Sci-Fi Lamp Posts

 Clearing the desk of odds and ends between rounds of packing!

 Here are a set of six sci-fi lamp posts from Antenocitis Workshop.  These folks make some really outstanding stuff so take a look if you would and see what they have on offer.

I got these from a 'Designed for Infinity' kickstarter called "Undertown - The seedier side of the 'sphere" which I am anxious to really dig into.  I've only built some peripheral stuff like signs, trash bins, cargo pallets and a street food vendor... things like that ... but there is so much more!

Arriving as unpainted (gray) resin and supplied with tinted  clear acrylic bits they painted up very fast.  Antenocitis has a really high quality resin that feels a bit more like plastic and has none of the brittleness usually associated with things resin. It has good detail and arrives very clean and holds paint well.

I did these fast... moving house ya know!... so a quick spray with a paint/primer combo in French Vanilla, lining with Storm Cloud (Secret Weapon) touch ups and highlights with Splintered Bone (Reaper)... glue on the acrylic bits... done!

In future they may get weathered and/or signs etc... but good to go for now.

Shown with some Void Elves (Raging Heroes) for scale.

Hopefully I'll get a few more posts up before the pack out but ya never know!

Raging Heroes Holy Blades All-Stars

Raging Heroes has had a few regular releases that expand on the TGG Kickstarter offerings.  Its very nice to see them working outside the massive Kickstarter format.

The Holy Blades All-Stars are a group of female Paladins that I'll use for warbands in Vanguard, Mordheim, and Frostgrave.  I'll also get a lot of mileage out of them in some RPGs, especially High Fantasy in the vein of Dragon Age.

 The Models were pretty clean and the resin has crisp detail and is just flexible enough to make handling them easy.

 The Models are very light weight and several of the more dynamically posed, the Standard Bearer in particular, were prone to falling over if the terrain was at all uneven, or the table was bumped, so I added a 1" (25mm) steel  washer to the base and now they are super stable.

 The flag staff of the Standard Bearer is holding up a huge, otherwise unsupported, banner and I'm afraid that it will eventually break during handling.  I'll probably try to replace it with a brass rod or similar if that comes to pass.

Painting wise the banner is not finished.  I'm going to add some patterning and images to it after we get on the other side of the big move.  So its mostly just concept at this point... playable but not really done!

 I experimented with a different way of doing armor and started with Tire Black (Secret Weapon) over the standard Khaki primer/white dry-brush foundation.

This was then dry-brushed with Engine Metal (Secret Weapon) and edge highlights were Necron Compound (Citadel) then lining with Tire Black thinned 50% with Glaze Medium (Vallejo).

 The rest of the color scheme is kind of traditional for warrior nuns and I viewed them as an Order of Paladins that specialized in fighting the Undead and so are equipped with a lot of tools for the consecration/reconsecration of burial grounds so that the Necromancers could be stripped of their access to the mortal remains that fuel their endless hordes.

 With that in mind there is a lot of gold on these models.  I tried to make the embroidered cloth of gold details have a different texture to the ecclesiastical tools that are meant to be metal.  To accomplish this the gold cloth is entirely non metallic while the tools etc... are done with regular metallic.

 The gold cloth is Iron Oxide dry-brushed with Sun Yellow (Reaper) while the metals are Brass Casings (Secret Weapon) washed with 50/50 Flesh Wash (Secret Weapon) and Glaze Medium then spot highlighted with Shining Gold (Citadel)

Whites are layered with the Reaper Bone Triad (Dirty Bone, Graveyard Bone, and Splintered Bone) and lined with diluted Soft Tone (Army Painter).

Lots more to do and the packing is accelerating!  I'm hoping to get some a few more Raging Heroes, Lead Adventurers, Hexy Shop, and RWBY figures done before the end... fingers crossed!

Raging Heroes Executrix Regulars Troop

 Raging heroes makes some amazing figures.  This Void Elf Executrix troop are gonna make great Incubi proxies for my Ynnari. 

They'll be operating as the Emerald Execution and I wanted to stay away from the usual colors of my more traditional Dark Eldar.  These Death Eldar seem a little more flexible with wardrobe colors as they are not so focused on being the Evil Eldar... leaving that for their Cabalite Cousins.

