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| I added the ring on his right hand with greenstuff to cover a minor casting flaw. |
Hot on the heels of the pair of Marauder techs from a few weeks back is the very last tech ganger I needed to paint for a full set.
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| Tech gangers sculpted by Mark Copplestone. |
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| Caryatid by Stephen Tappin, published in White Dwarf #132 |
As I'm tidying up some loose ends, I picked a random figure out of my pending pile last night to paint. This time it's a juvenile hacker I'd intended to hang around with my other kids.
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| 'Next Gen' and Ludo, from Crooked Dice post-apocalyptic and Colony 87 ranges. |
There have been many Citadel sculptors, but I really wish that Roy Eastland had stayed with Citadel longer than he did. He was responsible for the delightfully chunky non-Copplestone tech gangers, the flamboyant puffed sleeved space marine scouts and a handful of skeletons. And that was about it! The highlight of Roy's output for Citadel for me though is the small set of five Confrontation bounty hunters. They are brilliantly grizzled and hard-bitten characters, with eccentric hairstyles and exotic gear - 100% Confrontation in fact!
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I painted up one of the five as The Doc a few weeks ago, whilst another of the set was painted a few years ago as The Wolf of House Ulanti. I decided to paint up the other three and get the set completed.
I'm confident that if I did a quick poll on 'The Most Likely Heavy Support Option For Squat Pirates', a giant mechanised walking skull with guns in its eyes would come pretty high up on the results. Happily for me, Mammoth Miniatures recently released the Grobnik Annihilator from the Gardens of Hecate range.
I'll start off by saying that in general I'm not that keen on pop culture mash-ups. I prefer my Star Wars, Superheroes, Dune and Thundercats neatly compartmentalised and separate. Every so often, something happens and my willpower drops. I end up painting a RT pilot as Buck Rogers. Or a space pirate and weretiger as an alternate universe He-Man and Battlecat.
For no particular reason, I recently dropped my guard and ended up doing something I hadn't really intended, and is firmly in mash-up territory.
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| Notorious bounty hunters MJ MkFlay and The Doc |
Note: This is a repost of a post from October 2017 that I posted on the Scale Creep blog.
Back in August 2017, Asslessman proposed that we indulge in a bit of nostalgia with a group project in homage to the most heroic of 1980s heroes: He Man. These figures were my contribution.
When I picked up the captive fugitive from Antediluvian Miniatures, I also picked up The Assimilator - a fun alien monstrosity from the range at the same time. This nightmarish (but also rather cartoony) four-armed alien is a brilliant sculpt, full of menace with a dash of Monsters Inc!
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| A posse surround The Assimilator, hoping to subdue the alien and cash in on its bounty. |
I'm certain I'm not the only hobbyist that has a stack of partly painted or assembled miniatures sitting on shelves or in boxes. My stalling point is generally post-conversion - I'll have an idea for a figure (and often a gaming need), but then plans change and I end up with a converted figure waiting to be painted. Sometimes they wait for a few weeks. Sometimes it's several years!
Today's figure was built sometime in late August or early September 2018. I had a spare head from an Imperial Guardsman I'd converted for my Dracula's America in Space crew, and Ukko from Foundry's 2000AD range that I'd picked up at Bring Out Your Lead 2018. The resulting pairing gave me a rather fun NPC (instantly referred to as The Dude):
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| I suspect the contents of the bottle are cheap, nasty and very strong! |
Hot on the heels of the first set of Ventolin Pirates by WarFactory are yet more Ventolin Pirates! A further six sculpts, comprising 3 troopers, 1 missile launcher, 1 sergeant and 1 leader. As a reminder, the STLs are being made available as part of a fundraiser for Ukraine. Check out the details over at: WarFactory.
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| Well-equipped pirates enter the canyon. |
The classic Rogue Trader adventurers range is full of iconic miniatures. Most are individual characters, but there are a couple that are crying out for some companions. The Ventolin Pirate is a great example, and Aidan Boustred over at WarFactory has digitally sculpted some fantastic homage figures - the STLs are being made available as part of a fundraiser for Ukraine. Check out the details over at: WarFactory
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| 5-man squad of Ventolin Pirates. |
Generally I'm 'not bad' at completing miniatures projects - I manage to paint up game-ready gangs and skirmish forces in a timely manner. However, I am also regularly guilty of over-ambition. I might make a gang of 10 figures, but acquire the material to make 10 more which sit unfinished long after I've completed a campaign with the first 10. This pair of figures is a pretty extreme example - when I was originally planning my Helmawr gang at the end of 2019, I decided I wanted some unique character figures. So I commissioned John Pickford to sculpt me a leader and a champion. He created me a pair of wonderful characters in early 2020. And I only got round to painting them a few weeks ago. Better late than never I guess?!
