Another week down, and another check in with finished models off of my workbench!
Projects that are ON the bench but not yet finished: Heroclix Kingpin and Sin, 6 Black Templars, 1 Black Templar Land Raider, and some pickup-truck for hillbilly marines or something. Not sure, the Black Templars are for a friend, but they’re cool looking knights in my head! Also, Gladiator from Marvel Crisis Protocol.
This week’s finished models!
Elsa Bloodstone, Marvel Crisis Protocol
She has super-strength, loves guns, and considers being British a super-power! It’s Elsa Bloodstone, ass-kicking Monster Hunter and all around fun character to paint. This mini has been sitting in my back-log for years now, and the Midnight Sons faction is one I’ll be holding on to for MCP.
Orange is not a color I play with often, and I think I’m going to have to change that!
Carpathian Gunslinger, Dracula’s America
I love the concept of the game, but the rules are just not my thing. Still, great concept. I’ll be using these models for Silver Bayonet instead, which is great. I have had these guys sitting on a shelf for years, so it’s great getting some paint on him. Plus, I’m really enjoying these hand-sculpted casts, there’s something incredibly charming about painting the old-school stuff.
Austrian Paranormal Investigator, Silver Bayonet
Another rescued straggler from the back-log, I seriously love the no-nonsense look of the guy. Like I said a little earlier, there is something really gratifying about painting up something that isn’t 5,000 skulls bolted to a headpiece. This mini is solid pewter, one piece, and cool as hell.
I have some shacks and blasted buildings that would go really well in a Silver Bayonet game, so as soon as I get his unit painted up, I think I’ll be diving straight into this as my first solo game/battle report.
Hawkeye and Enchantress, Marvel Heroclix repaints
You can tell how simple these sculpts are, especially after seeing the Elsa Bloodstone mini above. These presented different challenges, and you can tell the newer Hawkeye mini has a lot more going on with the sculpt. But there is something really unexpectedly amazing going on with the Enchantress mini; she’s a very good early sculpt for Heroclix, and just radiating personality.
The Enchantress mini is proving to me EXACTLY what I was hoping to find when taking on this Heroclix repainting project– these minis are much better than they initially look, and with a little love and a little more work, there’s a world of cool toys that can be had for a very small amount of money.
There is no denying that the Elsa miniature is a better sculpt, and she was an absolute joy to paint for completely different reasons than Enchantress. But I find myself really proud of the Enchantress miniature, she was a challenge, and she rewarded my work and patience.
This was an absolute joy. What an amazing hobby we have!
I have been a collector my entire life. My earliest memories are going from store to store with my mom, looking for Mego action figures to finish out my Star Trek and Super Hero teams. I grew up with a single mom, and even after she married (when I was seven) we still had some pretty lean years, with the early ’80s being particularly brutal.
Me with Scotty and Uhura at the pool, 1975.
My parents did their best, though, and somehow I always had a couple of D&D books for holidays, and my dad always made sure I had a few dollars every month to get my comic books. Sure, it was easier with comics only being thirty-five (then fifty-five) cents, but he was only making about four dollars an hour, too. Still, we made do.
That may have led me to compulsive collecting. I’ve never been chill about it; when I had money for Star Wars figures, I had an end goal of collecting a hundred Storm Troopers, because that seemed really freaking cool. When I stumbled into miniatures in the mid-eighties, I wanted everything… which wasn’t too hard to do, since everything was sculpted by hand and cast in lead. So there really wasn’t a warehouse of temptation waiting for me whenever I found a store that stocked minis.
My favorites back then wereRal Parthaminis, especially those sculpted by Julie Guthrie. She did some brilliant sculpts, and when the industry shifted to pewter instead of lead, the miniatures were just a little crisper in detail, which made her work pop even more. I learned to paint with those early figs, and had a few dozen monsters and adventurers lined up for my D&D games.
Classic Julie Guthrie Skellies from Ral Partha, still available for purchase!
When my local comic shop started carrying Games Workshop stuff, I bough my first box of Space Marines, which was 30 plastic dudes for about ten bucks. I also got a copy of Rogue Trader, and man, was I hooked.
