly full-strength over a basecoat of Reaper Intense Brown with a quick highlight (before the ink goes on) of Reaper Oiled Leather. The hair is mostly Reaper Walnut Brown, which is a very-nearly-black dark brown.

Unfortunately for them, these skulking murderers ran straight into a really spectacular group of cavalry from one of the best painters in the contest, and got soundly thrashed, although lots of people said nice things about them! Luck of the draw; I’m a pretty solidly middle-of-the-road painter so a lot of how well I do in LPL sometimes comes down to who the random matchup for a given round is!

Round Five of LPL7 is running over on Lead Adventure as you read this. Round Five is one of the Theme Bonus Point rounds, with this round’s theme being “Historical Civil Wars”. That’s right up my alley, so go see how my Russian Civil War figures are faring this week!

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Three

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More Pulp Figures goodness from last week’s LPL round. This crew of underdressed primitives was started sometime last year, finished over the winter, and have finally gotten their moment of glory, beating a very nice little regiment of 15mm Napoleonic figures in the third round of LPL7.

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The Shaman’s Crew, all from Pulp Figures. Click to view full-size.

Round Four is going on as you read this, and can be viewed over on Lead Adventure. Alas, the Thuggee figures I’ve fielded in Round Four aren’t doing as well as the Neanderthals did. Perhaps they’re overdressed?

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Two

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Round Two of the ten-week Lead Painters League over on Lead Adventure Forum didn’t go so well for me, but at least the Blood Bowl dwarf team my reporters lost to was full of unique figures well painted!

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LPL7 Round Two – Reporters from Pulp Figures. Click for full size.

The reporters are from Pulp Figures, of course.

The 7th Lead Painters League contest continues for another eight weeks over on LAF. It’s a fantastic contest on a great forum; I compete to force myself to push my painting up a notch and get stuff painted and finished! My Round Three entry is in already and will go up over on LAF Sunday morning; Rounds Four and Six are done except for basework and photography; Round Five is going to take most of the time before it’s deadline to complete, as it’s a bonus round with a big crowd of figures to finish off! Beyond that I have enough figures in progress to cover Rounds Seven through Ten, although I’m still debating what to do for bonus points and a spectacular finish in Round Ten… wish me luck!

Pulp

Hairy Apemen!

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Missing Links? Yeti? Sasquatch? Some other sort of yet-undiscovered ape-man? The result of Mad Science? Any or all of the above?

Sasquatch/Yeti/Etc!
Hairy Apemen from Pulp Figures & Uncle Mike

The two big guys are from Pulp Figures, PLT-7 Hairy Hominids, the two smaller figures are from Uncle Mike’s Strange Aeons line, the Missing Links. They’re all on bases I constructed of pennies and milliput, as usual.

Left to right, we have Momma (holding a skull), Pops, Junior (in the background, mugging for the camera) and finally Uncle Fred. I might yet do one last round of highlighting on their hair, and the bases do need a bit more work, but they’re playable as is. Not sure when they’ll get their first outing to terrify explorers or hapless cavemen, but hopefully soon!

Painting, Pulp

Pulpy Painting & Prep

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I generally do figure prep (taking off moldlines and flash) and basic basing in fairly large batches, prime the whole batch, then tuck most of them away and bring them back out 5-10 at a time for painting.

It’s a good system for me; it gets the gruntwork of cleaning and prepping done efficiently, but avoids the “Primered Legions” paralysis I get from having hordes of unpainted figures staring at me from the corners of my painting bench. Instead they’re out of sight in in a spare figure case, to be brought out in small enough batches to actually paint.

This evening’s batch is pretty close to typical, and an amusing snapshot of the breadth of my current interests. Continue reading Pulpy Painting & Prep →

Painting, Pulp

LPL5 Week 10: Gunga Din (1939)

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The final round of LAF’s Lead Painters League 5 was another bonus round, this one “A Scene From The Movies”, with bonus points for two teams and a vehicle or scenery piece representing a scene from a well-known movie.

I thought about doing The Sand Pebbles with American sailors and Chinese mobs, but didn’t get around to ordering Chinese figures in time (I already have appropriate American sailors in the lead mountain), then Bob Murch of Pulp Figures showed up at Trumpeter Salute back at the beginning of April with some unreleased Thugee strangler figures, and I knew I had to do Gunga Din, an old black and white movie I’ve see a few times and enjoyed!

Even better, I planned on painting up another few WW1/Interwar British riflemen and running them as opponents; the actual movie is set in the late 1800s but I figured I could get away with using slightly later pulp-era Brits!

In the event, both the opponents and the new bonus scenery piece never got done, but I did get the very nice Thugee stranglers painted and shown, and they quite handily won their Round 10 outing against some Roman gladiators inspired by the movie Maximus.

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My Lead Painters League 5 Round 10 entry, inspired by the 1939 movie Gunga Din. Figures by Pulp Figures. As always, click for full size.

I have to wonder how much sheer novelty factor added to my vote count — there are a grand total, to my knowledge, of perhaps 4 packs of these Thugee stranglers out in the wild, and Pulp Figures is a well-known enough company that most of the time Mr. Murch’s figures are ubiquitous. Being able to show off brand-new figures that have literally never been seen elsewhere (not even the Pulp Figures website has the full set of 5!) has to have been worth a few votes!

The original Gunga Din theatrical trailer from 1939 is up on Youtube:

Round 10 brings LPL5 to an end! I managed 8 new teams over 10 rounds, 3 wins, and a final placing of 55th out of 72nd, which is roughly where I figured I’d end up and roughly where I placed compared to the overall field back in LPL3 last time I entered. More importantly, I have a whole bunch of freshly painted figures crowding the edges of my painting desk now, quite a few more than I’d have had without the prodding of LPL5 driving my brush!

I’ll do a proper LPL5 wrapup gallery post later this week.

Historicals, Painting, Pulp

LPL5 Week 5: Hunting von Lettow-Vorbek

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Week Five of the LAF’s Lead Painters League having just ended, here’s my entry. This was one of the bonus theme weeks; the bonus theme this time was “Africa”, with extra bonus points for producing an opposing team as well as your basic 5-figure entry.

I completely forgot about the extra bonus points for an opposing team, but that wouldn’t have mattered as I’ve no suitable figures anyway. I did manage to shoehorn the tropical British I’ve been painting in, as British and British Empire troops spent the entire length of the Great War chasing Paul von Lettow-Vorbek around various East African territories. They never caught him, he surrended shortly after the November 11 Armistice undefeated in the field.

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Hunting von Lettow-Vorbek, Tanganika 1917 (Click for a full-size version, as always)

Unfortunately my British riflemen got done for by a group of zombie nomads on zombie camels, but I’m still pleased with the paintjob on them and the photograph.

The larger base they’re on, incidentially, is a CD covered in sand and fine gravel, then painted to mostly match the bases of the British and some of the other figures I’ve been doing lately.

LPL5 Round 6 launched Sunday, go check out all the great entries!