Hell Divers Squad

Hell Divers
15 mm

Well my squad is finished, with some lovely floral bases as a bonus.  Time for some action shots...

Troopers emerge from rocky cover into a vicious firefight.

Sgt. Barnes prepares to messily dispatch two unwary Chloros.

Another day, another planet: the squad advances past a mysterious alien facility.

Hell Divers WIP, and a gift

Hell Divers are fantastic.  Really.  I'm working on another six right now and as good as the sculpts are, I think what I like most is no doubles!  I'm pretty sure that in the three packs I bought (Alpha, Bravo and Omega squads) every figure is a different sculpt, so no bending arms and cutting heads to avoid your squad looking like a chorus line.

Obviously I'm painting these to match my previous four, so lots of Ordic Olive/Okavango Swamp.

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Robot Monster (redux)
15 mm

I enjoyed painting this Khurasan figure again, this time as a birthday present for my brother.  Retro-licious!  I have to say I got a lot of use out of these packs...

First painted Hell Divers!

Crome Masters
Steel Warriors
Soul Stealers
Ripping out hearts
They're Devil Dogs
The Hell Patrol

Hell Divers - Sgt. Elias and Sgt. Barnes
15 mm

I was pretty excited to paint these figures and of course I started with a couple of the Omega Squad personalities, named by me after the better and worse angels in "Platoon".  Barnes (creeping) is as is, Elias (standing) is a basic head swap between two Omega figures.  I stuck with a classic military drab scheme, reminiscent of WW2 American uniforms, with red visors (below) giving them a sci-fi touch.

 

Hell Divers sniper team
15 mm

The Hell Divers' precision shooters can effectively eliminate key enemy personnel and even light vehicles from a safe standoff position.

Terrain, and Maligs, and Hell Divers, oh my!

Ruined City Terrain
15 mm scale

Took a while but these turned out pretty much like I imagined them in my head.  I'm glad I broke up the grey monotony with some painted/patterned surfaces, and coloured wreckage and casualties to keep it interesting.  They were probably a lot more work than most gamers would want to put into random ruins though!


Ion Age Maligs
15 mm

The violent, dirty, undisciplined greenskins of the Ion Age universe!  And dumb, so so dumb.  Dirty deeds done dirt cheap, but as usual you get what you pay for.  Want them to blow up a radar station?  Oops, they blew up your favorite radio station.

"Ay mates, three to one!  We can take 'im!"

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One more thing... Though I usually try to avoid posting "Look what I bought!", I feel ClearHorizon Miniatures' strong initial releases deserve as much promotion as possible.

Professional packaging :)

My personal favorites...

What possessed me to buy all these Hell Divers?  Oh right, they're a really nice lineup.  I think I got all the infantry packs that are currently available.  Looking forward to painting some of these!

Scatter brained

So I'm having a go at some basic scatter terrain right now.  Not my usual thing, but I figure I can use it for photo backdrops.  I'm a bit new to this so I stuck with standard foamcore "Stalingrad"-style ruins:

I do like to make things complicated, so I gussied it up with some wreckage and a few ex-combatants, molded from a Khurasan power armored trooper and Mekanoid.  This gives a satisfying half-buried look without having to saw a metal figure in half lengthwise:

Next step is to spray prime everything... I hope I sealed the foam well enough.

Recon Thing

Riflething Scout Buggy
15 mm scale

Designed for rapid reconnaissance of dense urban areas, this lightly-armoured buggy allows Riflethings to get in and out, relying on speed and good steering to avoid small arms fire.  The driver is protected by slug-resistant, laser-ablative canopy; the gunner is exposed, but packs a punch with a plasma projector whose effects on infantry are best described as "horribly demoralizing".

This was a fun stress buster in the week after baby #2 was born, the chassis painting came together surprisingly quickly, though detailing took a bit of time later.  Frankly, I tried not to sweat the clumsy brushwork too much, in the interests of finishing it quickly.  The display base is as basic as it gets... printed paper on craft plywood, just something to place it on really.

We did it!

Over a week past schedule, like so many things I have a hand in creating ;)

Need for Speed

Riflething Urban Ops Recon Buggy
15 mm scale

This vehicle started life as a Hot Wheels "Max Steel Turbo Racer" toy:

Pretty cool wheels... But I knew I could do better.  Luckily, this toy is almost exactly in-scale (judging by the driver's cockpit), and solidly futuristic-looking, so it didn't need much work.  I swapped the spindly front wheels for some from another car and added a turret (armed with a Space Marine plasma pistol) and Riflething gunner.  I don't do many vehicles to go with my figures, so this is kind of a step out for me.  We'll see how much painting gets done before the baby arrives, but I'll definitely have a go at it...

Bored? Games!

