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!
Part of the joy of the “Paint What You Got” challenge has been forcing myself to dive in to the backlog and get the previously neglected miniatures from my collection painted up.
Captain Marvel is a great character, and I really like the sculpts in the “Earth’s Mightiest Boxset” collection. You get two versions of Carol, one in her normal togs, and another when she goes full Binary mode.
The transformation mechanic in Marvel Crisis Protocol is pretty neat, allowing you to change out your model for a different mode of that character if it fits the spirit of their powers. So, Ant-Man has a smaller version, Carol can go Binary, you name it!
The standard Captain Marvel figure is nice and dynamic, Carol is a bit of a brawler so this works for me.
The Binary form, though, takes the cake. This is premium Feral Carol, looking like she’s getting ready to punch Rogue into the stratosphere.
Every once in a while, I get a crazy urge to try and see if a Heroclix mini can be brought to any sort of table-top standard for paint. The factory paints on these guys is really thick, and stripping that paint is nigh-impossible. So, you have to get your brush in there and let it do some heavy lifting for details!
Isiaiah Bradley is a pretty tragic character in Marvel’s history. He got the super-soldier serum during World War 2, did heroic stuff, and then the government decided he was expendable and that it was experiment time. You can read the whole story in the EXCEPTIONAL Captain America: Red White and Black.
I had to do a lot of hatching on these to get any of the details to stand out, there really aren’t any crisp edges or anything to use to try and get any stark contrasts. Mold lines really stand out, too. It’s about this point that I start staring at my Marvel Crisis Protocol minis and wondering what the hell I’m doing!
Crossbones turned out a lot better, I had to really push some stark contrasts, but it’s a fun model.
Still, I think I’ll be sticking with my MCP figs! Still a fun project, and it’s good to challenge yourself from time to time!
As I continue to mend, my stamina is picking up a little and I’m able to paint a little more! Just finished up Emil Blonsky, AKA The Abomination! He’s a delicious figure for sure!
He’s also positively huge, easily twice the size of the Hulk and close to Hulkbuster in stature. Very cool!
I’m still trying to figure out if I want to put him in a Hydra group or a Criminal Syndicate group, the big factor here being which group I’m going to get rid of. The syndicate has some cool models, but the Hydra group has a ton of Jack Kirby coolness that I love. On the other hand, Nazis. I hate those guys.
After assessing my overall storage capacity and several near death experiences over the last few years, I’m leaning heavily towards narrowing the collection down to one or two affiliations. The collector in me is shrieking like a gibbon at the moment, but I really don’t want to leave a ton of minis behind if something does actually catch up to me! That might sound a little morbid, but we all go sometime, and I would like to leave as little of my hobby behind to clean up as possible!
Enough of the maudlin, I’m hankering for some 15mm action!
I am back after a seven month battle with my pancreas that saw two hospitalizations, a major surgery, and an inability to eat food due to the cessation of my digestive tract. The surgery was undertaken to fix that issue, and I am happily able to eat now! I apologize for the absence, although my pancreas has informed me that it will happen again.
With that out of the way, though, let’s look at some minis! I love the X-Men, and, while I was a fan of the Jim Lee costumes that debuted 33 years ago, I don’t think they’re the end-all, especially when it comes to the original five students of Charles Xavier. Jean’s costume in particular never really gelled for me.
When the Krakoa storyline started a few years ago, I was really happy to see Jean’s first non-school uniform show up again, and spent some time looking for a suitable proxy model to use.
Before anyone rattle a pitchfork too mightily in my direction, I have a staunch take on proxy use! I always strive to own the original model, since I am playing a game that someone spent a lot of time and resources on, I want to support that. I also make sure that my opponent is cool with me using a proxy before we play. This allows cool battles like X-Men VS X-Men, with an obvious time travel element thrown in because of the costume variations!
I found this file of Jean in her Hickman era costume, and here’s how she looks painted up!
While I’m not 100% sold on the pose, I think the sculpt is actually pretty good!
