…and stay dead!

This isn’t the post I envisioned… this is a painting project that I’ve given up on before even spraying the figures with undercoat.

A long time ago, a mate bought a box of multipart plastic skeletons and assembled them. He gave me four, that haven’t seen much use in that time. As part of my three-day weekend, I decided to paint some more undead. I  cleaned up three metal undead and started work on the skeletons…

I’d say these fit most of the things I don’t like about multi-part figures – fiddly and fragile. (Why do this with Skeletons!) If I’d been the one assembling them I likely would have cleaned up the mold-lines, etc at the time. Doing that after they are assembled is much more of a mess. I’ve cut off a thumb, broken two in cleanly in half (at join points), and detached an arm. A third’s upper/lower torso is glued slightly out of alignment; just enough to annoy me that I want to break it and re-glue correctly. He also has the tip of his bow missing. (Probably me in the past, or moving around in storage.)

I’ve decided that I’m not happy with the way this is going, with the expectation that painting them would be annoying and I’d probably break something else. So, it’s into the bits box with them for future use as base decoration or whatever – skulls, bits of skeletons, bows and quivers.

The suns out, so I’ll spray the three metal undead so they’re ready to paint. Then maybe I get all my Warhammer Beastmen out of their storage trays and start preparing them.

Mantic Dwarfs

These guys are Mantic Dwarfs, multi-part plastic figures, that I was given (years ago?) by Azazel. (Mantic calls them Dwarfs, not Dwarves.)

I generally dislike multi-part figures, mostly because when I was first buying miniatures they were mostly metal, and awkward to assemble – often because parts didn’t fit smoothly together.

This lot were mostly assembled when I received them and look to have been two or three pieces – just enough to give a good variety of poses, weapons, etc. I have nine dwarfs, and while there are similarities, all are unique! I may have to watch out for some more of these. I like the style of Mantic’s dwarves; they were easy and fun to paint and it would be really nice to have more of them. I really like the idea of building a dwarf army, but I don’t know if I would ever get to do anything with it.

When I eventually decided to add these to my painting tray, I found I had three headless bodies, two loose heads, and two figures with no weapon. This is an excellent reason to put figures into plastics bags when you get them and not have them lying around on a shelf or mixed with other components in a box! I’m certain that I’ll turn up a dwarf head sometime in the near future.

I took the head-less body I liked the least, and cut his hand off to get a hammer for one of the other figures, and cut down a long spear in my parts box for the other. Heads were glued, a few small gaps were filled and many images of Ironclad, Sheildbreakers, etc were browsed on the ‘net.

I decided to try something different when undercoating – spraying with black from the sides, then white from overhead, aiming for the contrast of zenithal highlights that I’ve seen in many painting videos. (“A technique that quickly reproduces the light and shadows produced by an imaginary light source directly over the subject.”) I didn’t like the final effect. White undercoat makes detail stand out more – very helpful with my eyes when painting fine detail – and black means the final result is dark. I might go for this with monsters, but I don’t like the idea for characters. If do it again, it’s going to be with less black, and much more white.

Armour is primarily antique copper, with bright bronze for highlight. Gun-metal and silver highlight on some armour and weapons. Various browns, a few greens, some red and silver (chainmail) to add some variation.

I have very few decals left in my parts box, with nearly all of those being chaos related. At some point I think I need to look for some decal sets that would go with more “good” aligned forces, or that are more general in style. My free hand painting can’t do the fine detail that people like Azazel have achieved. I went with a variation of an online shield design. I’m glad I only had four shields too, not a whole unit… even when pencil lines marked in advance, trying to get all four looking the same wasn’t easy. A hammer or axe symbol on top would have been perfect.

These are also an entry in the Mo’vember challege by “Rantings from behind the Moustache“

Back from the Dead…

The title reflects both the state of my computer and the undead I painted during October, while mostly not online.

It was a remarkable month for many reasons: my PC died, I had a Covid test & a day of working from home when one of the guys at work might have been exposed to Covid, the last of our three chickens got sick and died, and we had a windstorm that left lots of people in Melbourne without electricity, including us for 30 hours. Since we don’t have a gas connection, this meant no lights, hot water or cooking. Thankfully, the end of lock-down the week before meant we could go over to my Mum’s for dinner and a hot shower.

Being able to travel and visit people again is great, and with the fantastic assistance of a mate I now have my computer working (upgraded MB, CPU and RAM!) and everything on it working normally.

While I had no PC, I did a lot of reading and got back into some painting. Now I’ve got blogs to catch up on, and pictures to take and post myself. I was lucky enough to be able to bring a work laptop home to keep up on some of the forums I read. I’m determined to make more regular backups of stuff on my system, and not just to a secondary hard drive, but to a USB. An up-to-date printed page with logins, passwords and site references, etc is also a must.

The three undead today all came from the UK in a miniatures swap with Subedai of the Lost and the Damned. One had been painted before and needed a clean up first. All are metal.

The first is a Prince August figure (1984, SK6, Skeleton) This one is history revisited for me: There are seven figures in this range (SK1-7) and I bought a blister pack of three (SK5-7) in the late 80’s. I dug them out to make sure this guy was painted in the same style. I first thought I had a slightly different figure, then realized that he’s actually missing his right arm. After painting, he looks like he has an arm there. (Only a humerus, not a radius & ulna.) The last picture shows him on the far right with my original three.

The next two figures are Citadel (I think) – I did look at the slotta base before filing it down to fit a plastic base and all I recall about them now is that each said “Skeleton”. The internet suggests these two are both from GW Citadel: UN2 (20) Agog Deathblow (Skeleton Infantry) and C17 (CJ-07) Skeleton Gunner, both 1987.

These three figures were all fun to paint. I particularly enjoyed the “gunner”. I’m saving him for my Gamma World game, though he might fit into a fantasy game in the right circumstances. He has hints of fluoro green that the phone camera hasn’t really picked up. I’m particularly pleased with his left eye – I got a dot of fluoro green in that eye socket with one attempt that I couldn’t replicate in the other. (The right eye has some green, but its not a fine point, nor as bright.)