 As I was working on these the Emerald and white base coats left me with a unit that was very heavy in cool colors so I elected to warm up the accents with an orange-y red for their swords and for the wing guards.

The wing guards are really a great weapon option idea!  they seem to be a device that dangles close combat blades while walking or standing but deploys they forwards when the knee is raised and bent giving extra stabby power!  I'd count this as, at least, an off hand weapon... which... given that the main weapon is a Double-hander... is awesome! So, If you are reading this Benoit please integrate something similar in the TGG3 Game...wink, wink...

I'm sure that will give my 40k opponents a little heartburn but they all love integrating cool models so I'm sure they'll be happy with it!  For everyone else they'l operate as plain vanilla Incubi.

I've also experimented a bit with textures on the flowing cloth bits... kind of going for an exotic monster pelt... looks like I'll have to generate a suitably exotic monster with such a pelt for them to hunt!  (Maybe another suggestion for the folks at RH?)

The blades are meant to look like power weapons but that was mostly just an excuse to paint them in warmer colors and not a weapon option suggestion...

The whole unit together... keep in mind this is just the regular troopers set... there is also a command group set which is in various stages of being assembled at the moment.  I haven't decided If I'll replicated these colors so I have add-on options... or if I'll pattern them after another alien beastie...

Back to work then!

3D printing: Ruined Lighthouse and Kingdom Death inspired terrain.

In the continuing quest to improve the terrain of the fabulous Kingdom Death Monster game I've added a set of 3D printed fallen and broken columns.

The printing in the area around the faces was a bit dicey and tended to have spaces and holes.  Nothing really serious but worth noting.

 I went with a tawny marbleized look for the columns because I imagine the twilight world of the Survivors to be covered in dirt, dust, and mold.  The ground faces tend to be alabaster because they might be newly deposited while the columns seem to have fallen long ago.

In any case they were an experiment in painting marbled surfaces and I learned a lot about painting in the various veining.

A sampling of the current state of the Kingdom Death inspired terrain set. 

 The biggest downside of this set is that the minis do not always sit easily on some of the elements that are intended to share a playable space with... its doable, just not pretty to look at.

Fortunately the columns and some of the larger things, like egg piles and sacks, are not intended as playable spaces so its not really a problem and the do look a lot better than the flat cardboard they replace. 

 Eerie lights emanating from the crystals complements the light variations on the mini bases.

I think that completes the terrain for the game.  I've printed replacements for all the cardboard terrain counters that I've found in the game and the Spidicules expansion... If I find anything else there will be more!

 Moving on to the Ruined Lighthouse from the Rampage: Lost Isles Kickstarter.

The first happy lesson was that printing this with black material was both less expensive (Black seems to be the cheapest color of PLA roll around by a couple of dollars a roll) and much, much easier to paint up.

Shown throughout with some of the excellent Raging Heroes Void Elves for scale.  This is important as, due to the limitations of my build space, I was compelled to print the model at 99% of its intended size.

 Because the material is black the primer stage was less demanding and full coverage of the crevices was not required.  This saved a lot of time and consumed much less primer than the tan, white, or gray material. 

 Rampage is really good about updating their products post release and I get regular emails about updated files.  Generally speaking these files seem to be re-scaling models that might have been proportioned for 20mm square bases to the increasingly common 30mm round lipped bases.

 Another great thing about Rampage is that many of their large models have .stl files for both large and small format printers.

In my case... my printer (Snapmaker) is on the petite side of small... which means that I am unable to print this size of model without using the small format files...without dramatically reducing the model dimensions.  Because of the inclusion of the small format files I'm able to print this model at 99% of its intended size.  Score!

 The model is quite large and I noticed that it printed with small holes for magnets!  Sometimes Storing and transporting big terrain models is problematic so I popped magnets into the designated holes and it went together surprisingly well... with a satisfying snapping sound to boot!

Here is the model broken down for storage/transport. I'll be adding magnets to many more buildings as, in addition to making them easy to deal with when not in use, it really opens up access to the interiors while on the tabletop!  Double win!