I really do hope that Atomic Mass Games are able to branch out and explore more costume designs in future minis, because there’s a vast and wondrous world of X-Threads beyond Jim Lee, but let’s face it; those costumes were iconic, immortalized in the ’90s cartoon, and nostalgia sells war dollies better than any other marketing tool!
There is something about the color green that inspired Jack Kirby to make his more evil-inclined Asgardians follow a jade hue. Or, perhaps it’s because they the green of Enchantress, Hela, and Loki contrast the overwhelming pop of Thor’s red cape so well. Regardless, it seems like the three primary Asgardian baddies really dig their green duds!
So far, Loki and Hela are the only “evil” Asgardians that Atomic Mass Games has released, and I finally got a chance to get them painted up!
Hela is a lot of fun, with a sculpt that kind of hints at the casual immensity of her power. I have been experimenting with a new speed paint technique, which came together pretty well with her.
Loki is pulling the inspiration for his look from the more recent comics, with a pretty nice coat and a smirk that speaks volumes.
The magic effect for both was created by layering thinned inks over silver, which looks pretty cool in person. In photos, it’s really hard to see the effect working!
I used the same effect on the stone in Loki’s scepter, with a little plasma blue painted over silver. It’s not perfect, and I’ll probably play with it a lot more before I get it to where I want it!
There’s another pack coming soon with Enchantress and Angela, which is cool, but I would rather have Sif packed in with Enchantress if I’m being completely honest. Angela may be a Marvel character now, but she really feels like an eternal Spawn character to me. Still, I’ll be happy to see them in the collection!
Believe it or not, I get a whole lot of questions about miniatures. It might be because I run a miniature blog, or because I spent several years of my life as a freelance miniature painter. It might be because I spend so much time nerding out about miniatures. I have no idea. But, being as how I absolutely love miniatures, I though a series of educational posts covering the full spectrum of the hobby might be handy.
First up, we’ll be covering SCALE.
Exactly what is scale? Really, it’s just a way to make sure that your toy soldiers don’t look too ridiculous when you have them going pew-pew at each other. By collecting miniatures in a similar scale, you can avoid the terrible shame showing up with Micro Machines when all anybody wants to play with is Matchbox cars.
That’s really the nuts and bolts of scale. Your six inch tall Star Wars: Black Series action figures are going to look a little funky if you’re facing off against normal three-and-three quarter inch figures. Scale is a just a handy way to make sure you’re in the right sandbox.
Most miniature games stick to a general range of scale between 28mm and 40mm. But even then, there is a massive amount of variation, even when the scales supposedly match!
Scale normally measures the height of an average (assumedly male from a production standpoint) miniature from the base of its foot to its eye level. Unfortunately, some companies measure from the base of the figure’s foot to the top of its scalp, which means two companies can say they produce 28mm miniatures that can still end up having a pretty sizable difference in height.
28mm Standard
Once one of the most common scales produced in miniatures, 28mm standard miniatures tended towards smaller details in their sculpts, with heads and hands that were more realistically proportioned to their bodies.
You can see this example illustrated with the miniatures below. Both are considered 28mm figures, yet the Core Space mini is definitively smaller than the miniature from Corvus Belli‘s Infinity on the right.
The Core Space miniature was measured from base to the top of her head, while the Infinity model was measured base to eyes. Both are still technically 28mm!
There are still plenty of miniatures being produced in this scale, with some fantastic multi-part kits being produced by Osprey Games for the Frostgrave family of wargames.
Games Workshop has largely disrupted that over the last few decades, with the advent (and proliferation) of what is commonly referred to as “heroic scale”.
28mm Heroic
My haaands are as big as my faaaaaaace!
Supposedly, heroic scale figures are the same scale as 28mm standard, but their larger heads, hands, and feet make them look more like comic book characters (hence heroic). There has also been very little attention paid to keeping the scale of most 28mm heroic figures consistent, which has led to a fair amount of “scale creep” over the last 20 years or so. Just compare a Warhammer 40k Space Marine from 1999 to one produced in the last few years, and you can see a huge difference in their size.
