Treevolution

 I had the seed of an idea...

Lots of outdoor-themed miniatures from the Dungeons and Lasers Encounters set, and that includes a range of tree and plant creatures. Here are some of them!

At the small end, a man-eating plant. The boots sticking out of the mouth are a nice touch. 

Next, a druid with an owl. He's rudely thrust his staff into the nose of a moose skull. Not sure what that says about his respect for nature, but it's pretty eye-catching. 

Skulls are also a big feature on some of the other nature-dwelling beasties, so I felt a theme coming on. This is the Wendigo, a lovely model who's having a proper red-in-tooth-and-claw moment. Probably would have been best on a snowy base, it's a northern monster I think, but I went with summer. 

The deer skull here is nicely decorated with tattered skin, but it's not quite clear if that's a mask or the creature's actual head. Creepy. 

As our druid shapeshifts steadily up in size, he becomes a Leshy. The big elk skull looks like the face, but that's misleading - he's got a bevy of skull faces leering out underneath. I didn't manage a good photo of it, but there's even a sad skeleton trussed up in his chest cavity. That's definitely not natural. 

Finally, the big chap here is the Demonic Tree, an Ent gone very bad. Two dangling bodies are nobody's first choice of earrings. Not until the woodcutters concerned cleared out that last copse of your nieces and nephews, at any rate. 

Top swampy base here, very gloomy and murky. Quite hard to assemble and paint the model, though, there's a lot going on with it. I should have done it in sections, all the branches kept snagging my brushes. 

Wood is quite hard to paint well, I think, on account of how it refuses to stick to one convenient colour in real life. Lots of greens and browns and light greys on show here, and I'm particularly reliant on Ushabti Bone, Dark Sand (Vallejo) and Rakarth Flesh as drybrushes. Real trees have so much moss on them (round here, where's its damp, anyway), and moss is hard to do! Flock is the wrong texture, so is green dotted over the bark. Tricky. 

Plenty more where that lot came from...