Wednesday, August 10, 2011

old figure art from Dark Horse Miniatures

I've always liked the windswept robes look on wizards,
like they're out on the moors casting spells at the Hound of the Baskervilles.
Maybe this guy is Heathcliff, the Warlock of Wuthering Heights.


 Ranger dudes get pet doggies and sweet mustaches.
Is that a grenade in his left hand?


Lady rangers get attack cats instead. 


This guy is an elf according to Dark Horse.
I'm not sure I believe that, but I love this figure either way.
He looks like a member of the medieval version of the Village People.


Baby dragon sucking its tail cracks me up. 


Best cleric ever.

FYI I probably swiped all these images from Stuff of Legends, one of the best places on the internet to research old figures.

15 comments:

  1. I say more elves should have mohawks and man-staches.

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  2. The first one (A-008) looks a bit like Gary.

    And yeah, that Friar is great. Makes me want to play a priest of Guinness.

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  3. I love those mini figure art sketches. They'd be great for paper-minis.

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  4. If you have ever seen the elf picture in the LBBs, you would not be confused by that mohawked Freddy Mercury. Elves looked like Jackie Wright back in the 70's.

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  5. Anonymous12:51 PM

    You can see more of those illustrations, and some of the actual figures, and download the Dark Horse catalog with all those illos, at the Lost Minis Wiki. Here is the Dark Horse page;
    http://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Category:Dark_Horse

    Timothy

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  6. I used to have that wizard at the top with the wind-blown robes! Don't know what happened to it, though.

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  7. Frakkin' sweet. :) I found those old minis amazingly imagination-inspiring; you looked at them and you wanted to make a character who WAS them. I find Reaper's minis to still do that for me, so it's not a total backwards-through-rose-colored-glasses thing. Painted plastic minis, by any company, though... meh. It's as if the LACK of color frees the imagination, because your mind has to work to fill in the details. (Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" actually discusses some of the underlying psychology of this.)

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  8. PS: Another great source of old miniature catalogs, and some unique and inexpensive (if a bit crude) modern minis is http://www.megaminis.com/

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  9. It's Friar I Don't Give a Tuck!

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  10. I used to know the owner of Dark Horse Miniatures. The guy owned the local game store for a number of years. Good guy. Got the very first TMNT license.

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  12. I always liked those little illos, as they show more details then the granny unpainted figures found in most of those old catalogs.

    I frond a ton of those little illos at this site (look along the yellow side-bar):

    http://www.megaminis.com/0-MINI-MAG.htm

    The Armory's Buyers Guide to Fantasy Miniatures (listed as: Buyers Guide to Fantasy Miniatures 1983) is a thick 212-page catalog crammed-pack full of those pictures, from several companies!

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  13. Re: the elf. Early modern Polish nobility actually sported the tashe+mohawk look. It was part of the national Sarmatian aesthetic consciously designed to differentiate them from their German neighbours.

    The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was quite, quite mad, and an ultra- rich vein of underexploited gaming fodder. :)

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  14. I'm thinking it's a tennis ball not a grenade...the Ranger wants to play fetch with his wolf!

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  15. How can no one have made a Mr.T Night-Elf Mowhawk reference for that elf? I thought this blog was populated by nerds. For shame.

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