Category Archives: Photos

Szabla

Another BLKOUT unit at good-enough-for-table-use completion. This one is Szabla, a PMC offshoot of a Polish heavy industrial corporation’s security arm. Two riflemen, a marksman, and a jammer specialist who makes every model within 12″ immune to data attacks:

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Harlow Kinetic Solutions

I won’t say that the most recent painting drought has broken, but I spent a fair amount of time at the bench the past couple of weekends, getting my recent BLKOUT purchases into usable shape. The photos aren’t my best – I would swear iOS 26 lost some camera control capability. The paint isn’t my best either, but I think it’s good enough for use on the table.

For my initial force, I’ve chosen to go with Harlow Kinetic Solutions. In-universe, they’re a PMC of South African origin. On the colony world of Abol, they’re largely under contract to the Authority, a somewhat mustache-twirlingly evil offshoot of the remnant United Nations that is ostensibly the planetary governing body.

Mechanically, Harlow’s things are mobility and some of the better combat drills (limited-use maneuvers) in the game. In theory, this design supports aggressively going after objective points on the board over getting bogged down in fights.

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Clearing the Photo Backlog

I set up the light booth last Saturday and captured a bunch of the miniatures that have been sitting beside my workbench for weeks (or months, in some cases). The link’s in the page header. Most of it’s the batch of Battletech figures I’ve been failing to work on on over the past couple of years, but there’s one ultramodern and a couple of fantasy figures in there too.

I have a bunch more ultramoderns and related figures, but I’m gonna want to set up the Battlesystems modular terrain and do some more detailed background/terrain work.

The backdrops on this batch all came out of Jon Hodgon’s Backdrops and Sci-Fi Backdrops collections, available from Handiwork Games. I was a Kickstarter backer for these and this was the first time I’d deployed them. I’m quite taken with the results.

WIP X

Working on a second set of Spectre’s SAS Counterterrorism Response Squad figures. Back rank is the first set in desert colors; front rank is the second WIP set in more traditional green. For both sets, I went for a “dropped what we were doing and threw on the armor when we got the callout” look, hence the total lack of uniformity in shirts and pants.

Preparing for Winter

I’m hoping to have the motivation to continue grinding away at the Pile of Shame over the winter. With temperatures and winds here being what they are, the days between November and May that I can safely spray primer outdoors are rather limited. In expectation of that, I’m assembling and priming a large number of minis so I’ll have a decent selection ready to paint when the mood strikes me.

(Once they’re complete, they’ll probably have to hang out in the project trays until spraying season comes ’round again and I can hit them with a coat of matte sealant, but that’s not the hard part.)

WIP IX

On the workbench this week: a batch of samurai from the Clan War starter box (anyone else remember AEG’s twenty-plus-years-ago attempt at a wargame?). These guys and their friends are getting done up as a collection of scruffy ronin for a friend’s Legend of the Five Rings tabletop campaign:

Once again, Army Painter Speedpaints FTW. Despite rattling around in a box for a couple of decades, the sculpts are still crisp enough that the texture on the armor really pops when the self-shading compounds do their thing.

I’m trying to decide if I want to try to do eyes and risk fucking up the whole face.

Black Site, Light Box

Over the summer, I picked up an LED light box from B&H. This coincided with a major slowdown in painting and photographing my Pile of Shame, so I hadn’t actually used it for much yet. Around the same time, I also picked up a trio of building kits from Black Site Studios, whose specialty is pre-painted MDF – just glue and deploy.

Recently, I’ve had the free time to sit down and work on a few of my neglected projects. I went ahead and knocked these out. For what they are, and for the money and time invested, I’m pretty pleased with the results (and the light box works pretty well, too, even if these pieces are threatening to overflow it):

A few more photos and some notes on what’s what are over on my Flickr gaming photostream.

WIP VIII

On the workbench: a few more BattleMechs from the boxed set and a couple of Salvage Boxes. I’ve been continuing to use Speedpaints on these because of the ease use, but they may be a bit too large for the intended use of those paints. Large flat armor panels tend not to have a lot of detail to draw in the pigment, so the result is a bit lackluster at times.

Battlemaster in something that’s only camo in very odd biomes. It doesn’t show well here, but I gave this one a three-color red gradient from front to back.
Mongoose with a slightly more obvious gradient. The plan for this one is to try to freehand a starscape on the darker upper half (and hope I don’t screw up something which, at the moment, looks halfway decent).
Marauder II in an attempt at Berlin Brigade camouflage. This one’s likely to need a lot of detail work despite using Speedpaints for the primary coat.

WIP VII

On the workbench: a CPLT-C1 Catapult from the current Battletech boxed set:

I’ve had mixed results with Speedpaints on figures with limited texturing, but they did okay on the panel lines on this one. Less success with the attempt to freehand a peacock pattern. That might have gone better if I’d used some of The Girl’s iridescent nail polish.