All in all this took me a time fraction of the time it takes to paint an equivalent model in another color.  Printing took a couple of days but cleanup and adding magnets time was under an hour.  Painting was done in two short afternoon sessions.









An early experiment with texture rollers from Greenstuff World (Thanks for the heads up Ed!).

While these will be great for Twisted! I'm really going to want to switch to a less spendy putty or clay and roll out big sheets of texture.  Then I'll want to get, or make, some small size biscuit/cookie cutters and punch out circles and squares.  I'm having difficulty locating circles and squares in the right sizes for this but its early days and I haven't put a lot of time into the search... hmmm... maybe some pill bottles are the right size.... we'll see!

Back to the desk to experiment!

The Order of Vampire Hunters: Core set Hunters, Star Saga furniture, and Varseesh the Venomous from Raging Heroes

 This amazing Alaskan summer has been hard on my painting schedule!  So much to see and do while the days are still long!

But... I did manage to get some stuff done!

I read through "The Order of Vampire Hunters" rule-book and realized two things.  One:  That this game was more complex than I thought it would be and Two: That Dark Gate Games really loved the subject and was serious about creating an awesome game!

 The game is almost a lightweight RPG and the characters will develop a bit over the course of a campaign.  Replay-ability is good and there are some cool expansions that add to the two campaigns presented in the core set.

I managed to persuade my wife to take a pause in our Kingdom Death campaign to give this a shot and she agreed... on the condition that I paint up the Hunter party first!  So....

The Kingdom Death terrain I had in the queue got pushed back just a bit to make room for the basic Hunter party.  So here they are: Sarah, Magenta, Stephen, and Joshua.

 At first look I was put off by the models as the scale felt a little odd.  At second glance I realized it wasn't the scale but the proportions... these models are sculpted in a tall thin style like CLAMP anime characters. 

 I painted these primarily with washes over a Khaki base coat with highlights placed on the base coat and top highlights layers on after the base color wash.

The bases are cast on the models and I used Agrellan Badland (Citadel) to add texture for the feel of decayed interior spaces with old tile and linoleum covered with the small debris of abandoned spaces since the game takes place inside the vampire lairs.  I drew in black lines to represent the gaps between the tile and built up the Agrellan Badland on the tiles to create some actual depth to the design.

The bases were then given a splotchy cover of Sewer Water (Secret Weapon) mixed with Wash Medium (Vallejo).  Once dry they were stippled with a semi dry cover of Buckskin Pale (Reaper). 





Finally I used Green Black Wash (Secret Weapon) to re-line the spaces between the tiles to add some mildew to the look.

Finally I added Pete and the Extractor to the crew.  Pete is a sort of semi-character and really functions more like a piece of equipment than a Hunter.  He does not enter the lair but is stationed at an exit door, or window, and uses his Extractor to winch vampires, speared by a hunter equipped with Pete's spear, into the sunlight and their fiery demise.

Because of this I gave him a different base treatment to represent him standing outside

Onward!

Last post I announced that I had completed the painting of Star Saga: Wave 1.

Imagine my chagrin when I discovered these shelves and armory racks hiding among the Kingdom Death terrain!

Ack!

Now I can announce, with reasonable certainty, that Wave 1 of Star Saga is completely painted...






Shown above with CURBY for scale I've attempted to match the white process with the rest of the furniture in a sort of Mass Effect meets Borderlands style.  Fortunately I used the Reaper Bone Triad for the whites so it was fairly straight forward to replicate it... I just had to remember the lining with Algae (Secret Weapon).

 On to Varseesh the Venomous!  This is from the Raging Heroes TGG2 Kickstarter.  I think she'll make a great foe for the Vampire Hunters!  I'll also use her in my Lust Elf army, of course, but this model makes for a great, small format, boss adversary.  She's dead scary!

The model was well thought out and I was able to get good access to the interior areas by leaving the front leg off for a lot of the painting process.

 I liked how well the individual snakes were articulated and I was tempted to make a more complex color scheme on them... probably will for the next one!