In December 2019 it wasn't my intention to abandon my Confrontation / Necromunda Helmawr gang halfway through. But global events took over, and the Necromunda campaign my group were planning didn't happen. The other week I was looking for a filler project, and that box of unpainted Helmawr figures caught my eye. I wanted some quick and easy wins, so decided to paint up a couple of figures ready to go, rather than work on the planned conversions. And what is more satisfying than painting a pair of unreleased figures to round out a set?
It had been some time since I last thought about painting up any figures for my Citadel Eternal Champion collection. However when the 28 Mag team asked if I was interested in writing an article about gaming in the multiverse, I thought it was a great opportunity to add some new figures and characters. As the photos of newly painted figures in the article are just illustrative, I thought it would be good to give the figures a little more airtime here on the blog!
The only downside to the Marauder Confrontation figures is that there aren't enough of them. Four Ash Waste Nomads. Four Venators. Four Psykers. Four figures isn't enough to make a gang of anything (except possibly a rubbish gang that needs to rethink its recruitment policy!).
So on the heels of my four Marauder psykers and my converted leader, I wanted to add some more big-headed lads with mind powers.
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| Venators corner a notorious group of psykers on their witch hunt. |
You'll have read about the creation of my Stargrave crew over the last 6 weeks or so, and it was really great to meet up with a bunch of great friends last weekend to play our Stargrave campaign: Unreal Engine. We were hosted by Underworld Gaming in Dublin, and 10 of us (including: Mr Saturday, Asslessman, Alex from Leadballoony, cheetor, Curis and others) travelled variously from the UK, France, Finland and of course Ireland to play on some great tables, each set up for a specific Stargrave scenario or custom scenario.
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| Some of the crews that took part |
Every so often you see a fun model that you instantly think of a use for. As soon as I saw the Antediluvian Miniatures captive fugitive, I knew it would be perfect as a game objective. Not to mention all of those scenic pics that need a prisoner or two!
The final member of my Cold Trader's Stargrave crew is a Pathfinder. I'm a big fan of ranger-types in any warband - there's something about the kind of character that wears a long coat or cloak and carries a bow or long rifle that really appeals to me. I'm not sure how effective a Pathfinder will be in Stargrave, but I couldn't resist including the archetype.
Everybody knows that robot characters are cool, and that if you have opportunity, you should include them in a starship crew. I wasn't quite sure how best to include some robots in my Cold Trader Stargrave crew, as nothing really seemed to fit the bill stylistically. I happened on the Q-Bot soldier type from the Quarantine 37 supplement and decided that 40k servitors would be a fun way to represent them. I dug out a couple of the early 2000s servitors, but it was nagging me that they didn't have any detail that could be easily passed off as the one-shot flamer or grenade launcher. And then I remembered my Skullz servitors...
As mentioned in my previous post, I'm currently prepping a crew for Stargrave. Most of the scenarios in the game are loot-grabs, so every game needs a selection of suitable loot counters. Loot comes in two different types: physical (crates, ammo, valuable items etc) and data (floppy discs and memory sticks).
For my data loot tokens I bought a bunch of little doodads from a bits reseller. I think they might be some kind of mine from a Space Marine kit, but I figured they'd do as little data caches.
I've been steadily working away at a project that I've wanted to do for some time - creating a crew to accompany my Necromunda Cold Trader. I always wanted to create more than a 4-strong group. Not only is this now possible in the Necromunda rules, but they're the perfect premise for a Stargrave crew. Happily, I have a weekend of Stargrave gaming coming up next month, so that was the perfect motivation to work on some new figures to accompany my Cold Trader.
I wanted the additional figures for the crew to give the feel of professional no-nonsense criminals. These aren't gutter scum or lawless pirates. This is an efficient and meticulously-planned smuggling operation that requires a skilled workforce. The first group of figures are exactly that - disciplined and well-trained, if perhaps a little morally suspect!
I wanted something relatively quick and easy to paint up as my first figure of 2023, so I decided to pick something from my boxes that was long overdue. I'm a firm believer in salvaging all of the off-cut components from my conversion projects as they nearly always get recycled into new projects. This figure is a good example of that, using the torso of the Imperial assassin who donated her legs to a chaos cultist in November 2018, and the body of a fantasy cleric whose head is now sported by a renegade Inquisitor.
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| The new Navigator flanked by a junior member of the house and her personal servant. |