One of the things the missus and I do to avoid becoming TV zombies is try new board games.  We don't have a big budget or a games library nearby, but fortunately we have interesting friends, who have their own collections of interesting titles.  We regularly play the ever-popular Carcassonne, Zombies!!!, and Settlers of Catan, but recently we've had a chance to try a few interesting new ones:

Candamir: the First Settlers

(not my photo)

Designed by "Settlers" maker Klaus Teuber, this Norse-flavoured game revolves around resource collecting quests and building items for victory points.  Each player plays as a different character, with a few unique strengths and bonuses, so it's a little like a "canned" RPG.  During each turn you venture forth from town towards an objective square, drawing cards to see if each square you pass through allows free travel, or requires you to fight an enemy or perform a risky task to proceed.  Resources gained from quests are used to brew potions to help your character, or build items for different merchants in town, and the first player to make 10 items wins.  There's an "XP" system too so your character can buff their abilities over the course of the game (unless you suck at it, like I did).  Lots of fun, and not too hard to learn either.

Ticket to Ride

(definitely not my photo)

This is a railway building game that can require you to be pretty sneaky in plain sight of your opponents.  You collect same-coloured train car cards in your hand to build stretches of track between cities across a map of Europe and Russia (there are, of course, different geographical sets).  Each player has secret objective cards ("Destination Tickets") for long multi-track stretches that they can complete for extra points, while trying to discern their competitors' objectives and disrupt them.  At the end whoever completes the most objectives and has the longest tracks wins.  This is by far the easiest of these three games to learn, but it has some intense play mechanics and a good balance of skill and luck.

Tzolk'in: the Mayan Calendar

Holy crap.

My wife bought this for herself as a birthday gift.  Wow.  I'm pretty sure this is the most complicated board game ever made.  The board consists of six interlocking gears, based on the cyclical Mayan/Aztec calendar.  Briefly, you place and remove worker pieces on the gears, paying corn to place them and collecting benefits when you remove them.  The thing is, the gears MOVE every turn, so where you place your worker is not where they end up a few turns later. There's a "buy low, sell high" dynamic in how/when workers are placed/removed, but where the game gets really nuts is how this interacts with the temple tracks (points for pleasing the gods), technology tracks (bonuses and multipliers to boost your resources), and buildings and monuments (a bunch of other stuff).  We haven't even played a full game yet, and it took me 40 minutes just to set up the board (probably incorrectly) so I won't even pretend to say I understand it.  But it looks challenging and fun once you learn it.

Shia Khan conversions (and big news)

Garafraxian Black Guards
15 mm

The quasi-humanoid, photosynthetic Garafraxians (colloquially called "Chloros") use heavy armour to protect their fragile bodies during combat.  Their long eye stalks give them excellent depth perception and peripheral vision however, so they generally extend them out of their suits except when in immediate danger.  The suits are lined with red-LED arrays to maintain their metabolism far away from their home star's nourishing rays.

We have another baby on the way... arriving in only a few weeks now, whoa! So I expect that I'll be posting pretty sporadically for a while.  But just like last time, I'll be back, so stay tuned :)

I did want to squeeze in at least one more fun project before our due date, however.  I wasn't sure what to do with these cool Shia Khan Pioneers when I ordered them, but once I got a good look at them I knew I couldn't not convert them into something weirder.

As Chloro shock troops poured in from the docking ring, Fett found himself
in the uncomfortable position of fleeing away from his ride off the station.

Kind of a goofy B-movie look here, but I like it.  All I really did was stick in wires with drops of epoxy on the ends, and sculpt the tentacle/pincer things over their human hands.  Well within my constraints of talent, fortunately.

The Ion Age February Mini

Interstellar Envoy
15 mm

The Zin Envoy was Ion Age's limited edition mini from this February.  I'm surprised at how fast I got this mini done... by my standards at least.  Anyway it's a great figure, alas now unavailable but if you have one, have a go at it.  I really tried to glam him up, and so it was a lot of fun to paint.

The Ambassador has a stroke of luck - a Very Strange Alien appears just
as he needs to send an urgent encrypted message to the homeworld.

The Ion Age March Mini

Female Muster Officer
15 mm

"Your papers, please."

As I mentioned in my last post, Gavin at Ion Age was nice enough to comp me this month's limited edition mini when he re-sent my order.  So I figured I'd paint it up first.  I like the pose here, as you can see it reminds me of a border guard or sentry though it could be a combat hand signal too. The sentry box is from Germy.co.uk, home of a number of nice paper buildings.

As a side note, I noticed Ion Age minis are visibly larger than some other 15 mm minis I have; this one is a mm or two taller than my Khurasan SEAL team.  Probably fine to use together, though.

Thanks, Ion Age!

I ordered some Ion Age stuff at the beginning of February... it never showed up :(  Fell off the boat, I guess.  But Gavin shipped it again, and threw in March's limited edition miniature too:

I'm going to try and paint one of these up for the blog ASAP, they're pretty nice figures.

Among other fun things, I ordered a couple of "Maligs", sort of undisciplined auxilaries from the Shia Khan faction.  I love them!  They'd make GREAT not-Space-Orks:

"More dakka!"

Ain't no party like a boarding party

... 'cause a boarding party don't stop until all hostiles on the target vessel are neutralized or captured.

Cultural Collective marines and breaching drone
15 mm

"Maintain spacing!  Watch your angles!  Advance on my mark."

