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