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Malifaux and Fallout

08.01.2022

Today helps to show the epitome of painting things for games I don't play, as I have no idea about the rules for where either of these sets come from. First up is a group of 4 from Malifaux, because the guy with the hatchet looked like he would be fun to paint. And he was fun to paint! Ditto for the trio from Fallout.

Thanks to various sales over the years I've gotten a handful of sets from the Fallout game, yet never opened any. There was a recent sale of even more from the line which looked fun to paint, so I thought it was time to actually see about that before buying more. The Fallout minis are resin which needs some assembly, which is not my favorite combo. These minis are slightly larger (32mm) than most other things I paint (28-30mm). It's such a small difference I didn't think I would notice, but these had some nice detail that made me think that just having that little but larger scale might make a difference.

Having learned a little from Blood Bowl construction previously, I painted before gluing. Also having learned from Blood Bowl construction, I didn't get fancy with the paints used where parts would join, so that shades would match. The glue-points for some of these was a little weird - the guy holding the pistol with both hands had 1 arm, both hands, and the gun as 1 piece, while the other arm from shoulder to wrist was the matching piece. I was a little worried about things lining up, but I managed to get everything close enough (without gluing my hands to the resin).

After long runs of just cranking out minis this year, between alien zombies and Blood Bowlers, it was nice to just paint some random stuff. I'm not really sure what will get painted next, as the backlog of shrinkwrap needs a little organization to both see what all I've got, along with make things a little easier to get to/grab and paint.

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Blood Bowl Part 3 (maybe 2.5)

07.23.2022

Quick post to wrap up the Khorne Blood Bowl team, as I finished up the balls and turn marker/tokens. I think that's what they are. One of the balls was lost during priming - never to be seen amongst the river rock/pebbles it fell amongst. It was like Games Workshop knew this might happen and thus cast multiples in the kit.

Permalink Blood Bowl gaming miniatures

Blood Bowl Part 2

07.14.2022

I stuck to what I said in my last post and actually finished touching up the glossy bits on the Blood Bowl team! And it took less time than I had originally feared.

With glossy metal parts and battle blood splatter applied sparingly, I now proclaim this Blood Bowl team ready for blood bowling. There's still some secondary pieces I've got to ready - like a ball or three - but those are more along the lines of whipping out for fun as opposed to cranking through a team. At least that's my approach.

Next up will be something random which doesn't constitute a lot of similarly painted minis. Considering my year has been made up of this Blood Bowl team and a whole lot of alien zombies, I have a desire to not paint the same colors in mostly the same places over and over again. It might be time to do another terrain/building piece?

Permalink Blood Bowl gaming miniatures

Blood Bowl Part 1

07.11.2022

When last I posted I foreshadowed the next post of magnetization and Warhammer 40K minis. It turns out I'm a big fat liar because after 6 weeks of complete silence I'm going to post about non-magnetized Blood Bowl minis while completely ignoring any past foreshadowing. Pastshadowing? Retconning my posts!

At some point this year, my good close personal associate Charles Jr and I decided that we would play Blood Bowl. To be honest, we decided that we would prep to play Blood Bowl, as my joy of gaming for the past handful of years has been in the painting and making of scenery for games which I may or may not play. Now we could prep and not play a game together! The logic makes sense if you read the sentence properly, just trust me.

Now with a common focus, we each stepped out of our comfort zone. Charles Jr purchased the basic rules that came with 2 teams. I purchased a separate team (ok, 2) which I would prepare. Then, 6 weeks ago, I started painting my team of 12 Khorn Whatever-Games-Workshop-Calls-Them. 6 weeks. 2 minis/week (so far). I can whip out a mini or 3 in a day, plus a day for primer to dry and another for base-tweaking to dry. What's taking so long?

I thought I would try the "Don't Get In A Damn Hurry"™ method. We're not in a rush to play a game, so why not take some time and try out some of those things I never do, but I'm supposed to.

WASHING SPRUES - The first step for anything that needs to be glued together is to wash the parts so as to get rid of factory residue, like mold release. I'm not sure my painting is good enough to notice imperfections caused by this, but sure, why not. I washed the plastic bit in warm soapy water and then rinsed them off, followed by letting them air dry for another day.

SPRUE SNIPPERS - While I've gotten better about using proper cutting implements instead of twisting plastic bits off sprues, this time I ONLY used those snips.

SANDING AND SCRAPING - With some sanding strips and scraping with a semi-dull razor blade, I went over any burrs from the above snipping along with mold lines and tried to smooth things out. Enough dusty plastic came from this round that the washing phase was repeated.

PIN TO BASES - These minis had some very action-oriented poses, most of which didn't allow must super-glue friendly surface area between foot and base. Now armed with a new pin vise (see previous magnetization foreshadowing post that I no longer claim exists) and some paper clips, I successfully pinned my minis!

PAINT AND ADHERE HEADS LATER - I knew gluing on the heads before priming everything and then trying to paint details wasn't going to work with the angles I would have to work the brush into. I've never painted parts and then put them together. Except for some tones not matching as well I liked, it worked out ok. It worked a lot better than it would have ended up if I had glued the heads on first.

MICRO SOL AND MICRO SET FOR DECALS - While I used these solutions, I did something wrong as in the end the decals still show the decal part instead of blending in. I think I didn't use enough Micro Sol.

Now, after 6 weeks, I have a team of 12 painted, along with 2 coins. I haven't read any rules so I don't know what anything is named or does (especially those coins). While the team is painted (and sealed), the metal parts still need to get a splash of hardcoat to be glossy. For fun, I thought I would post pics as the final glossy bits are glossified - which will hopefully continue over the course of this week.

This post also gets all of the various in-progress pics I was sending Jer for the past month and a half

Permalink Blood Bowl gaming miniatures

The Final Trio

05.24.2022

It appears that painting 3 alien zombos takes a lot less time than painting 20.

The final 3 baddies from Zombicide Invader are done! 130. Done. Maybe not the prettiest, but done.

Although I painted this mold/pose previously, I wanted to try out a little of what I had learned over the past couple of months. My meaty-muscle paint scheme came back in. There was another Color Shift color I wanted to try out - Solar Anomaly, which kind of looks like glittery pale pink nail polish when you first apply it. For each iteration of these beasts I've had a hard time mentally differentiating between bone and armor, so I leaned toward more bone bits this time.

In the end, these 3 were more colorful than their predecessors. Maybe even on the verge of gaudy, but that's also when I remember that the purpose of painting all of these was to test out some color combinations and techniques, which "don't do that again" is valid. Gaudy, but good enough for an alien monstrosity.