If you had this, it’s time to book your colonoscopy…
Here’s the thing about being hooked on 40k in 1989, though; there were probably less than a hundred models at first. Fantasy was the bigger franchise for Games Workshop back then, and they were still making stuff for Dungeons & Dragons. So being hooked wasn’t going to put me in the poor house, and I could afford a fresh blister pack every payday and still keep up with the sporadic releases.
Now, keeping up with just about ANY miniature line is going to put you in an interesting financial predicament. If you want to collect an army for 40k or Age of Sigmar, you could easily spend a thousand dollars, and that’s just for funsies. I know tournament players who spend even more, as they try and chase the meta and stay on top of the most competitive releases.
And that’s not even getting into the fire-hose of releases GW puts out every week. Luckily, I’m not a huge GW guy (even though they’ve still managed to get some money out of me in the last few months).
Marvel Crisis Protocol was another beast altogether, though. These are super dynamic miniatures, and they’re big, beautiful, and fun to paint. The release schedule isn’t as robust by any means, and if you were only interested in one team or faction, you could get the ten minis you needed to play the game for anywhere from a hundred to two hundred dollars. That’s downright cheap in the miniature wargaming hobby!
But, if you’re a collection minded sap like me, MCP is dangerous. I love that world. I grew up in that world. I built my adolescent moral compass reading comic books, so I’m not going to be so good at resisting the temptation when new kits come out each month.
I gotta catch them all, dammit!
I’m trying not to be that guy anymore. As I mentioned earlier this year, I’m finding more and more examples of how rampant collecting can be devastating for families when that collector dies. I’m also trying to have an office that doesn’t look like a pinata stuffed with war dollies exploded in it.
The new Nimrod box almost got me. Actually, it did get me. I bought it, after selling off almost my entire collection of MCP minis. And once I had that, I had that monkey on my back again, and I was making plans on how to aquire that old collection again. After all, it was only $65 for that Nimrod box, how bad could it be if I spent a year or two getting the old minis back? I still haven’t completely talked myself out of it.
Luckily, they’ll be easy to return if I choose to go that route…
What a junkie I am. Luckily, I managed to have an emergency intervention with myself before it got out of control… yet.
I realize that it would be silly to deny myself the fun of collecting and painting super hero minis. There really isn’t anything wrong if I wanted to go whole-hog into MCP again, either. At the end of the day I wouldn’t be endangering anything other than my discretionary income. So I’m going to allow myself to collect supers. I’m just trying to pull back on MCP.
They are big, for one, and take up a lot of space.
Second, they’re expensive. Not in the “get a squad and you’re set” kind of way, but definitely if you want to collect the entire range, or at least get all the characters you like… which in my case, is most of them.
At an average of $15 per figure, the minis would get really cost prohibitive, really quickly. And stay that way, too, since Atomic Mass Games tends to release at least two boxes (at $65 each) every month. That math tells me my discretionary budget would be just a Marvel Crisis Protocol budget.
Luckily, I already had a solution to this issue. And it’s a fun one, because I’m stubborn and really enjoy ridiculous challenges. And it’s a solution that is about 1/15 the cost!
Yeah, I’m talking Heroclix. And yeah, I know they look like ass for the most part. But, with a little work, you can make them look like a pretty acceptable kind of ass, which is where all the fun comes in!
(And honestly, they only look like ass compared to modern mass market sculpts. Compared to a lot of the indy studios, or the stuff I grew up with, they look great.)
Plus, they take up about a third of the space of the Marvel Crisis Protocol figures. Here’s a couple that I already had painted up!
I placed an order for some used Clix, which came in at about a buck a figure. I got some heroes, a couple of standard goons, and a few of my favorite goofball villains from the silver age comics that I love. This is what came in that box when it arrived yesterday:
That’s 29 miniatures, which came delivered to my house for a total of $35 when shipping was added in. That’s about half of the price of a box of three MCP models. I totally get that I am intentionally getting a far inferior sculpt, and that there’s some work that will need to be done to get them looking good.
