DLBlog 6: Tara Finished & Build Binge

Hello again! This week I've got another completed crew to show, Tara's Herald of Obliteration crew. As mentioned last week, this is the special edition transparent 'smoke' plastic set that Wyrd first sold at GenCon a few years back (one which I didn't attend) and some holiday specials since. As this was my first time working with this type of material I did research and testing on my own on how to best approach it. Plastic cement unfortunately doesn't work. Superglue does, but it fogs the clear plastic. The best adhesive was said to be clear canopy glue mainly used for windows on scale model planes and cars. I picked up a bottle to test out, but the instructions said to tape the pieces in place and then wait 3 hours... I'm not that patient and that had me questioning the durability of the bond for gaming pieces. So I just used superglue to stick everything together. It did indeed fog around the application area, but since I planned on green-stuffing and painting over the seams anyway, it was acceptable for my purposes.

I wanted to leave large portions of the Nothing Beast and Void Wretches transparent to reflect their otherworldliness. I started with a thin layer of rattle can matte varnish over the bare plastic. This would act as a sort of primer for the areas I wanted to paint traditionally as nothing was going to stick to the bare super slick surface. It also gives a neat frosted effect. Most of the models have hollow cavities inside which aren't attractive to look at and there were surface scratches from scraping off the mold lines (which are really hard to find on clear plastic, by the way). The matte coat conveniently hides all of these imperfections and gives more depth to the surface.

The Void Wretches were done up in much the same way as the Beast. I had seen others use a wash on clear plastic for depth so I tried that on the middle Wretch's legs. But the combination of matte coat and wash all but eliminated the transparent look. I did try a wash on the bare plastic before the varnish as well, but nothing stuck and I just ended up with nasty looking pools in the recesses. They must have used a much clearer varnish to give the wash some tooth to grab on to.

Tara and Karina had much less surface area I wanted to leave unpainted and thus mask off with tape. Tara's monster arm and sword were good candidates but I wanted to fully paint Karina. I went through a couple of basing options for these two. I started out with Micro Art Studio 'Chaos' bases for the whole crew, but wasn't happy with how they painted up. My initial plan was to have an OSL effect coming from between the cracks in the rocks, but the glow on the models would have covered up the transparency. I stuck with the chaos bases for the Wretches, but for the humanoids I switched over to custom bases of floating stone inspired by other's work posted in Wyrd's forums.

The rocks are just small pieces of cork board superglued together with chunks of the edges torn off with pliers to blend the horizontal slabs of cork together.

After painting up the minis I gave them each a light airbrush of green from below as a quick glow effect, leaving masking on the pieces I wanted to stay clear, as I imagine ethereal bits wouldn't reflect light all that well.

Beyond completing Tara's crew. I've been on an assembly binge. I put together and based my remaining Outcast minis and also decided on basing for my already assembled Yan Lo crew. Outcasts got a simple rocks+sand scheme (with some post-painting bushes/grass to follow), whereas Yan Lo got fancier treatment with Micro Art Studio 'Ancient' bases.

All were then zenithal primed: black primer all over with a top-down spray of white, out to about 45 degrees.

Batch 1: assorted Outcast mercs. 3 Desperate Mercenaries (1 metal, 2 plastic), 3 Convict Gunslingers (1 metal, 2 plastic), and a Malifaux Child (metal).

Batch 2: plastic Friekorps models. Librarian, Trapper, Specialist, and 2 Freikorpsmann.

Batch 3: Yan Lo and a Lone Swordsman. I had already assembled Yan Lo's crew box (with superglue rather than plastic cement unfortunately, so I had to green stuff some seams), but hadn't yet based or primed them.

Finished up with assembly of Jack Daw's crew and a pair of Hanged who got my remaining 'Ancient' bases, but have not yet been primed.

That's all for this update. Just want to wrap up by saying how awesome plastic cement is! Back when I started hobbying all I used as superglue. After dealing with the fragility and messiness (always had scales of glue to pick off of my fingertips) I finally switched over to the good stuff. Aside from the rock-solid bond between the parts, it nearly eliminates the need for any green stuffing to hide joints, something I loath doing. Simply squish the melted plastic into the crevice and scrape any excess of with a knife after it dries for a perfect, clean seam.

