Happy Halloween! When I first read through Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, one new monster definitely stood out to be: the oblex. It's a slime that eats memories and can then alter parts of its body to impersonate other creatures. I've been champing at the bit to include it in an adventure, but first I wanted to craft a mini for it.
Slimes are easy miniatures to make rather than buy, through the use of that ultimate tool of the crafter: the hot glue gun. I've made oozes of various colors, as well as a set of ten gelatinous cubes. You can never have too many gelatinous cubes.
This project would be a little different though. I decided to grab a few extra pieces from a Warhammer set I had lying around, as well as chop up a couple extra Bones Kickstarter figures I had lying around.
I started randomly gluing pieces together using big, bulbous globs of hot glue. The main thing to keep in mind with using hot glue to "sculpt" like this is patience. You need to wait for one glob to fully cool and harden before adding more on, or it will all melt together, and ruin your globby texture.
Speaking of patience, I normally take the time to clean up minis and remove mold lines as best I can before painting them, but I didn't in this case. As I thought, it didn't really matter, but after finishing, it was noticeable enough on part of the model that I wish I had taken the time to do it for this.
As with almost all of my other minis, I used an airbrush to prime the oblex. I use a technique called zenithal priming, where you shade the mini in black and white before painting. I got a little bit of speckling with the white paint as my cheap airbrush literally started to fall apart in the middle of this process.
I then used the airbrush to hit the whole thing with a coat of red ghost tint. These are neat transparent paints that I'm always looking for good opportunities to use. Since it's transparent, the shading from the priming stage still shows through.
The ghost tint already gives a glossy finish, but I wanted to slime it up a little extra with some glossy Mod Podge. It goes on white, but dries to a hard, but slimey-looking gloss. Make sure you give a day or two to fully dry, it stays tacky for a bit and you don't want a giant fingerprint on your model.
And here's a pic of the finished product! So spooky! Maybe next year I'll fill up a bunch of red water balloons and make an oblex costume to wear.
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