On the other hand, there’s a lot of work that goes in to making any miniature look good. The MCP figs need to be assembled, mold lines need to be cleaned, and the mini needs to be primed. The Clix? Well, they’re assembled. Sometimes poorly, but assembled. The mold lines need to be cleaned up, but for all intents they only need to be primed if you want to prime them. The factory basic paint they come in is primer enough.
This will be a fun project! And even better, there are tons of costume variations for the characters that have been made over the last 26 years of production. For folks like me who are really tired of the Jim Lee X-Men costumes, this is welcome news!
I’m not saying I won’t buy more MCP. If I do, I plan on just sticking to mutants or characters I really like, and using the Clix project to tame the wild collector in me. My wife is already laughing at my really convincing resolve with this idea.
I’ll keep you updated on this silly new project… oh, and another thing! The Clix are 28/30mm scale, so they’ll fit with my existing minis and terrain. I even have some ideas on how to work powers into my game engine!
I’m trying a little change-up here, realizing that adding some substance to my blog posts like a couple of my favorite bloggers do would be a good thing. Still plan on posting pics, just maybe a little more thought into the context as well!
First off the block is Moon Knight for Marvel Crisis Protocol. One of my favorite characters from the Marvel comics of my youth, he’s like Batman, but the insanity is surface level instead of suppressed. The challenge with a character like him is that white is a bastard to paint convincingly without looking like you had an accident at a chalk factory!
I went really slowly and deliberately with Mark, starting with a pretty bright undercoat of Wolf Grey, then doing a zenithal highlight with White Blue, then layering in some very subtle white glazes. I’m pretty exclusively using Pro Acryl paints these days, the pigment count seems to be pretty high, and very finely ground as well. This really helps a ton, and I’m really happy with the result!
Another MCP figure, this time a mutant menace named Avalanche. He’s also part of the super-hero A-Team, which is guys that have an “A” on their costume, like Apocalypse and Animal Man.
Avalanche also has a bit of white to him, so I used the same technique as with Moon Knight, then my standard super-hero blue. The water was painted with the same blue, just different highlights and shading. I also had some fun with the fire hydrant, which was just blocked in quickly over a dark red undercoat. Sometimes, simple is best!
On the skirmish front I painted up another couple of soldiers to use with Warhammer Empire themed groups, the first is another Witch Hunter. I’m calling her Grizelda Kaine, and she has some of the same bright color choices as my Witch Hunter captain. I’m really enjoying bright color pops in my fantasy!
There’s also a Gallant, which is a type of lesser knight from Age of Sigmar. He’s cool, and has a weirdo frog on his helmet. Since I’m really not caring much about AoS, he’ll see action in skirmish games like Frostgraveand Five Leagues from the Borderlands.
With the new edition of Necromunda coming out yesterday, I wanted to have a color test done for House Orlock. Normally I’m not a fan of this gang, but I wanted to try something quick and dirty to see how it looks.
I underpainted the mini blue with a red zenithal highlight, then went over the upper part of the mini with a lemon yellow drybrush. The bottom part of the figure is mostly washes, with metallics picked out to show some contrast. I spend some extra time on her skin and shirt, and I’m actually looking forward to painting more Orlocks now!
I’ll be playing some Necromunda solo, so if you’re interested in my thoughts on the new edition, let me know in the comments! I was going to try and arbitrate a game with some friends, but I never know week to week if my health is going to play nice with me.
And wrapping things up for this week is Marley the Ghost, part of the Moonstone Shades line that I backed a few years ago. Sadly, that all happened right around the time I got sick, so I didn’t get a chance to get any painted while recovering. Happily, I have a really cool collection of ghosts and zombies to paint now, and plan on having these done for Halloween this year! Goals are good!
Marley was really fun to paint, I used Jade and light Jade from Pro Acryl, and shaded up from there with white blends. The eyes are yellow, layered up from orange, and the robes were terra cotta with lemon yellow mixed in for highlights. This is probably my favorite mini from this month so far, and I’m really looking forward to painting more!
For this coming week I have some Black Templars to finish, as well as more MCP figs. I’m hoping to get some of the new Escher minis from Necromunda on the table as well, but we’ll see how things go!
Until next time, I hope your projects go well and you treat yourself kindly!