DLBlog 5: Blood and Rust

Hello again! It's been a very productive couple of weeks of painting. With a total of 16 models I can now call complete and a good amount of work done on a handful more there's a lot of pics below

First up is a group shot of the newly painted Malifaux Outcasts. Most are thematically from Leveticus' crew: Rusty Alyce, 2x Desolation Engines, 3x Hollow Waif, and 8x Abominations. Also, returning from the last post is Vanessa. And finally there's the mercenary grenade-launching robot Lazarus.

Lots of the same techniques were used on most of the models: gratuitous amounts of blood splatter and rusty steel. My blood splatter formula is Tamiya Clear Red mixed with a bit of Agrax Earthshade to darken and thicken it up. Suck up a bit in the end of a plastic pipette, squeeze it a few times to blow out the big chunks, and then spray the remaining little drops onto a model. For the rusty metal I start with a base coat of dark red-brown, heavy drybrush a dark steel metallic, dab on Citadel dry rust paint in random crevices, wash with Agrax Earthshade and then a light drybrush of a bright steel paint. Both are nice quick techniques that give a great result for the time investment.

First up are the master/henchwoman pair Leveticus and Rusty Alyce. Leveticus was previously painted as part of the diorama that was mentioned a few posts back so he simply got a gameplay-legal base. He's just pinned to this new base so he can live on the diorama while on display but be shifted to the 30mm base when he's ready to mix it up. I do need to do a bit more detail work on the gaming base, as Leveticus has some green underglow that makes sense on the diorama, but needs some light source on the small base. Luckily he's standing above a grate so glow can easily be added there.

Rusty Alyce is a straightforward paint job with brighter colored coat and a rusty mechanical arm made for clocking chumps in the face. Her eye looks huge from this low angle, whereas it looks more normal from a typical gaming angle. I have been running into this problem lately and think I'm getting too much white paint on the underside of the eye socket which is only visible when seen from below.

Next are the Hollow Waifs; Leveticus' totems. Fluff wise these girls are soulless shells which, if Leveticus is killed which happens quite often, he can burst out of one of these 'horcruxes' to be reborn. Not quite sure how that works in practice, but whatever. To reflect their soulless nature I left the skin in white tones. I cheated pretty hard on the skin tone as it is simply the original black/white zenithal priming with a few highlights, but it gives much smoother transitions than I have the patience to paint! The dress colors were done to match their box artwork. My favorite Waif is the lady in red; the mini's pose, face, and subtle dress highlights turned out the best IMO.

Here are the two different sculpts for the massive Desolation Engines. On the left is the new plastic version; old metal version on the right. Although I think these minis should have been scaled a good bit larger to reflect their high in-game cost and abilities, I really like how they turned out. The plastic sculpt has quite of bit of seams that needed to be green stuffed and the head didn't fit onto the body very well, but I got everything smoothed out in the end. Metal sculpt is like two pieces, so no issues there.

These are the Abominations. First set of four are older metal sculpts, rest are the new plastic minis. I really like the aesthetic of the models and how different each of them are. The same steps were followed for painting these in assembly line fashion. Airbrush dark then light skin tones all over, followed by some brush highlights and red and purple shades for the shadows and to pick out the scars. After painting the rusty metal as described above, that's the majority of the surface area of these models: skin and metal. Then details were picked out with one or two highlights for each: bone, clothing, gore, and tubes.

 That wraps up the rusty, bloody mess that is Leveticus's crew. The next two are models that were ongoing works in progress. Vanessa, as seen last week as an unfinished member of the Viktoria's crew, is now finished this week. I really like how the strong glow effect turned out, it really brings life to the otherwise generic brown-trenchcoated woman. The glow effect was a simple airbrush spray of blue from below after the model was painted normally, and I then finished painting the magic cloud itself.

