Having finished up my first Relicblade figure, I knew I wanted a thematic force. Relicblade has a very open and flexible list building system that is more like making an RPG party of disparate adventurers of similar alignment. I didn’t really want to go that route so I eschewed the path of buying a single faction and picked out my force individually. More precisely, I made my own cohesive faction up of only gnomes.
Relicblade is mostly a one man shop: Artist/Designer Sean Sutter has a studio, Metal King Studio, and publishes Relicblade under that label. He is the artist, sculptor, and game designer for all of Relicblade. He is also the manufacturer and seller of the product as well. It is refreshing to see such a well-oiled machine being run by one talented individual. Given this, I wanted to make sure I patronized him directly and so I went to his site to pick up my gnomes and the rulebook and other necessary paraphernalia.
One nice boon to buying a rulebook from Metal King Studio directly is the personal touch Sean adds. The image above is a freehand art signing he does with a lot of his physical rulebook orders. I assume he tries to match the art he makes to what you bought and this drives a nice connection between him and the consumer. It was great to see when I opened the book up for the first time and really set the tone on the direction I wanted to go.
As you may be able to tell from the illustration, I picked up a fighter, gunner, and mage. The fighter, a Gnome Battlesmith, is the foot version of the Gnome Mountaineer that I painted up earlier. Since he had an open helmet, I spent some time on his face, eyes, and beard to get them set.
Using the same scheme as my Mountaineer, I painted him up simply and added more cork basing for consistency.
The Gunner is actually Teklin Eldenfoord, renown gnomish grenadier.
There are two gnome grenadiers but Teklin has the beard and I want my group to be all beardy-like. Again I start with the face and skin to get the tones right and then run a simple color scheme.
The high rock base was part of the actual sculpt so I just scarred up some green stuff for basing and added a few little cork rocks for consistency. Obviously, a theme developed here and lead Friend Colton to refer to my team as the Gnomes of Greyrock. With a great name and theme, my band was born.
With my first three gnomes set, I just had one to go, the mage.
He is a bit more complicated so I’ll tackle him in the next post.