If you’ve been following this blog, you might be wondering why haven’t I posted anything since the beginning of 2020. The end of 2019 and early this year was extremely busy with a lot of work, studying for exams, and visiting family (which also means that we’ll soon have a new entry in the “Painting with my nieces” section too). I also spent a significant amount of time with building and painting my brother’s Christmas gift in December, which is what this post is about.
He chose a 1:32 resin kit from eBay with 3 futuristic soldiers in body armours: one with a minigun, another one with a riot shield and a rifle, and the third one with an SMG and an axe. It’s the classic ranged DPS – tank – melee combo. It wasn’t a branded item and sadly the product itself seems to have gone by now, so I’m glad I could get it then.
Frankly, I had mixed feelings about this kit. There were many positives about them: the figures were well sculpted, neatly detailed and full of character. There were only minimal mould lines, most of the parts were slotted and fitting well. That’s all good, right? However, the material itself was probably the worst that I have ever seen: it was crumbling like toffee (no, I didn’t actually taste it :-P) and the realistically scaled parts, came at the expense of practicality, leaving you with parts that are doomed to fail. The material was so thin in the recesses of the ammo belt of the minigun or in the magazines that I could see through it. Consistency, scale accuracy and fine details were all fine, but there is common sense too: please don’t sacrifice the usability of a model for extreme levels of accuracy, or if you really want to, use a suitable material.
I don’t know if this was by design, or I just ended up with a faulty batch, but it did cause some difficulties: both the rifle and the UZI broke. Luckily, I found a (Malifeux) metal weapon kit and could replace the broken weapon to a more reliable one. I was quite happy with the result, the soldier’s finger was just perfectly fitting the trigger! I also had to reinforce the ammo belt with some green stuff.
The broken rifle and the replacement 
There I fixed it!
With the above issue fixed, I thought I could get started with painting, but I ran into another problem: I don’t know what release agent was used or if it was the material, but degreasing ended up being really difficult. Normally I use hot water and washing up liquid to clean and degrease the minis I paint, which have worked well with all my old models, but with these figures, it just didn’t: the paint simply didn’t stick to them and it peeled off. I had to clean them at least five times (!) to be able to get started with basecoating them. By that time, I was really frustrated and was very close to abandoning this project.
I mounted the minis to round bases with Blu Tack, for the easier handling.
I wanted to apply some kind of an urban camo pattern on them with different shades of grey, but a shocking amount of time was spent with fixing the broken and the vulnerable parts, and the challenges with degreasing also caused some delays. By the time, everything was ready to be painted, I simply did not have enough time left for that and I had to rethink the process. The revised idea was a classic military green armour over grey uniforms and beige webbings. I wanted to use a limited palette, without extreme highlights to keep things as simple as possible.
With the exception of the heads and the shield, I applied a black basecoat. The reason for this is that I can paint skin tones better over a lighter base and I also wanted to use brighter colours on the heads as spot colours: red, yellow and blue.
I used GW Waagh Flesh for the armour, Vallejo’s Neutral and Darks Greys for the uniforms and the straps, German Camo Beige for the webbings and Gunmetal Grey for the exoskeleton. I have washed the webbings with Agrax Eartshade and everything else with Nuln Oil.
I wanted the heads and the shield to be the focal points and used colour washes and multiple layers of highlights. I used masking tapes on the shield for the white chevron pattern and added a skull decal. When I had everything painted, I assembled the minis, and I was really happy with the result.
The next step was building a scenic base. I imagined an urban environment with some rubble and mud. I tried bases of different sizes and shapes and picked a relatively small, rectangular one. The Gatling gun and the riot shield created a powerful composition. I used cardboard for the concrete slabs, Stirland mud for the soil and I also added a resin pile of junk that I bought at SELWG 2019.
Colour coated 
Washed 
Highlighted
Once I painted, washed and highlighted the base, I was ready to fasten the figures to their final positions. Instead of simply gluing them to the base, I carefully drilled into the legs and through the bases and applied glue, with adding a wire that went through the base.
With this, I finally reached the last step: varnishing. I used GW’s Lahmian Medium for most of the surfaces and Vallejo’s Metal Varnish for the weapons. The latter one worked well, the metallic surfaces looked nice, but the rest was a bit of a shock: the contrasts were massively reduced! It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the result I aimed at. Unfortunately at this stage, I had only one day left and I realised that any attempt to quickly fix this would probably have only made things worse.
I padded an ice cream tub with sponges to protect the minis during the flight and hoped that they survive the trip. Luckily, the minis made it without any damage, but the most important thing was that my brother liked them!
What did I learn from this? Well, there is a time and place for varnishing and this definitely wasn’t that. Maybe I should varnish only the tabletop minis I use for my games and leave the showcase ones alone after finishing the highlights.