Getting my feet wet: my first homemade minis

Although my brothers and I made up and built our own games in our youth, I don't remember ever making our own minis for them. If they involved minis at all, we used what we already had: Lego figures, plastic soldiers, Micro Machines. I believe my first set of scratch-built game miniatures were more recently produced than some time in my teens.

Carving boats was something I did do in my teens, along with a number of other things that are usually categorized as crafts, so it isn't a big leap for me to produce my own game pieces. Maybe the only wonder is why I didn't start earlier. I guess I just needed a push from somewhere and it never came in my youth because what I had then for gaming was always good enough. That and I started spending a lot of time on video games.

So what was the push? It was the debut of the Ticket to Ride expansion, Alvin and Dexter. The expansion adds a Godzilla-like character (Dexter) and an alien character (Alvin) to the usual Ticket to Ride play. Basically, the game starts with each of the monsters on a randomly selected city. No routes may be claimed while a city is occupied by a monster, but players may pay matching cards to move a monster to a different city. I didn't know if I would like it and I didn't want to spend $25+ to find out (sorry DoW). Good thing too because we've only played the expansion once since I carved the pieces and I think that they have recently been commandeered by my children.

So here are my first homemade minis! Both are roughly 2" high, carved from a bit of waste lumber and painted using Testor's enamel paints that I picked up for free through a Kijiji add.

Alien spaceship. I carved this one first, I didn't feel like my skill
 set  extended to carving life forms at the time.

Because it had been a while, I thought the UFO would provide a good re-starting point. I think it turned out pretty good. There isn't much to do with a saucer to make it more dramatic, but I tried to shape the base it's on and paint it to look like the light of some kind of "abduction ray". The fact that the wood grain shows through the yellow gives it the look of having a kind of spiralled energy flow.

Mini-giant-dino-monster looking for something
 to destroy. So far the only creature I've carved.

Next, my beginner's try on a mini-giant-lizard. Appearing more like a dinosaur than a fearsome Godzilla, I still like the way it turned out. Again, not as dramatic as a professional might produce, but who needs that. I adapted a template I found for a simple bear carving. What she lacks in pizazz, she makes up for in stability on a game board.

It was while I was carving the lizard-beast that I got a set of Dremel bits for wood carving, which was good to use for the areas that were too hard to leave a smooth surface using my knives.

So far, my "Faux Dexter" is my only attempt at carving any kind of animal-type thing. I've been thinking about doing people, but I haven't taken that plunge yet.