Infinity Spring Cleaning

Nothing much new on these fine folks except the tentacles coming off their noggins. For these I used the same system as I did for the tentacles on the bases (you can find it more in depth below). A successive highlight of the colors in the picture (though the lightest I didn’t put on pure but in a 50% mix with the next one down) and then a final wash with amethyst.

I’m quite pleased with how these turned out. I didn’t use my usual rattle can varnish this time but rather pumped some Vallejo Mecha Matte through my airbrush and that’s what I’ll be using from here on out. Goes on quickly and is nice and matte indeed.

These ended up being a bit more grey in the armor than black by the time I finished highlighting them up but truth is I’m quite pleased with the look. And as this little beasties start to come to life A) I’m increasingly fond of the combined army and B) I’m getting increasing excited to play Defiance.

I’m currently finishing up an Imperial Assault campaign and quite enjoying it. Having read through the Defiance rulebook there are certainly some similarities to the mechanics so the learning curve shouldn’t be too steep. Of course, that may well be true of most dungeon crawly coop games. Regardless, I’m really looking forward to getting to play this–though admittedly I still have some way to go on getting everything painted up. 10 down (I finished the seed soldiers tonight too. Pics to come soon.), 18 Combined Army to go. And then the heroes. So yeah, a good bit. But it’s coming together!

So this turned out to be a double post due to the mysterious workings of Cloudflare. I will just say that I’ve gotten into the habit of copying any text I write in an entry before I hit submit in case I get the dreaded failure message.

I guess this is a chance to talk about highlighting the black on all these guys. I basically just add in a bit of ivory in increasing amounts for successive highlights. Then a final highlight on all the edges with pure ivory. It really makes them come alive.

Hit a bit of a funk/lull on these but now I’m back at it.

So that’s 6 of 36 Combined Army for Defiance. Now for the seed soldiers.

It took me until the last instant to realize that the ones that come with the game have visors on. I was trying to figure out why they had such different skill structures. Not my brightest moment.

Also, I’m not sure how we are supposed to track damage, etc. for units within a squad (the rings that come in the game work to distinguish between squads) so I’ve taken to painting dots for each squad that will work if there is no built in method.

It took me quite awhile but most everything now has a base coat of black where black needs to be. Next up: highlighting the black. Though before that I actually need to back up and do red on three Nox—the duplication of sculpts was bothering me until I realized I had three different sculpts from the Operation Wildfire box. I still don’t understand why CB didn’t just put those sculpts in Defiance. It doesn’t seem like it would have cost them any extra time, energy, money, or resources but what do I know. I still will have duplicate sculpts for the taigha beasts but for some reason that doesn’t bother me at all.

Still a long way to go—batch painting always seems to take forever until suddenly 25 minis are all done right at the same time.

So I got distracted from my main project of getting Defiance all painted up. These scatter pieces just arrived from Warsenal and I couldn’t resist putting them together and painting them up.

I love the little pods–it’s nice to have round shapes on an otherwise angular playing space. I had fun playing around with the airbrush.

The barrels on the other hand…they’re a really nice little kit. I just had to discover that aggressively sanding MDF is not a good idea. Unless, that is, you want the end product to look furry. Oh well. From any reasonable distance the fur isn’t quite as noticeable.

My Acid House terrain box came in today (I’m really really pleased with it) and I figured it’d be a nice chance to show it off and get some better pics of my test models.

I may be missing a few steps with the pics in the gallery but the process was (all paints Vallejo):

• base with 70.815 Basic Skin Tone
• washes with 70.859 Black Red until pretty well covered (but not uniformly as that would defeat the purpose)
• washes with 72.011 Gory Red until well covered but not uniformly
• Add a bit of 70.845 Sunny Skin to Gory red and highlight
• add a bit more Sunny Skin and do another careful highlight, focusing on the edges
• edge highlight with pure Sunny Skin

This is the first time I’ve used washes this extensively. I was more than a little surprised at the effect. I’ll definitely be using them more than I have been as I mainly relied upon them to as a final stage to unify things/smooth my transitions.