There I was, minding my own business at my FLGS. I had stopped in to pick up some of the new (to me) utra-metallic metallics from Vallejo (which are freaking amazing) and then everything went fuzzy.
When I came to, I was sitting at my hobby desk, with a freshly assembled unit of Chaos Marauders from Warhammer: The Old World in front of me. Holy hell, I did a nice job putting them together, too!
This is obviously what happened, since the reality of just seeing these amazing minis in the shop, shrieking like a schoolgirl at a BTS show and deliriously buying these beauties in a state of delirium doesn’t sound as cool. I’m a super manly man, mind you. I don’t swoon at just any war-dolly.
Just most of them. Here’s the first finished minis, looking damned fine and ready to kick some teeth in:
The unit leader is called Karga, she’s from a Warhammer Underworlds warband, but she looks cool with this group, so she’s the leader. The mini might even be a dude, who cares. She’s Karga. The Ruinous Powers care not for the gender binary.
She’s backed up by Hjork, who is wielding a banner of the Carrion Crow. The Carrion Crow is definitely not Nurgle, or any kind of Chaos God. Just a freaky cool crow who brings disease and laughs at mortals whilst they sleep.
The other three dudes don’t have names yet. Karga cares not for names until these milk drinkers earn them. Then Karga might stop calling them Meat.
The long term on this project is going to be a full-on Chaos warhost, supplemented by some Nurgle duders from Age of Sigmar because those sculpts are sweet as hell. I also have a bunch of stuff from Darkwaterthat’s going to fit in really, really well.
And for once, there’s no time limit on these guys. I’m just going to have fun and paint. Fun is good.
As for The Old World? It’s a good time! As I was thumbing through the rules I was really happy to see how much they had streamlined the old ruleset, which was pretty bloated and cumbersome. It’s still a little bloated, mind you, and you could bludgeon a small contingent of halflings with the FAQ alone, but it feels a bit like home.
I wish I had been a Fallout fan earlier. My oldest kid was way into it, and I remember listening as she played the hell out of Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Fallout 4. I’m a huge Skyrim fan, so you would think I would have played sooner. Really, it took the new series to get me to look at it again, and now I really can’t look back.
I love the Atom-Punk vibe of the whole thing. Alternate histories are a hell of a thing, too, and the games and show have strung together a pretty fascinating look at a future that looks a lot like our past had a baby with an old Flash Gordon serial.
I had the Welcome to Nuka-World starter for Fallout Factions, and sold it, thinking I wouldn’t get back to it anytime soon. I still had the Disciples set, and decided I would paint them up before making up my mind on more minis from the franchise.
I think I want more minis from the franchise. Modiphius has made some pretty cool minis, and the hard plastic kit for the Disciples is pretty keen. I was thrown at first because they’re a true-scale 32mm, so the features, hands, and feet are smaller than I’ve grown used to. But they’re fun to paint, take an oil wash well, and look pretty good once all is said and done.
I ordered the character command minis for this group, I should have one of them done for the next update!
These are the elves that sold me on Warcrow. Prior to seeing these, I was curious, but ultimately decided there wasn’t anything that I really burned inside to paint. Then I saw this unit of ambushing assassins, and that was the end of that.
I thought I would be really clever and put them in an autumnal camo scheme, but it turns out a lot of people are really clever as well. That’s fine, these are mine and I love them!
The second ambusher is my favorite model in the line, it’s just so damned majestic and mysterious!
Once again I used a purple/maroon underpainting pass to unify all of the main colors. It’s really obvious in stark lighting and zoomed in, but on the table they pop like crazy.
I’m working on a couple of demons and knights from this range of minis, I hope to have them up soon! Thanks for stopping by!
While perusing through some posts from Argent Badger’s inspiring blog I stumbled across Dave’s excellent Wargamesculptor’s blog, and his annual “Paint What You Got Challenge“. It runs from the end of December through the end of February each year, and it’s exactly what it says on the tin; a challenge to paint what you have started or just sitting in your collection.
Rasputina crew for Malifaux, painted in 2021
I’m not going to even try to hide my enthusiasm. I have WAY too much stuff, and every time I look at the news I somehow end up feeling bad and buying MORE stuff. So, I probably need to cut back on the news and hide my debit card while I’m at it.