On the desk currently are the delayed Kingdom Death Terrain pieces and Xehzirhya: Lust Elf Demon Stead Rider (SF) from Raging Heroes.  Also getting some assembly are a few survivors from our Kingdom Death Campaign with updated armors.

Build it!
Paint it!
Play it!

Mahaleezariah, Lust Elf Matriarch

 Mahaleezariah, Lust Elf Matriarch is a medium large model with a lot of fiddly bits.

I love the concept of the model but the most commonly used poses emphasized the weaknesses inherent in the joins for the numerous claws and the two 'body bag' sleeve/skirt accessory panels so I shifted a few things around and ended up with a pose that was stable enough for game-play and even survived a couple of inevitable drop events!

Shown here as a WiP with a WiP of Varseesh the Venomous for a sense of scale.

 Among the swaps was the addition of a weighted base which makes her much more stable.  The Body Bag skirts are huge sails that catch the slightest breeze and are also handling obstacles for a figure intended to be used as a game piece so I changed the contact point on the back of the model and brought them closer in to the body and tilted them to imply a swishing motion.

The claw array was also realigned with a pair out front and another pair arching over her shoulders.  The front pair is attached to the main sword hands as well as the torso while the shoulder pair is glues to the horns making a stable point to grip the model by for moving it around the tabletop.

 Moving the body bag skirt involved a little greenstuff to make the new attachment points and gluing the two panels together to improve stability and to present a long, continuous,  wall of body bags.

For colors... I'm still sorting out a direction for the lust elves... I've done a lot of them in red schemes but thought I'd give the Matriarch a purple panoply to mark her as special... as if her size alone would not do that!  I've also retained this bright greenish hair that I used for many of the Blood Vestals.  I'm an anime fan and it shows a bit!

The purple was Witch Purple (Reaper) with Pure White added to it for layering and highlights.
The Green was Verdigris (Secret Weapon) a wash of Green Wash (Secret Weapon) and re-application of Verdigris.

Varseesh the Venomous (SF ver.) WiP for scale again. This time she's showing off a pair of 3D printed Dog Houses from the Rampage Lost Islands Kickstarter.

Next on the list, finish up Varseesh and knock out a small pile of 3D printed terrain for the Kingdom Death campaign.

3D Printing terrain for Kingdom Death Monster +Star Saga, Twisted, and Raging Heroes WiP.

I finished up a pair of large Faces to replace the cardboard markers that come with Kingdom Death Monster.  I painted them in a similar way to the small faces that come on the decorative base inserts.   Basically a Khaki base coat, a sandstone dry-brush, some blended washes with Secret Weapon Algae and Sewer Water amended with a spot of Glaze Medium (Vallejo), and a dry-brush of Graveyard Earth (Reaper) and a final dry-brush Splintered Bone (Reaper).

 Is that a ray of hope!

Maybe it explains how some things grow in the gloomy world of Kingdom Death!

I've found that in 3D printing at my best resolution visible striations are a thing.  I'm looking into ways to reduce them other than sanding.  Mass sanding of PLA seem to result in it melting...

I actually like the striations on these faces but, in general, it would be better to get a handle on them!  I think I can rotate them in the shredder so the layers stack from a different direction to reduce it... more tests!

 The last batch of Core Set Miniatures from Mantic's Star Saga Kickstarter is getting close to finishing up... which is good because there are rumbles in the rumor mill about the next wave shipping soon!

Two batches in progress here.  Twisted! The Dickensians Set 2 and some paupers, street performers, beggars, and merchants from the Bruegelburg: A Day at the Fair kickstarter (Lead Adventurers)

Both of these sets are traditionally sculpted and I'm having a lot of fun with the personalities.  I'm finding myself more and more into NPC and Non-Combat type characters... probably because I'm leaning in on scenery and the role play elements of the hobby more than the wargames themselves.

 The real end of the line for Star Saga wave 1!  Doors! So far I've sprayed these with a khaki paint/primer combo and then taped them and resprayed with an Ivory... next step... colored stripes!

And last, but definitely not least, Two miniatures from the Raging Heroes TGG2 Kickstarter are in the build bucket.  I just got word that the remainder of my TGG2 was shipped today so I'd better start clearing the deck!