Rise of the Machines

Today I have another robot, he's not quite a terminator but he's angry and he's armed.  I'm guessing he's some sort of maintenance bot and he has decided that the best maintenance he can be doing is bringing "Death to the Fleshy Ones!", after all they are the ones making all of the mess.

Death to the Fleshy Ones!

Another Mongoose Mini-bot, he was a bit of a test bed for painting red and for practising a bit of edge highlighting.  I was quite happy with the results but I'm struggling to keep the lines neat, more practise and keeping the paint thinned though should do the trick.  Keeping the paint thin when painting the highlights makes all the difference, the  finish on this is much smoother than I managed on the dustpan bot I used a similar number of layers but was much more careful about not letting the paint dry out on palette.

Not quite Rosie from the Jetsons.

Between him and and irate motorised dustpan and brush I've got the start of a robot uprising, hopefully Fido won't be tempted away to join them.

An uprising has to start somewhere

That brings me to 7 miniatures this month which is a vast improvement and hopefully I'll keep the momentum going.  I've been stocking up on undead for march but there's a real chance that the latest boxed offering from Games Workshop will throw up a it of a distraction.

Fido!

I decided Corporal Jones was probably a dog person, I also thought a Robo-Dog would be a very quick edition to the squad.  Then I thought that the Wargames Foundry have a very nice robo dog in their 2000AD range, Toby from The Ballard of Halo Jones which I thought would be a good alternative to the Mongoose Robo-Dog.

Toby, his time will come

As it turned out, Toby arrived from Wargames Foundry and turned out to be a bit on the large side for the resin bases I've been using, a new order of bases from  Tiny Worlds would be required, as would carefully removing his metal base.  Instead I stuck with the Mongoose miniature and painting him turned out to be not that quick and basing him was still pretty fiddly.  I think he's turned out all right though.

Robo-Fido

I stuck to red so that he fits in with the rest of the squad, the legs made him quite fiddly to paint  are to small to pin to the base, Instead when I cut away the metal tab I left enough to use as a pin.

Walking the dog on the mean streets of Mega-City 1 

Fido comes out of the equipment budget so corporal Jones gets his gun and 30 Credits worth of mans best Robo-Friend and some armour which sounds like a good deal to me.

Don't pet strange dogs.

He's a bit rough around the edges and I used Typhus Corrosion to cover up a bit of a mess around his paws that I made when basing him.  This instantly made it my favourite Citadel Technical paint, it will be just as good for muddying up boots to cover up unsightly basing errors as it will be for adding grime to metallic areas.

That puts me at six miniatures for February, by far my best monthly total and with a week still to go.

The Dark Lord

A short break from Sci-Fi Dreddy stuff, I wanted a bad guy to go up against Van-Halfling and who or what could be badder than a Dark lord?  As with Van-Halfling, the Dark Lord is also from Heresy Miniatures and under that cloak he could be anyone, a vampire, necromancer, Emperor Palpatine or just somebody who likes long black robes.  

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I've kept the colour scheme very simple, the black robes were highlighted with Dark Reaper  and then Thunder Hawk blue which I then glazed with Nuln oil to keep the robes suitably dark in colour, to keep the flesh pale I used a base of Rackath Flesh with a thin wash of Reikland Fleshshade.  The highlights were Pallid Wych Flesh and then White Scar white, he has not been catching much sun.

I recently came across Frostgrave and I think he would fit quite well as a Necromancer, now I need to find him an apprentice.

#7 - Total Block Lock Down

February is off to bit of a flier, for the first entry of the month I have four members of a block Citi-Def Squad.  The Citizens Defence are generally volunteers from the block and supposed to be mobilised during emergencies.  Only very occasionally fulfilling this role, I can only remember them appearing as competent during the Apocalypse War, they are instead more prone to turf wars with local gangs, rivalries with the Citi-Def units of other blocks and various random acts of incompetence and general nuisance making.

Gillian Anderson Blocks Citi-Def

The colour scheme is perhaps a bit of a Christmas hangover but I also had an unused can of Citadel Mephiston red to hand and didn't want to use a more traditional military fatigue, black helmets and padding adds a nice contrast and I think stops them from appearing to gaudy.  For the first four Squad members I've kept a very limited palette and stuck rigidly to using the citadel paints as they come straight of the pot, base, shade and two highlights, this should make the scheme easily repeatable when I add more squad members and allowed me to paint them relatively quickly.  With a good solid scheme in place I think future squad additions can have a bit more variance without breaking the coherency of the unit.

It turns out that the spray can Mephiston red is a different shade than the paint from the pot, it's a bit more muted with a less glossy finish. I'm not sure whether there is a genuine difference in the paint formula to make it more suited for spraying or if it's just a result of being sprayed.  As an experiment, one of the miniatures was base coated from the pot to see whether the difference was still noticeable at the end and I'm not sure that is.

What I'm still finding is that I'm not thinning the paint enough, the black in particular does not have the most even of finishes.  I could probably add less highlighting too, picking out all of the folds in the uniform is perhaps a bit much.

The bases came from Tiny Worlds, the casting quality was good and they needed very little cleaning up.

Captain Mainwaring

First up is the leader, in 2000AD the Citi-Def often remind me of Dads army, I think this Captain Mainwaring has by hook or by crook taken command of the unit to improve his social standing in the block. He's a little bit podgy, a little bit pompous and probably keeps notes on his neighbours so that he can quietly inform on them to the judges.  Despite tales of his time in the resistance he most likely spent the entirety of it holed up in his closet with a stash of canned goods and bottled water.

Sergeant Wilson

Every Captain Mainwaring needs a Sergeant Wilson to act as a foil.  No doubt he's the real brains of the unit, well regarded by the men and the only member of the unit to have ever had a job, mopping the floor of the local Hottie House before a local Juve gang fire bombed it.  Here he is striking his most dashing target practise pose.

Corporal Jones 

Of the four figures this one strikes a pose that looks like he knows what he's doing.  Corporal Jones has seen action and has the stubble to prove it.

Private Frazer

Of the four this one had so many mishaps while being painted, the arm falling off a couple of times, splashes of paint appearing and needing patching up, she is clearly doomed.

As a unit I think they are ready to take on their arch rivals, the Citi-Def from David Duchovny block, I'm sure they'll stick to non-lethal ammo.