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The medic is definitely the winner for me. But a very nice job on figures that most people have not been overly impressed with.

Valete,

JohnS

Thanks for the kind words. I find the SW models to be pretty good generally, but fell victim to the material, or more correctly to not being designed for the material. If they had been sculpted a little bigger and with more pronounced details, I think they'd have been much easier to work with.

I have that sedition wars stuff too, was excited but cleaning up the restic stuff took ages, killed all my enjoyment of it.

You've done a good job on those three. Aside from Kara, I didn't recognise either of the others, and you did a nice job on all three. I think the Medic is my favourite as well.

Those DS traps are disgusting. Did you get a refund for those?

@Jehan-reznor: Clean up is, indeed, a huge hassle, which is why I my standards are so much lower for restic models.

@Azazelx: The traps look usable on the trap side, and I figure a little work to make the flat side acceptable is less of a hassle than dealing with Mantic's post-KS customer service. Also, I didn't realize they were giving refunds.

Having finished those Sedition Wars characters, I decided to bite the bullet and work on the troopers:



These are the twelve troopers that came with the Biohazard add-on. I actually finished the base set within a month of receiving it, but I moved on to other projects before I got around to opening any other little baggies.



I got bored with cleaning these models pretty quickly, so there are a lot of mold lines left. The paint job is incredibly basic: Tamiya NATO green, dark brown glaze, NATO green and Army Painter Army green drybrush. The guns and flexible undersuit (at the knees, hips and elbows) are AP uniform grey with a Payne's Grey glaze. The visors are silver. The male troopers are serviceable enough, but the cocked-hip pose on the females still bothers me.



The guy on the left in this photo is from the latest batch; the guy on the right is from the first set. The newer models turned out significantly darker than their predecessors, but I'm not to worried about it. Overall, these models are pretty nice, and would probably benefit from an edge highlight on their armor, but given the size of my backlog I don't see that ever happening.

Next up, more Strain miniatures. Watch this space!

They look great. Nice job.

Good work. The uhh.. are they samaritans? Or is that their gun? Bah whatever, the troopers look pretty nice. The ladies definitely suffer from bizarre and terribly unrealistic sexual dimorphism as is too often the case... but what are ya gonna do?

Sedition wars stuff is looking really great!

Thanks for the kind words, all. The SW really are technically fine models for what they are, but I still can't get behind the design and posing of the female troopers. I can understand the constant clamoring for female soldiers who look like they can fight rather than just striking pin-up poses.

Really great work on the Sedition Wars stuff, I never had thought about the green until you painted the first up last month. Too bad that you killed the game .http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/570/509493.page#8442455. Long time for it to die, but it finally has.

Huh. I guess I'm not surprised. My first reaction was "I wonder if I can still get the boxed set for cheap." And then I remembered that I don't want any more of these models. Although the newer gribblies and non-human models look pretty good on the SMV site...

I'll be glad when they stop popping up for peanuts... i'm a sucker for a sale.

Shipping costs pretty much eat up any savings, so that acts as a buffer for me.

I started these at about the same time as the Vanguard troops:



These guys are pretty heavily textured, so I went with blocks of color and then a glaze-- in this case, walnut varnish from the ￥100 store. The metallic parts are Army Painted gunmetal with a wash of Payne's grey. The torn skin is AP chaotic red, the skin is a Ral Partha flesh (which I had to revive with some matte medium), and the pants are all different colors.

Some close-up shots:





Finally, a comparison shot:


The guy on the left is from the first batch I painted oh-so-long ago. As you can see, the older ones are darker, and I did their blade-like extrusions as metal rather than bone. Otherwise they look pretty much the same to me.

I have started on the wave 2 heroes, but they don't look like they'll be much fun to paint...

The Sedition Wars stuff looks great.

EDC

Those actually look pretty bloody good. Not sure if good enough to make me get my own ones out yet, but every time I see them done as nicely as this it moves me a little closer to getting them out and batch-painting a load of them as Zombies for Nurgle 40k and KoW undeads....

Apart from issues caused by the materials, the Wave 1 models really are pretty nice. Even the sexy female troopers are technically well-made. The upcoming Wave 2 stuff, however, is a little disappointing. I'll give my impressions later this week when I post the next batch.

Yeah, I chopped most of my W2 models up for a refund. The W1 ones are in a box somewhere, mostly out of disgust in what was promised vs what was delivered. I spent a ridiculous amount on SW because I believed McVey would deliver what he promised. I'm still bitter about it. If I'd picked the sets up for $30 or $15 a pop, I'd be happy as Larry.

Thankfully, the yen was really strong against the US dollar at that time, so paying full KS prices wasn't that painful. I agree, though, that the final product doesn't live up to the promises.

Yeah, the AU was as well, but even with that I spent more than I probably have on any other. Well, SW, KoW1 and Dreamforge were the three big early ones. /lessons learned

I like the fact that you're painting to a solid tabletop standard, and crushing it through the closet of shame. Great work!

--Brian

Thanks everyone for the kind words. Here are some more SW minis, this time from Wave 2 :


First up, Morgan Vade in his Biohazard suit. I painted him pretty much identically to the previous version (AP army green and leather brown, with my homebrew dark brown glaze). He has fewer pouches to break up the lines, and gloves that look heavier than the latex gloves I gave him last time, and also a hand flamer. His visor is Mithril silver with a Gryphonne Sepia wash. He looks good enough on his own, but is significantly smaller than the previous version.