Finally there is Lazarus. He's a model who's been based for a long time and I've tried several color schemes on him, none of which I was happy with. And being a pretty goofy looking model to begin with (Wyrd's only posable mini, albeit not posable enough to get it out of a Baymax pose) I just wanted to wrap it up. Lore-wise he's powered by the trapped soul of a Guild Guardsman who was murdered during a science experiment, and sensibly now hates the Guild. So I gave him a heavily weather red paint scheme. The scratches in the armor don't have enough contrast for my liking, so I may go back and line the edges of the gouges to give it more depth.

And that's about it! Now I've moved onto working on the Herald of Obliteration special transparent box set. I plan on painting the top surfaces and leaving the lower portion transparent with a light wash to better define the surfaces.

The 'scrap' bases used above and the 'chaos' bases below that I'll be using for the new crew are from Micro Arts Studio. This is the first time I've used them and they're very nice and easy to use. Since I paint the lips of my bases to match the mini's faction it's super easy to paint them separately and them glue the insert in at the end. However, they are difficult to magnetize. With the normal slotted bases and even resin bases (drill a well in the solid bottom) I could insert a magnet for use with my metal transportation box. There's no recess in the bottoms of these bases and not much meat to drill into. Thankfully, since I've shifted my hobby more away from actually gaming and more toward painting that's not a big deal for just placing them in the display case.

DLBlog 4: Swordswoman Doppelgangers

Continuing from last week where I was in the process of staining the wood pieces of this display case, here's the finished result. Looks a lot better than the light, unstained color of the thing when I bought it. However, the wood was in pretty rough shape, so I may replace it in the future.

And here it is all filled up with minis. It just barely holds all of my painted Malifaux stuff.  With only about 1/3 of my horde painted, I'm going to need a few more of these if I plan on storing them all the same way. Thankfully, the display case looks like it was homemade to begin with; just acrylic and wood. Should be simple to replicate and even customize a bit to better contain minis.

Here is my finished batch of miniatures for my Viktoria crew. From left to right: Student of Conflict, Viktoria of Blood, Viktoria of Ashes, and Hans (proxy from Warmachine). I initially planned on spending a good amount of time detailing the metal pieces, but ended up with fairly simple paint jobs as during the process I started to lose interest and wanted to just get them finished up.

Nothing particularly interesting to say about the painting process. For the skin tones I'm sticking with the midtone base coat, highlight up then shade down that I first used last week. It's given me good results so far and is much quicker than starting with a shadow base color and needing lots of highlight layers.

The skirt of the Student of Conflict was a very quick paint. These model were zenithal primed, with a black base primer and white preshading from above. Just a thin coat of purple and thin highlight and that's all that needed to be done with very good results for the time invested. I'm going to try and use this technique much more in the future on those model that I don't to the base coat with the airbrush, as you can't have any stray color on the painting surface.

Vik of Blood was my favorite model to paint, as I love any model that I get to splatter blood all over. I use a mix of Tamiya Clear Red acrylic paint mixed with a bit of Agrax Earthshade to darken and thicken it up a tad. I either flick the mixture off the bristles of a stiff brush for a fine spray or splatter larger drops out of a pipette. The paint mix thickens up quickly and you can brush on the gummy leftovers for chunky bits of gore.

This Warmachine Kara Sloan mini is my proxy for the Malifaux's Hans. It was chosen to stick with the 'sister' theme of the Viks. The sniper rifle position was modified from being held straight up the the air to being held at the ready in both hands. Not sure that the pink hair jives with the rest of her paint job, but it definitely stands out and goes with the purple hair of the Viks.

I haven't finished up Vanessa yet, as I'm not sure of the color scheme and how much OSL I want to do with the magic staff. I'm leaning more toward a very strong light source where most of the front of her will be lit blue, but I want to do some testing first (and paint something other than brown/black clothes...).

Inspired by the blood, I've prepped and started painting my Leveticus crew. With plenty rusty, bloody models such as the Abominations and Desolation Engines I'll get to flick red paint to my heart's content once these are painted up.

DLBlog 3: Drug Addicts & Laser Burns

On The Bench

This past weekend I put in the time to complete a handful of Malifaux models to finish up the thematic group for the master Jakob Lynch, the drug-pushing gambler enslaved by the mind-controlling horror that lives in his casino's basement.

