More Vengeful Spirits!

I finished up the two Seishin the other day but I've been struggling to get better pictures of them.

Basically this is another case (like my Arbites and Judge Dredd models) where I've gone with some really dark colours and when I photograph them they just turn out black.

Can anybody suggest either a reasonably priced camera for macro-photography or an add-on for an iPhone?  I have a light box and it doesn't seem to help so I'm pretty sure what I need is better camera hardware.

-Jay

Kirai and her spirit....I want to say....friends?

Got my next two Vengeful Spirit models done tonight.  These models represent Ikiryo (a monstrous manifestation of Kirai's soul) and her Lost Love (the ghost of the governor of Malifaux's son).

These are the two figures in the box that are probably the most thematically connected to Kirai.  I painted Ikiryo to match Kirai so they very much appear linked and although the Lost Love is a spirit I painted him up very much like my more traditional undead.

So far that means I've got 3 of the 7 models from the box done so I feel like I'm in good shape to have my new crew done by Friday!

-Jay

Kirai; Molly's super-best-friend

Last night I got off to a good start on my new Malifaux crew for Gaining Grounds; Vengeful Spirits.

I choose the crew based on the Assault On The Gray Lord scenario/fiction from the Malifaux Crossroads rulebook.  Basically the story depicts Molly and Kirai  as vengeful forces laying waste to some really bad people in Malifaux.  What's cool about it is that it sticks with the idea that Molly and Kirai are both unhinged and lacking in moral compass but it still lets them be the heroines of the story.  One of the other things I really liked about the Vengeful Spirits box is that although it's still Resurrectionists it really does represent some figures and ideas that are completely different than the rest of that collection.

I started off with Kirai because unlike most of the other crew boxes where you can use 50-75% of the models with another Master there are only 2 figures in the entire box I can use if Kirai is not in play.  So it just makes sense to get her done first.  I'm happy with how Kirai turned out but less happy with how she photographed (that's becoming a theme for me), her dress is a very light green (but looks overly yellow in the picture) and the flowers on her dress and in her hair are a very light purple which contrasts well with the darker colours they are set against but somehow they seem washed out and dark in the photo.

At any rate I'm happy to have gotten started and if all goes to plan (does it ever?) I should have this crew done in time to game with this Friday.

Wish me luck!

-Jay

Take Back The Night DONE !!

I finished my last Crooligan in time for my first game with Molly as my Master yesterday.

Unfortunately due to a late start I only got the chance to play about two and a half turns so I didn't get to try out all the fancy rules but I've got to say this is one of the fastest moving crews I've played with so far.

Tomorrow I start on Kirai and hopefully next Friday I'll get to play a full game!

-Jay

Creepy, evil children....

One thing Malifaux seems to  do better than any other game I've played is conjure up images of innocence corrupted.  I still remember when I first got into the game facing Baby Kade (yes, an actual baby) and it seemed far more disturbing fighting a demon baby with a knife than any actual giant monsters in the game.

Fast forward to now-ish and I've got two of my three Crooligans done.

 

The Crooligans as I mentioned before are evil lost souls serving Molly in Malifaux.  Now that I've started painting them I've really warmed up to these figures as they are something unique and give my Resurrectionists something different than the traditional undead war gaming forces.

This leaves me with my last Crooligan and my last Nurse to paint.  Hopefully I'll get those done before the weekend because whether I do or not I'm moving onto my Vengeful Spirits box set once the weekend hits!

-Jay

A blast from the past and a stake in the ground

I've made a decision.
I'm going to paint 8 more Blood Angels models, that will bring me up to 2000 points  and then I'm going to call that army done.

And then I'm going to take a new attitude towards 40K models.  I will only buy and paint things that can be used as Arbites, and everything I buy and paint WILL be painted as Arbites!  I've already got some ideas in mind, and a few started (really excited about Arbites robots and Arbites Ogryns!) but I also wanted to haul out my older Arbites/Enforcer stuff and figure out what I have so far.