Core Space Minis painted in 2019
I’ve decided to take Dave’s idea and just run with it. So, from this post forward, I’m painting what I’ve got. I won’t be buying anything new, and barring gifts or something out of my control like that, everything you see posted from here on out will be stuff that’s just been sitting and waiting for some love.
Big Infinity terrain build for 2016!
Big thanks to Dave for the inspiration, and to Argent Badger and Kuribo for the great blogs!
I have such a love/hate/love relationship with Atomic Mass Games‘ Star Wars miniature offerings. Legion hit in the mid two-thousand-teens and I loved the idea, but couldn’t stand the soft plastic miniatures. Then, Shatterpoint took the lead in the early 2020’s with some really dynamic sculpts and a fun game system.
But damn, buying the same characters again wasn’t something I wanted to do. Those soft plastics for Legion made my initial plunge into Shatterpoint an easy one, but then Legion ended up with some pretty good hard plastic sculpts as well.
Now it’s coming down to scale preference. At 35mm, Legion is already pushing the envelope of how big I want to get with a miniature. The 40mm figures for Shatterpoint look amazing, but with bases even bigger thanMarvel Crisis Protocol, they get challenging to store, let alone display.
So, once again, I find myself debating going to one game at the exclusion of the other. Sure, I could keep both, but again, space is an issue. And Shatterpoint doesn’t have vehicles! AGH!
Still, Lord Maul for Shatterpoint was a blast to paint. He’s got those freaky spider mech legs from Clone Wars, and the larger minis really are fun to slap paint on.
My introduction to The Uncanny X-Men was Rom Spaceknight #18, a cover with the coolest looking characters I had ever seen, teamed up with a FREAKING SPACE KNIGHT, not yet knowing that the cover had been drawn by the legendary Frank Miller. I was eleven years old, and doomed to love the X-Men from that point forward.
One of the coolest aspects of comics browsing in the early ’80s was that just about every grocery store had a spinner rack or some shelves with their comics on display, and that meant whatever hadn’t sold was pretty much still there. So, even thought the issue was a couple of months older, I was able to pick X-Men 139 up with a fortunate donation of half a buck from my mom.
This was also my introduction to John Byrne, an absolute legend in his own right. But right there, front and center, was Kitty Pryde, freshly minted X-Men rookie. She wasn’t Bucky or Robin, mere sidekicks (at the time) to title characters. She was the real deal, just training to get there. She was also about my age (sure, 13, but what’s a few years?). She was my favorite character, and pretty soon, Fifty cents a month was being saved up to follow along.
Fast forward some decades, and I’m still an X-Men fan. I don’t pick up the first-run titles, since $5 a pop is just more that I can afford, especially with an already expensive miniature hobby and Marvel cranking out half a dozen X Books a month. But I still pick up the trades where I can, and I’m still hooked.
Marvel Crisis Protocol released Kitty a bit back, and the miniature is fantastic. I wasn’t a fan of the phasing effect always being “on” with the sculpt, but these little figs are a work of art and it just works for me now that she’s painted up.
I’m hoping against hope that her “Captain Kitty” costume makes an appearance, I loved the Krakoa storyline and would really like to see new costumes! Still, this is a home run from Atomic Mass Games.
I’m a pretty content Star Wars fan. I think I grew up with enough hit-or-miss Star Trek that I can allow myself to enjoy a less than perfect visit to that Galaxy far, far, away, and I’ve only really loathed one of the movies. So I found myself pretty excited to get my hands on the Ghost Crew for Star Wars: Shatterpoint!
I’ve already painted Hera, who was a bit challenging because her leu pattern is pretty distinct. Still, she turned out pretty well and I’m happy with the paint job.
Zeb is a lot more straight forward, with a little bit of striping on his legs and arms. I had some fun using fluorescent yellow for his eyes.
It’s also a bit of fun painting this crew because you can either go more muted to match a live action feel, or vibrant for a cartoony look. I went somewhere in between, but that’s what I’ve been aiming for with my Shatterpoint minis from the beginning!
I should be taking on Sabine next, I hope Atomic Mass Games revisits some of these characters with the older versions from Ahsoka!
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