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.

#6 - A Late Christmas

This is a desperate attempt to not drop below one post a month, not boding well at all for the original plan of one miniature a week.  I'm sure January is not too late for a Christmas themed miniature either.

Plague Santa

I bought this guy from the Wargames Foundry, a company set up by Bryan Ansell of Games Workshop fame.  This was definitely a bit of Christmas painting fun, mostly done between wrapping presents.  I was short of festive decorations and I like the miniature a lot, this is not a santa that makes it on to very many Christmas cards.  He was one of four scary santa's from the Foundry, I'll post the others at some point if I manage to finish them.  In the meantime, a picture from the Foundry site, I'm sure they'll be back on sale in November.

Wargames Foundry Scary Santas

The Plague mask and corpse in a sack makes for a suitably odd Santa, I'm guessing he's visiting or possibly already visited somebody on the naughty list.  Doctors genuinely wore these masks in the 17th century, they stuffed the beak with herbs which were supposed to protect them from the plague, I checked Wikipedia  and so it must be true.

One of the more easy going images from googling "16th century plague doctor mask"

The number one thing I learnt from painting him was that slotta bases were a really great idea, I relied on just the tiny metal base initially, I glued it to an old pot so that I had something to hold and it fell off, repeatedly.  I then thought I could rely on the base alone only to find that stability was a problem and in the end to stop rubbing the paint off I pinned him to a slotta base and I think he looks all the better for it.  All of the fiddling around before I finally pinned him down did lead to the white trim ending up a little grungy due to all of the handling but I figure that he has a corpse in a sack and so a dirty trim is appropriate.

Meet Ivan

Ivan is probably what happens after one too many 'Bah-Humbugs'.


The second biggest lesson I learnt was base the miniature at the start, it so  much easier, cleaner and it is impossible to damage the paint work.  For the snowy base I used Citadels Mourn Mountain Snow, I've been dubious of the benefits of the textured paints but to be fair, applying it with a little scoop and spreading it with a brush worked quite well, it was very quick.

I'm not sure about the blue tinge to the dirty snow

I was a little surprised how at how much textured paint shrank when it dried but I did apply it very thickly.  I tried a blue wash first and wasn't impressed so then I used Agrax Earthshade to dirty it up, followed by drybushing it with grey and white.  Next time I might just apply a white drybrush.

#5 - Van Halfling

Today's instalment is the famed Vampire Hunter, Van Halfling, scourge of evil.

Scourge of the Undead!

I think that this is a great figure, lots of detail and plenty of character, it reminded me very much of the classic Citadel miniatures of the 80's and 90's.  It's one of a number I impulse bought from Heresy Miniatures a couple of weeks ago.

When the package arrived not only was there a hand written thank-you note from Minion Dan but also a packet of fizzers, top notch customer service and the detail and casting quality of the miniatures is excellent.  I've been looking forward to making a start on them and went as far as to taking the plunge and purchasing some resin bases to round him out.  No plain black finish this time.

Fizzer are an excellent customer service touch.

Back to Van Halfling, I was worried that with all of the brown he would be look too drab and I was going to try and add a it more colour but I think that by mixing between dark and light tones to create a bit of contrast did the trick and I could probably have got away with a brown hat and a darker feather but it does add a nice spot colour.

Presumably the feather was a gift from some rescued maiden, it doesn't really fit with the rest of the ensemble

For the coat I started with a Rhinox hide base, the boots, belt and straps are Mournfang Brown.  I then shaded the whole lot with Agrax Earthshade.  The layers were built up by mixing with the base colours rather than going straight to the next layer colour, this gave a more subtle highlight which I prefer.

No vampire is tall enough to avoid  a good stabbing of the ankles

The pouch and scabbard are Zandri Dust with a Ushabi bone highlight.  I thought that the obscured face had saved me from doing the eyes but painting the buckles and tip of the crossbow bolt more than made up for it.

He was pinned to the bases once painted

The base came from Fenris Games, they have their own website but it didn't have the Cthulhu bases on in so I used  their ebay shop instead.  I drybrushed Dawnstone grey heavily over the black primer and then stippled on some brown, yellow and green washes which you can just make out in the picture above.  I drybrushed Dawnstone again and then Administratum grey.  There was a final drybrush of Longbeard grey to bring out the edges.

This is my favourite miniature so far and I'm very pleased with the outcome, I'll have to look for a game I can use him in and more importantly I need to find him a worthy adversary.  I've been scouring ebay for old citadel Night Horror miniatures which I think would fit quite well.  I think a band of trusty comrades could also be interesting, maybe the start of a Mordheim witch hunter warband?

#4 - Rogue Dustpan and Brush

This is what happens when you mistreat your Roomba, in the Mega-City 1 it's not just the Citizens that go Futsie.  Another one from Mongoose, at some point I'll have to pick up their rulebook or at least paint a couple of judges to start keeping the perps in check.

This little guy has been swept up by the moment

There's an awful lot of green on this robot and to begin with I'd intended to just do a little edge highlighting on the bodywork leaving it a very dark green, in stead I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time using layering to build up to quite a bright almost yellow from a dark Caliban green base to try to give it the appearance of having a more glossy sheen.  I like the effect but instead of being a relatively quick job it really did take a lot more time than I'd intended, next time perhaps I'll just try some gloss varnish.

He is very very green.

I also tried a black undercoat for a change.  In the old days that would have involved applying several coats of the base colours to prevent them looking to muted or dark and in the case of lighter colours re-coating in white first so I was interested to see how the high pigment citadel base coat paints would do.  I've been finding them to be a bit thick for my tastes but in this case it took only one coat to get a good finish, they really do work well over black.  It does still mute the colour a little but now that it's finished I don't think you can tell.

I've also tried to paint a bit of a glow around the eye, the single red eye reminded me of HAL, if HAL happened to have been a robo-broom, I think adding a glow to lights is something I need to practise a bit more.

Not quite HAL

One last thing, I've got to say that looking at the photographs my brushwork looks as scrappy as I expect it to be but, sat on my desk, it's not so apparent, the model looks much better with the stippling giving quite a good blend effect which I'm actually quite pleased with it.  Maybe a trip to the opticians is in order.  That being said, from the pictures I can see that I do need to pay more attention to the consistency of the paint, thinning it more would hopefully help smooth out the highlights, best get off to the shops and invest in some Lahmian Medium.