'Monstrous' from MichaelA: Monster Mash

I can’t believe that we have reached the final bonus round of the ‘VIII Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge’ already!  A sure sign that the winter months are abating, not that it has felt like that this past week here in Blighty. 

Monstrous, what a theme, what a challenge, I have thoroughly enjoyed both and, with a couple of exceptions, have managed to paint miniatures that had been left languishing on the periphery of the painting queue for an age, waiting for just such an incentive to galvanise me into action.  As a result, allow me to present to you a veritable cornucopia of monstrous beings – the legendary Universal Monsters!

From the silver screen’s infancy there has been a desire to shock and scare the audience out of their seats.  Drawing inspiration from literary greats such as H.G. Wells, Victor Hugo and Mary Shelley, Universal Studios created a stable of monsters that would terrify and delight in equal measure.  Such was their popularity that the long running franchises are still revisited today.

My tribute to this golden age of cinema hail from ‘Studio Miniatures’ and were yet another of their Kickstarters that I supported.  A couple of them required assembly, namely ‘Frank’ and his wife, but the rest were lovely, crisp, single piece castings and an absolute joy to paint; although the preponderance of black did strain my eyes a little!  I had, albeit briefly considered painting these in greyscale, but my experience of this is rather limited and if memory serves me correctly it is a lot harder to pull off than you might imagine. 

The question now is what to do with them?  Well these may yet prove the perfect villains for a certain crew of mystery solving teenage detectives, perhaps just the ticket for a 7TV crew?  Either way, I am thrilled to have them completed and a fitting final theme for the challenge.