While life as a citizen of the Cultural Collective is generally one of fulfilling work and hedonistic leisure in a low-scarcity economy, utopia is not without consequence.  In addition to its overt and covert diplomatic interaction with other galactic powers, the CC is constantly engaged in a variety of low-level military endeavours against renegades, pirates, rebellious elements, and adjacent domains with whom it is not officially at war.
 

No citizen is compelled to serve in the CC's armed forces.  Instead, service simply appeals to a certain subset of the population who enjoy the the combination of action, violence, and relatively low personal risk due to advanced weapons and armour.  Periodic excesses may occur, but the average CC resident considers these a small price to pay for freedom and security, if they are aware of them at all.
 

I decided to keep a cool blue "authentically military" look for these guys, with only the white helmets to offset it and tie them in with the robot.  The yellow markings* on the bases (colour printed and slightly weathered with paint) help with both colour contrast and visual unity.

* The square yellow signs are tiny versions of "Autonomous Device" and "Self-Replicating System" from this interesting collection of future warning signs - good eye-candy for any industrial or military sci-fi scenery :)

Diecast Drive-by

I just made a few good finds in the grocery store while on an emergency cat food run.  Inspired by Spacejacker's amazing Hot Wheels repaints, I thought they might work as 15mm scale vehicles.  First, the "International MXT", in desert drab:

Wow!  Probably a bit off-scale, but it looks perfect next to some average minis.  This is a real military truck, but not so well-known you can't field it as a fictional one.  Detail is a bit soft, but I don't know if that's from the casting or the kid-proof paint layer.  Apparently even this durable paint can be stripped with solvents or oven cleaner, but the metal body has to be separated from the plastic frame and wheels.

Next up we have this tracked dump truck thingy.  Some greasy sci-fi potential here, for sure.  The cab is not at all big enough to be 1:100/15mm, but I still feel like something could be done with it, or at least the track portion could be used as the basis for a kit bash:

There are probably a bunch more interesting things available along these lines; I've been keeping an eye out for that cool fire engine Spacejacker used, but no luck so far...

Colour Commentary?

So I'm working on these GOTA troops from Khurasan, and while I'm generally happy with the colours I've picked and how they look on their bases, I am stuck on one thing.
 

My robot!  I don't want it to be exactly the same scheme as the troopers, and just blend in.  But I don't want to do it in a wildly contrasting or too-colourful style either because I'm trying to make them look realistically military and of the same faction.

Any suggestions, oh readers?

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Also, my Planet Tubby entry in the Titanium Dropship painting contest has finally been posted on Dropship Horizon, along with a lot of other very, very nice entries.  Check em out, if you haven't already!

Hellspawn Hero

Hellboy
15 mm

"Don't mess with me, lady. I've been drinking with skeletons!"

This miniature is released by my favourite mini company as part of a pack called "friendly demons".  Its a pretty good proxy for Mike Mignola's wisecracking demonic comic book hero.  I whipped up a couple of spectral foes for him too, using Rebel Minis' Nazi zombie pack:

"Aw crap!  Nazi ghosts?  Worst kind of ghosts!"

Now I just need a 15 mm pyrokinetic woman, amphibian man and homunculus, and maybe a plague of frogs.  Anung Un Rama...

"They Came From Planet Tubby"

Mysterious Tele-Aliens
15 mm

The origins of these strange biomechanical aliens are shrouded in mystery.  They dance and babble in childlike voices, until they suddenly disappear, only to turn up on a new world.  Strangely, they can communicate instantly with others of their kind via their abdominal view screens, and so have become a widely used faster-than-light messaging network for other species.  They have been known to alarm some human religious leaders, but are considered an extremely useful oddity by most sentients.
 

(This "squad" was my entry in the Dropship Horizon 15mm SF painting contest.  A lot goofier than my original plan, but time was tight.)

The figures above were my original plan for this contest.  Khurasan GOTA Clan riflemen with Mekanoid Melee Bots for support, on scratchbuilt starship bases.  But my KM order just arrived this week and there's no way I could have finished them nicely for the 15th.  So, Tubbies it is ;)

Jen Haley MURDERS Khurasan's Paranormal Investigators

I don't normally post about other people's paint jobs... but damn it, woman:

"Something's spooky out there Mulder, and it's Ms. Haley's brush control."

I was still am pretty proud of my paint job on this set, but yet again, Haley shows me why she's soaring with the eagles while I'm still ****ing with the ducks.

According to Jon's TMP post, Khurasan will begin selling these with a new wave of releases starting next week.

Ooh! A painting competition!

The excellent blog Dropship Horizon is holding a 15mm sci-fi painting comp.  Their post itself is pretty clear, but in a nutshell:  three categories: squad, vehicle/mech, terrain piece.  Must be sci-fi.  You can enter one entry per category.  Lots of prizes.

The comp closes in a month so, if you're me and your stock of 15mm figures is sadly depleted, time is a bit tight.  But hopefully I can pull something together and even have the time to paint it nicely.