And yes, I know Primaris Marines are bigger. I’m talking about your standard marine. And I have Imperial Guard from 20 years back that are a bit smaller than newer figs.
On the plus side, though, larger minis make for more possibilities for detail, which leads us right to what is becoming the industry standard for miniature scale.
32mm
Malifaux, Zombicide, Kings of War, Runewars, and a fare amount of independent sculptors have settled on the 32mm scale range for their miniatures, which has some definite perks; the larger size allows for crisper details, which can lead to more dynamic or expressive characters.
It’s also close enough to 28mm, especially Heroic 28mm, that most people won’t care much about the size difference.
35mm
There’s really very few games producing minis in 35mm, notably Wild West Exodus and other figures from Warcradle Studios. Everything that we said about larger size is even more apparent at this larger scale, but they’re also much larger than 28mm figures when presented on the same table!
40mm
These Marvel: Crisis Protocol figures pretty much max out the size of scale miniatures, but their larger surface area is far more forgiving to paint!Should have used a pic of him moving, sorry for the empty space…
Atomic Mass Games produces Marvel Crisis Protocol at 40mm, and at this point they’re one of the few miniature lines at this scale. The miniatures are so large that they are much easier to paint, which is nice, but forget putting your Iron Man on the table against someone’s Frostgrave minis. He’ll look like he’s attacking students from that school model in Zoolander.
Other Common Scales for Wargame Miniatures
Quite a few wargames rely on much smaller scales, and this is purely due to economics of space. If you’re going to re-create Waterloo, you’re going to need a lot of miniatures to pull that off!
That’s where 15mm comes in, which is the standard scale for historical wargames. The average figure is pretty small, which means that a whole lot more of them can fit on a table!
Gaslands has been taking off lately, which uses customized 1/72 scale Matchbox and Hot-Wheels cars. This works out to 20mm scale for miniatures, which there is not a lot produced for, but some enterprising sculptors on Etsy and Patreon have been filling that niche beautifully.
Another semi-common scale is used primarily for giant robot games, but it varies wildly between 3mm and 6mm. At this point, human sized characters are about the size of a Nerds candy, and the real stars of the game are the monsters or robots that the game focuses on.
Of course, there are even smaller scales for starship battles, but even those tend to exaggerate scale to produce evenly sized ships. Star Wars: Armada, I’m looking at you…
Why does any of this matter? That’s a pretty good point, and one that some people won’t even care about. Some folks are just fine facing off with any scale miniature that strikes their fancy, and there is absolutely fine!
There are others, myself included, who get caught up in the scale trap because of the immersive quality of a good miniature game. I like to bring a nicely painted group of figures to play on a table with nicely built and painted terrain, and I tend to get lost in the story that plays out in a game. Differences in scale can be a little jarring, but it’s not a deal breaker for me.
Seen side by side, scale difference can be staggering!
Mostly, this comes from the types of games I like to play. Most of the game systems I like are setting agnostic, which means they don’t have an established universe set up for them. So, you can bring whatever miniatures you want to the party. I have a ton of 28 and 32mm minis, so I tend to collect miniatures in that scale to use in the games I like to play.
If Marvel Crisis Protocol was the only game I played, or I wasn’t really keen on throwing Wolverine at a Genestealer, this wouldn’t be a problem at all!
I also tend to display my painted miniatures, and I like seeing minis that are similar scale displayed together. It might be a little fussy, but that’s my preference!
If you have questions about scale, or miniatures in general, drop a comment below!
Nothing like being all smug about all your newly-finished Marvel Crisis Protocol figures, except maybe when you realize you never photographed all of the original release figures back when you finished them!
So, here’s the first of the OG MCP figs, Doc Banner’s altered ego…
Mean Green was a lot of fun to paint, but I really haven’t found an MCP mini that I didn’t have fun with!
One of these days I’ll remember to putty in that wrist seam, there’s no excuse really. But I’m still happy with the finished result!
Grimmleigh's Lab 