#converting miniatures

The creaking is all that can heard from the Wooden Men, your terrified breaths are all it needs to lumber to your hiding spot.

Hello, I’m Kess. I’ve been making miniatures since just before the first lockdown in the UK. My very first miniature was a Space Marine kitbashed with Tau pieces from a Kill Team box split between me and my friend—and almost every single miniature ever since has been modified, ‘bashed, scratch built, or even sculpted!

I loooooove making my own minis, or having a go at recreating artworks or characters from shows/video games that have no official miniatures that exist but I so so so want to have a little thing physically to show my love of them. I sparingly use 3d prints, because I have so much bloody plastic I might as well try and make it myself!

I use to post across all sorts of social medias, but in recent years I’ve deleted or abandoned all but my Tumblr, the people I follow here really inspire me and sometimes I even directly make minis tagged to certain artists. Tumblr is also a lot less stressful, as I don’t really care about “growing” as a “cReAtoR”, I just want a nice place to host all my minis.

Kids these days only care about they teleholo-phonepadds and the newest auto-generated vidscreened megablockbusters, this particular Techno-Solo-Merc was delighted when his favourite granddaughter picked up hexadecimalised witchcraft.

I LOVE THESE! I think some of my favourite minis. Effective kitbashes, and certainly a better paintjob than I’ve been doing recently. Put a lot of effort into em, I particularly like the granddaughter’s teeny tiny little Tamagotchi on her belt, was her very first digital familiar :3

When you encounter the Six of Six in the frozen wastes of Felstad, you best hope they roll low.

I’ve done some dice themed minis before and they’re some of my favourites, I know some people have “avatar” miniatures and I’ve genuinely considered using my Dicelin for that—haven’t thought about them for a while until I found Clayton Ellison‘s AMAZING profile on Instagram of dice miniature after dice miniature scrolling all the way down, I absolutely LOVE their minis and their painting style, as I still have tons of miniature dice lying around from that old project, thought I’d give it a go. The two female minis are BadSquiddo miniatures, 3 of the others are from a game called Barons War , and the one with the executioner’s axe a friend gifted me and I have no clue where it’s from.

The Collector's automata from across the Imperium. Their shells are useless once their Abominable Intellences have been cleansed--someone's gotta keep their husks so they don't fall into the wrong hands, might as well be someone who appreciates them.

Been slowly working on and off with these lot for months now, been in a real slump with my mini work, until some key pieces of inspiration struck which made me instantly want to have them in miniature form--and looking around broken minis and key bits I've been hanging onto for a while, got into the groove from there with others--I'm both happy and displeased with these lot, I think the kitbashing on all of them is excellent, and the painting is actually okay for such a long break, other than the little holo-table bot I do think the rest look a little generic however, tried to spice it up with those circular patterns which is alright I guess.

The (totally not a Tech Heretic) Collector. That little top piece I've had for almost 5 years, been trying to find a use for it forever.

my fucking sick Flamethrower-wielding Ballerina. She has little wheels for feets!!

Then for the rest, I've been wanting to tackle a 40k version of Marathon's S'pht for a while now, last year I made a Compiler and I absolutely loved it, wanted an excuse to have one in an Inquisitor game

And I saw this AMAZING blog, @cardo-de-comer with both 2d and 3d artwork, and such striking colours. I try to make colourful miniatures, but these just looked gorgeous. I knew I was gonna have a little hologram out of that upside Tau drone piece, originally was just gonna be a flat piece of transparent plastic that I'd do a diagram on, but seeing their work I knew I just had to have someone on it.

At such a small scale, those tiny little roughly 1mm dots is the best I can do to attempt at recreating that amazing texturing work.

For the bot that was shown off last on my blog, I was playing this amazing demo for an indie game called Hypogea, the robot in that was super distinctive to me, and I knew I had to recreate it.

Certainly my biggest post on here, and despite the complexity of these minis they were actually made pretty quick, just not been feeling that great, and took FOREVER to paint. I've got some more Frostgrave Wizard ideas, and I recently got myself the new ODST minis that came out, got some fun sculpting ideas for them. Hope to get back into the flow of things.

On the magik-scared battlefields, it’s not just armies of wizards you’ll find, but Magic-Mercs and Scavenge Acolytes willing to fight anyone for some gold coin.

I saw @terkmc ‘s amazing Gun Witch and knew I instantly had to start work on making that as a miniature, while playing around with pieces, I ended up creating two rather unconventional Battle Mages alongside her (featuring my first wizard to actually have a wand! Yeah, I usually just do hand gestures and such).

I had taken a break from minis for a little bit, so I’m really happy the OSL came out as well as it did honestly. Very eye catching for me, I love doing spell stuffs.

Just because she’s built like a war machine, doesn’t mean she has to avoid the ballroom.

Saw some cool art featuring a giant hat and realised I’ve only done a few big hats before, desperately wanted todo one and it turned into a rather elegant design in the end (thankfully, I was worried she’d end up looking like a pimp lol). I was tempted to actually paint this up with proper Mechanicus imagery, but decided to make it a little bit ambiguous so I might be able to use her as an Inquisitor and for other games.

If you’re wondering about that obscenely bright red, I used Rogue Hobbies’ signature paintset with just a contrast red over the top, created enough depth while still keeping the vibrancy of her paint. The resin pieces are some super super cool assassins from Anvil Industry