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.
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.
On the workbench: Spectre Miniatures’ Russian Juggernaut (a Salute 2016 convention limited run, snagged from a Spectre “covert pack”). Figured I’d post this one for all my friends who are celebrating Pride Month:
33 colors of paint on this one. Mostly Army Painter Speedpaints, with a bit of conventional stuff for detailing.
Still working with Army Painter Speedpaints, with the exception of tiny dots of Vallejo metallics for the weapon optic and tac light. This guy was a test job for a squad I want to do for [redacted]. The Girl suggested the mixed greens (so to speak) for the armor, helmet, and nylon gear, and I’m quite pleased with the result.
This completes my paint work on all six of the covert/overt pairs. I need to seal this one, base her and the U.K. agent, and then there’ll be some better and more-contextual photography in the Flickr gallery. I may throw a spot of black wash on her shoes; as it is, they’re a bit too monocolor for the “women’s casual hiking shoes” look I was seeking.
I’ve seen some complaints levied against Spectre’s newer sculpts – some consumers feel that the computer-rendered figures are too “samey-samey,” and I certainly can see how the sculptor might feel a temptation to reuse elements. However, in terms of paintability, the consistently clean lines of a CAD-derived figure coming out of a new mold are a joy to work with, especially when I contemplate some of the melty-edged 30-year-old Ral Partha minis that are still in the stack of to-be-painted boxes in the basement.
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).