HAWKS

Chris Palmer

     I’m sorry folks, but due to me being in full preparation mode for the Cold Wars convention, I was unable to finish any Bones painting this week.  I was however able to whip up a quick conversion piece.
      As some of you may remember, last July at the Historicon gaming convention, I traded my Griffon from the  Bones Kickstarter to a friend who wanted a pair of them, for two of his Kickstarter minis: the Deathpriest, and the Female Storm/Cloud Giant.  (See: A Change in the Numbers for details ) I had been playing around in my mind, for a while now, with the possibility of converting the Cloud Giant for use with my Uncharted Seas collection.  Uncharted Seas is a game of Fantasy naval combat, and one of the elements in the game is the use of Giants, who can wade out into relatively shallow coastal waters and attack the ships.  To do this I would need to cut the Giant in half to make it appear as if she was standing in water.

      As I considered the figure, I had a couple decisions to make.  First was where would I cut the figure in half, and the second was what would I do about her weapon: keep it pointing down, or raise it so it would be above the water.   I decided I would make the cut right below where her hair hung down, that way I wouldn’t have to deal with modeling the hair in the water.  I also decided I would re-position the mace, so it would be raised up as if she was threatening a ship.  This required I carefully cut it away from where it is molded  into her clothes near the base.
      So, to begin with I cut the mace free from the bottom of the figure with a hobby knife, trying to retain the shape of the mace as best as possible. I had to go back and trim and shape it a little, so the end looked like it was fully sculpted.   I then cut her in half with a jewelers saw.   Finally, I cut her arm right at the point where her wrist protector meets her elbow to help disguise the joint.

I then prepared the arm for reassembly. I had to trim a little bit off the upper arm to make sure the mace would be raised at a good angle.  I also realized I had to make another cut, this time in the mace itself,  as when the forearm was flipped around to make the mace go upwards, the fancy carving of the woman on the mace ended up facing towards the back of the figure, and I wanted it to face forward.  So I cut the mace just above the handle, so I could rotate it around and have the beautiful carving of the lady face forward. Luckily, the Bones material is very easy to slice through.
   I next drilled small holes in both parts of the arm, and both parts of the mace, so I could pin them, thus making the joints stronger.  For the pins, I merely cut small sections of wire from a paper clip.  To glue the parts together I used Gorilla gel super glue.

     After I had glued all the parts together, I glued the figure to a 1.5 inch black-primed fender washer using Aileene’s Tacky glue.  Now the figure is all set to paint.   She is shown below with the Giant that is sold as part of the Uncharted Seas line of miniatures.

And here she is shown with a Dwarven battleship.

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The view from the other side of the table.

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A soldier takes down an adventurer.

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The chaos continues. The police had “commandeered” a truck and tried to run me over, but he hit the embankment and crashed. Then someone shot Duncan, with whom I was in hand to hand combat. Before Sidney Greenstreet could reload his pistol Bill’s cop shot me. That was the second time he hot me. The first time, I only had five hit points left, but he rolled three points of damage with five dice!

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