I don't remember this guy's name, and he 's not listed on the SW campaign page. He has bulkier armor than a standard vanguard trooper, and his longish hair and vandyke reminded me of Kris Kristofferson, which is why I went with gray. His trenchcoat (which would fit like a tent if he wasn't wearing that carapace armor) is a lot less splotchy in person.



This is Cyber Akosha. Remember that sniper from the last batch? Apparently she is a terminator. Like Vade, this version is teeny-tiny compared to the original. As you can see, I kind of rushed through her paint job.



Finally, the worst model in the whole set (in my opinion), Jada "Iron" Lily. There are a lot of things that I simply don't like about her. What are those horizontal strap things on her jacket and inner thighs? Is she supposed to be wearing chaps? I ended up painting them gold and then trying to forget about them. Why is she wearing a bolero jacket and a corset? If she calls herself Iron Lily, wouldn't she opt for a tougher look? Even ignoring the aesthetic mismatch, she is completely out of place in the setting. The enemy is a nanotech virus that infects and mutates the human troops into monsters, so the cleavage-and-bare-midriff look is jarring at a minimum, and extremely dangerous for her teammates as well.

Speaking of skin, I felt a little skeevy paining her boobs and belly. I'm no prude, nor am I a Social Justice Warrior, but I don't really want or need cheesecake in my battle gaming. That's essentially why I don't buy Malifaux or Brother Vinnie models, and also why I detest GW's Dark Elves/Dark Eldar. I'll be glad to put this one in the case and leave her in the closet.

Also, in the photos she looks a lot like Courtney Love.

Here's a group shot:


I should have six more big gribblies done by the end of the week. Watch this space!

Rather nice work on those. Keep up the good work.

Good work despite your dislike of them.

I really like Vade. Nice realistic look to him. Agree on the women. Not the best sculpts. Even compared to their peers. Sill nice job getting them "table ready".

I think you're selling at least a big chunk of the Malifaux range short if you're not looking at Wyrd's miniatures due to not wanting cheesecake. Yes, there are some eggregious models there but there's huge parts of the line that have not a whif of it.

Valete,

JohnS

I won't deny that Wyrd makes nice, if highly stylized, models, but so many of the female minis that come up on GIS are so boobalicious that I can't really bring myself to explore much further. Not wanting to start investing in another game that I won't play is a part of that, as well.

These guys are coming along nicely. The Morgan Vade is my pick of that particular bunch.

I agree-- Vade is probably the best model in this set. Of course, he's almost identical to The Survivor from DZ, meaning I have three painted versions of him, with one more metal version waiting for when I tackle DZ again.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
After those not particularly fun hero models from the last update, I decided I needed to cleanse my palate with some monsters:


These guys are Quasimodos, stage 2 Strain monsters. I used the exact same techniques as on the Stage 1s I posted earlier: barbarian flesh with a walnut stain, gunmetal with Payne's grey. I have two more of these from the first set I did, but they are both too top heavy and leaning too far forward to stand up on the 25mm bases they came with. I put these guys on 32mm bases that I have had lying around forever. They still fall over, but not as badly as the others.


These are Stage 3 strain models called Bladewitches. They don't actually have blades so much as spikes, but we can let that slide. I figure that for stage 3 and above, all the skin will have sloughed off, so the non-metallic parts are AP Chaotic Red, drybrushed with Chaotic Red/Barbarian flesh mix. Despite the hassle of cleaning, these models are probably best in restic, since those long spikes on their hands would snap off if they were metal, resin, or HIPS.


These are called Brimstones, the other Stage 3 strain. I painted them just like the Bladewitches. The 50mm base makes them too big to fit in the carrying case with the rest of my SW models, and now that I have four of them, I'm running out of space in my little display cabinet.


Here's this latest batch all together. I took these photos with my camera rather than my phone, so they came out a little darker than normal. I need to figure out the settings, I guess.

I'm near the end of this project. All I have left are:
1 Grendlr, 1 Cthonian (Phase 4 and Phase 5, respectively), Kara in Gnosis Armor, Barker Zosa in what looks like a power loader, 3 THI suits, 6 bone crabs, 1 AI drone with 6 mini drones. With only nine days left in February, I'm thinking I might not get all of these done,and may have to push the robotics into March, as part of my challenge for that month.

Following up on the Phase 2 and 3 Strain modelsfrom last week, I managed to crank out the final models in that set:



This is Phase 4, the Grendlr. It's essentially a giant walking mouth. There is supposed to be a flesh-hook-like thing on either side of its maw, and I even spent some time cleaning and attaching the stupid things, only to have them snap off while painting them. I seem to recall that the same thing happened to the first one I painted oh-so-long ago. Nothing really new to say about the technique, although in retrospect I should have painted the belly before gluing it to the base.



This is Phase 5, the Chtonian. The fluff says it's a squid-like thing inside an armored suit. There is a lot more armor than squid on the model, so I painted a lot of the tubing as guts rather than metal.



Finally, bonecrabs. I remember being really excited when these came up as a stretch goal, and then somewhat disappointed when they arrived. The tongues and tails are a little too spindly for the material, and I gave up on cleaning mold lines when I saw how many of them ran right over the admittedly-interesting details. By this time and the project, my painting standards had fallen to "good enough," a feeling which I suspect McVey himself shared by this point in the production process. If I had another set, I might try to put a little more effort into them. Sadly, I don't.

Last up, a group shot:


I'm in the home stretch with about a week left in the month. I may end up finishing it all.