In my basic Arbites squads there are a few unpainted Proctors because I had originally gone with different models and then changed my mind back to the 'proper' model.  At some point I'll just sit down and get these done and then re-base the whole force and I should be in pretty good shape.

I had always wanted to do an Arbites army when I got into 40K but the model that in my mind finally made it a real possibility was the multi-part Necromunda Enforcer.  I had tons of models with shotguns and grenade launchers but the Enforcer models gave me what I felt like had really been missing, riot shields.  Years ago at the second to last Canadian Games Day I ran a table with Darren from Strategies Games & Hobbies in Vancouver that featured Arbites vs Zombies.  The shotgun equipped squads roamed the streets laying waste to the horde but it was the Riot Squads that formed the proverbial thin-blue-line in front of the precinct house until help arrived.  These models hold up for me as some of my favourite models in my collection because they feel like they truly represent the look and feel of the army.

I've used an assortment of different rules sets over the years to represent this force and after the Enforcers came out a lot of unofficial rules used the Cyber-Mastiffs as a quick assault unit.  I like the Mastiffs and they are one of the things that for me really makes this feel like a 40K force rather than just another pseudo Judge Dredd thing.

Last but not least a small selection of characters.  Again depending on what rules I've been using these have represented several different types of characters over the years but the one constant has been the Inquisitor Coteaz standing in as my judge.

There's no real urgency for me in terms of when this stuff is going to get done (I'm not actually painting it FOR anything) but my slow steady pace on my Blood Angels really changed how I saw collecting and painting 40K and brought me back to my younger days.  This will be my attempt to catch that same lightning in a bottle again.

Wish me luck!

-Jay

What the next 2 weeks of Malifaux painting looks like for me

I'm gearing up for another Malifaux campaign starting this Friday night and I have a few things that need to get painted over the next couple of weeks.

For the campaign we need to pick 3 Masters and a pool of 100 Soul Stones worth of figs to draw from over the course of the campaign.

I decided to go with Resurrectionists primarily because I was really excited about having just completed The University Of Transmortis and Take Back The Night box sets.  So based on that decision Molly and McMourning (who I had painted previously) would be my first two Masters.  I needed a third but one of the components of the campaign is that we all also have to paint a new crew box we didn't already have done.  A bunch of my friends suggested Nicodem, who is a cool undertaker looking guy with hordes of zombies at his disposal, and I personally was seriously thinking of picking up the new Seamus box set but neither of those felt genuinely "new" to me because I had painted the previous versions during the first run of the game.  So instead I decided to go with Kirai's Vengeful Spirits crew box.

There they are ready for painting.  The league starts Friday so they will be sitting unpainted until then, hopefully I'll get a chance to at least get started on them this weekend.

In addition I had 4 Resurrectionist models unfinished on my desk and I decided to commit to having them done before I put a brush to the Vengeful Spirits.  It's the 3 Crooligans from Molly's crew and another Nurse for McMourning.

This should keep me busy for the next 2 weeks or so.

-Jay

Take Back The Night - Getting progressively more creepy

I was a lot closer to being done Philip and The Nanny than I realised late last night and I just spent about a half-hour finishing them up.

So at this point I have 3 of the 6 models from the Take Back The Night box done, basically the models that would be traditionally thought of as "characters" in most war games.

Molly is the leader and in-spite of her delicate appearance is incredibly hard to kill.  She has host of interesting abilities like the ability to create Belles out of thin air (glad I painted those models already), and she can also buff her allies and help them move around quickly.  The Necrotic Machine as I mentioned before is her sidekick and is both able to apply negative conditions (like poison) to enemy models and can also help allies move around more quickly.  Last but not least is Philip and The Nanny.  Philip can lead the crew in smaller games if I'm not using Molly and is great at preventing opponents from taking interact actions (which is usually how scenarios are won in games of Malifaux).

The remaining 3 models in the box are the Crooligans who are basically soulless evil children....so this crew isn't going to be getting any less creepy any time soon.