First up are the Depleted, the unfortunate patrons addicted to the drug Brilliance who have been nearly sucked dry of their life force to feed the beast's hunger.

In the past I have always used Reaper paints, but used Scale 75 paints for the first time when painting these guys. I'd heard good reviews about this relatively new line of paints and seen some impressive results, so I picked up a few of their paint sets. They have a super matte finish, which I find perfect for skin tones. The paint also has a very fine pigment which is great for thin glazes, although it takes quite a few coats to get an even base coat.

This is also the first time I've tried starting with a midtone basecoat and glazing in the shadows, rather than my typical method of dark base coat, wash, and several highlights. I think it turned out very well, especially with the dark red hue to make the skin look bruised and feverish. I especially like how the faces on the two shorter minis turned out.

Next up is an Illuminated. Those newly addicted to Brilliance undergo 'beneficial' mutations well-suited for combat. Their new-found power of short-lived, however. Over time their condition deteriorates until they are in the same state as the lowly Depleted, only to be wholly consumed by the Darkness.

This model is a kit bash: body from the Malifaux Female multi part kit and arms from an actual Illuminated. Jakob Lynch's box set comes with three Illuminated models. Two I have already painted, but the third wasn't to my liking, so I stole its arms and glued/green stuffed them to this chick.

I didn't use the Scale 75 paints for this model's flesh (as I was a bit frustrated at first trying to base coat the Depleted) and I reverted back to using Reaper medium and pale flesh tones. I'm not quite as happy with this model. After looking at the picture the highlighting, especially on the claws, could use some more work.

Finally there is the Hungering Darkness himself, an ancient Spirit of Malifaux that feeds off of the Brilliance-addicted patrons of Lynch's casino.

Figuring out a suitable color scheme for this guy had me stumped for quite a while. This sculpt isn't terribly liked in the Malifaux community. Affectionately nicknamed 'Huggy', it is a pretty goofy model to begin with and, depending on the paintjob, can get much more so. I wanted to stick with a simple paint scheme to avoid a mishmash of colors over the large surface area, so color of the main body parts is the turquoise scheme common throughout my Lynch crew. I wanted to keep the focus on the central portion of the model and away from the tiny slug tail and large protrusions on the side of the head, so for the rest of the body I applied a mix of black and iridescent medium. In the fluff Huggy is a spirit composed of the ethereal drug Brilliance, so I thought the glossy sparkle would be appropriate, and it came out better than I expected.

And here's the Jakob Lynch family photo.

And the paint streaked hand that signifies a good day of painting.

Next up in the paint queue are the Viktorias and their sisters in battle. You may remember seeing Matt's excellently painted versions in a previous post; these Viks are some older metal sculpts that I prefer the look of so they'll have a bit different aesthetic. I've had these ladies primed and based for a while and it's about time I give them the attention they deserve. I'll be trying out the Scale 75 metallic paints on their armor plates.

Hobby Storage

In the past couple of weeks I've picked up a few new ways to store all of my hobby toys. The first is a pair of paint racks from Burn In Designs. They are laser cut vertical paint storage racks specifically made for dropped bottles. With my collection of Reaper and Scale 75 bottles they were perfect for me. Each row holds up to 11 bottles; with 8 rows that's a bunch of paint stored in each rack. The top of even has a tray to hold misc items, like Citadel/P3 pots or other tools.

The pieces fit together very nicely. They recommend wood glue to hold it together securely, but only the the top lips and bottom legs require it, the rest firmly slots together.

I was previously using a very large nail polish rack which only held a little more than a single Burn In Design rack. Upgrading to the vertical racks is much more space efficient and aesthetically pleasing.

My second storage acquisition is a nice little display case. While in the Lake of the Ozarks last weekend I happened across this gem at a shop's going out of business sale. With 12 compartments perfect for storing Malifaux-sized Crews I snapped it up. It even has a mount on the bottom that allows you to spin it around to easily access all sides. 

The only downside was that the light wood color wasn't too my liking. After a quick tear down and sanding I applied a darker stain which is drying as I type this. In the next update I'll have pictures of it back together and filled with minis.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!