I agonized quite a bit over the paint scheme. I knew I wanted to do the masks in white, both for a cyberpunk vibe and as a nod to Legend of the Five Rings‘ porcelain-masked zombies. Everything else hinged on making that color choice stand out. The Speedpaints Tyrian Navy may be just a tad too dark to show detail, but I think any lighter blue would have looked too cartoonish. It also sets off the Ashen Stone of the nylon gear pretty well.
Still need to add a bit of detailing to the weapons, paint the bases, and maybe risk a bit of white touch-up on the masks, but they’re 95% done. I was going to do the masks in gloss white but I think it’ll work just as well to leave them in the white primer.
Aside from a tiny bit of detailing (black on rifle muzzles, metallic red and silver on rifle optics and lights, ivory and black for the dog’s eyes, fluorescent yellow on chemlights), this was all one-coat work with Army Painter’s Speedpaint range. No wash, drybrushing, or other technique. They aren’t gonna win any contests, but about three hours’ total work yielded nine table-ready minis.
I’m particularly happy with the green on the pants of the two guys at left-front (Algae Green), the blue for the denim in back (Tidal Wave), and the tan/khaki that I used for the armor, war belts, helmets, and face protection (Bony Matter). All three colors showcase the automagical shading that Speedpaint provides on well-textured sculpts.
I haven’t posted miniatures photos for a while. I stopped painting for the fall and most of the winter, and when I resumed in February, it was too cold to get outside and spray matte sealant. My usual workflow is paint > seal > flock > photograph, so I had a growing project tray of painted but fragile figures waiting for things to warm up.
The girl and I carved out some time over the weekend to set up the Battle Systems terrain that she gave me for Christmas. It makes an excellent backdrop for this sort of thing, though some of the flocking was drastically inappropriate for an urban landscape. In the long term, I’ll add “build terrain boards for photography in different biomes” to my list of projects I’ll realistically never accomplish, but we made do with some other terrain bits, a towel or two, and the remnants of a nontraditional desk planter that I gave her a few tax seasons ago.
I’m quite pleased with the results. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that she did all the actual photography – she has both a better eye for composition and a newer phone (and we didn’t dig out the household’s actual cameras for this).
I like this one because it has a cinematic action shot vibe. The pallets are hiding the base flocking, which is Huge Miniatures’ sakura scatter. I have a vague thought of using that for a bunch of ultramoderns and building a Japanese cyberpunk terrain board.While I haven’t previously blogged about it before, I’m a huge fan of Ubisoft’s The Division franchise, especially the first game. Spectre has a couple of lines of figures that absolutely nail the aesthetic of Division 1’s player characters. These four are from their Deniable Operators line.Spectre also has a line of paired “covert” and “overt” figures. These are four of the “just minding my own business…” covert versions…… and here are the versions for those times when subtlety is no longer appropriate.
