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Tuesday, 2 December 2008

First Wreck

I've got a self-imposed Christmas deadline for both my Bad Moon and my Cryx. By Christmas they're to be at 3000 and 500 points full-painted respectively. This wreck marker is one of the last few pieces that needs doing.

Slayer wreck

This marker was painted on a train last Saturday some time around 5:15am. The train was deserted so it was done with a minimal of bizarre looks from other passengers.

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Posted by Curis at 10:26 AM

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Friday, 21 November 2008

Good intentions heal the soul

Glossy soul tokens I've been agonising over.

Take from our souls the strain and stress.

Problem is how to base them. They're little chunks of metal with a very sharp edge around the base. They'll chip easily. It's something I'm countering on my Epic models by gluing them to coins. But unless I glue stuff to the obverse of the coin you can see the design through the paint. And basing them to match my fledling force looks odd - the token ends too abruptly and it looks like an odd novelty fountain. And some regular opponents said it would make them too big and they'd get in the way during games.

In the end I just elected to gloss varnish them. What a cop out.

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Posted by Curis at 2:42 PM

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Wednesday, 19 November 2008

More Cryx

My first Cryx model I did - the Pistol Wraith. I love this model as it's got a later-Castlevania vibe going on.

Juese Belmont!.

The biggest model in my Cryx army so far. And the most ineffectual. The Slayer.

Hello, we're Slayer.

I've got a heavy wreck marker for this too. I should have painted that first as it spends more time on the table than the Jack itself. Humph.

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Posted by Curis at 12:23 PM

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Monday, 10 November 2008

Bellies gonna getcha

With a few more train journeys, I've had the time to finish my Bile Thralls.

Belly's gonna getcha.

It's a little frustrating having sunk hours into doing the whole unit of ten, only for them to be worth 65 points in total. The first 350 of my Cryx was done so quickly, with the Slayer and Deneghra. Bile Thralls are a poor points-per-pence ratio, but they may actually help me lose less.

I've stuck them up on CoolMiniOrNot, so you can go vote should you so wish.

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Posted by Curis at 6:04 PM

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Monday, 20 October 2008

Smiling at strangers on trains

I make a lot of journeys on trains. And as well as having several good (comic) books in my bag, I also entertain myself by taking my paints. Here they are somewhere approaching Didcot.

It was the strangest thing today

Here they are somewhere in Birmingham, further along in their paintjobs.

Argh!

It's a great use of time. I got a good four hour run at them today, four hours that I would normally have had to have put an evening aside for, or stayed up extra late to do. It's magic time from nowhere.

It's also perhaps the only interesting picture of someone's painting area you'll ever see...

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Posted by Curis at 12:57 AM

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Friday, 10 October 2008

Just one cage

More copying the standard studio schemes. This time, it's Deneghra, the most diminutive of the Cryx casters. She was bought as a present, and so she went straight to the front of the Cryx painting queue.

Champion rack.

This was my second attempt at painting the girl. The first time I used the Vallejo Game Color (eurgh american spelling) silvers, and it came out truly awful. They had that glittery finish that put me in mind of fairground bumper cars. I got sulky, and threw her in my undersink Nitromors jar. For my second attempt I wet out and bought some of the GW metals - I must say, (price aside) they're the best metals on the market, and produce a gorgeously even finish.

Only problem with Deneghra is she's, well, 'meh'. She's not a 10-foot tall steampunk skellington, or a zombie pirate dragon - she's just an unimposing little girl with very straightforward colours. Maybe in time I'll do another in a more striking scheme, with marble green armour plates, and lots of runic tattoos.

I do like the way her skin came out. I wanted her to stand out from all the green/grey Thralls, and look healthy and alive, but still eeeeevil.

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Posted by Curis at 1:14 AM

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Wednesday, 24 September 2008

Cryx

My Cryx. Curis' Cryx. They came from the Crypt. Curis' Crypt Cryx. Crikey.

Curis' lovely Cryx.

The one thing that as a stumbling block in Warmachine for ages was how to indelibly stamp the models as mine. I wanted Cryx with a twist, something uniquely mine. Problem was, I knew too little about Warmachine to ever do conversions or alternative paint schemes that actually fitted. I'd be converting what I thought was woo-awesome, only to find that those conversant in the PP fluff would roll their eyes and mutter. It would be the equivalent of a child at GW sticking a Terminator in the cockpit of an Eldar Warwalker and making hands for it out of screws. It looks good, but only to them in their painful nativity.

So eventually, I jacked it all in and settled on copying studio paint schemes. Nice and simple, no thinking required, and the perfect way to break out of my rut where I just borrow techniques from previous models.

It also fits nicely with (what I perceive) is the PP mentality of collecting the figures as-is, rather than making them your own. The 40K Universe is sufficiently big to wedge 1,000 Marines of your own devising in. The PP Universe is a teeny tiny thing where there's not as much space to do you own thing.

Good or bad? Well, it got me to take those hesitant first steps towards collecting a whole force.

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Posted by Curis at 9:20 PM

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