-Jay

Philip and The Nanny WIP

I've been buying an assortment of horror themed models for years (probably more than 25 years at this point) so it's a significant statement to say; this is the creepiest model I've ever gotten.

Much like Molly Philip Tombers was a big part of the back story in the first Malifaux rulebook but he waited a long time to get an actual model.  For those of you not familiar with the background Philip is actually the severed head in the baby stroller, the Nanny is a minion of Molly's that she uses to get Philip around.  In the first edition of the game Philip was just carried around by Molly...guess she's moving up in the world.

I'm hoping (emphasis really is on hoping) to get Philip done tomorrow but I've got a busy couple of days at work coming up so I may or may not have time to update and check in.

Wish me luck!

-Jay

Take Back The Night crew box beginning to take shape

Last night I was able to make a decent start on my Take Back The Night crew box.  I usually choose to finish by painting the Master last but this time out I decided to paint Molly first.  The main reason driving this decision is that I have a tendency to not get my new Masters done in time for games that are coming up and then I really just play like I'm adding a model or two to an existing crew.  I have a game on Friday and I'm determined that Molly will lead my forces that day!

I had previously painted the metal version of Molly and although it was a nice miniature looking back I clearly rushed painting it and it came out a bit sloppy.  One of the things that worked out really well for my this time around was that I painted Molly during breaks in odd jobs I was doing around my house.  This meant that every time I sat down and worked on her for 5-10 minutes I was fresh and every thing on the model was dry.  The big challenges with Molly were painting a large yellow area but the texture on the dress really helped with that, and choosing a skin tone.  I wanted to get Molly's skin tone half-way between my zombie skin colour and my normal "healthy" human skin colour.  I think it turned out fairly well, I'm looking forward to how it looks on the tabletop.

Alongside Molly is the Necrotic Machine.  The Necrotic Machine is Molly's totem (sidekick basically for those of you who don't play Malifaux).  The Necrotic Machine was fairly quick and easy to paint being primarily metal.  The one thing I tried that unfortunately didn't photograph very well was painting all the tubes and hoses very lightly and then using Citadel's 'Blood For The Blood God' to convey the sense that blood or some other red chemical was flowing through the machine.

That's it for today, now I'm just trying to decide if the Crooligans are next or Philip and The Nanny?

-Jay

NOW I'm playing Malifaux!

As I've mentioned in the past I played a lot of first edition Malifaux and at the time I originally got into the game the only crews I played with were the Resurrectionists.  I played with 3 different masters and but there was always one constant; the Belles.

Since I picked up playing again with second edition I have bounced between Arcanists, Resurrectionists, Guild and Outcasts so I never really got a theme going.  I've got to say, not having zombie harlots at my beck and call always made me feel like I wasn't really playing Malifaux.

Tonight my new Rotten Belles have joined the collection and are ready to entice some unsuspecting opponents into their necrotic embrace!

With the Belles done I have fulfilled my goal of competing my outstanding Resurrectionist painting projects before moving on to the Take Back The Night crew box.

So starting tomorrow I'll be working on Molly and her minions.....

And the Crooligans.....

Stay tuned!

-Jay

Re-rise of The Resurrectionists!

One of the promises I made to myself is that I would get my remaining 2 boxes of Resurrectionist models done before I started painting the new Molly box set that came out today.  Technically I haven't broken that promise....yet.

Last night I stayed up an extra hour or two and finished off my University Of Transmortis box set.  I can't say enough about this box.  The models look great, they will be a worthwhile addition to my Resurrectionist collection and the box comes with rules for a solo-play scenario that pits another of the player's crews against the Iron Zombies.

My other outstanding box was the Rotten Belles.  I started working on those today but between a work project and other non-hobby related errands I ended up not finishing them.  I'm hoping to get them done tonight and then start cranking out the Take Back The Night box set this weekend.

Hopefully tomorrow will bring finished Belles and assembled Molly crew!

-Jay