Preparatory Actions

This week hasn’t been an exciting week as I’ve been toiling with the starts of some projects that mainly include a lot of priming with the airbrush. I’ve really hit my stride with airbrush priming as my process is down to where it is easy and quick without the hassle of needing the weather or temperature to cooperate. The smells are also nicely cut down as well.

The zombear is coming along now that the greenstuff is fully cured. I’ll get back to him in a minute but first we’ll check out some little brown men.

These little guys are not Jawas but monks from Joan of Arc: Ars Nova expansion. Joan of Arc is a beast of a game but I’m going to try and take my time with it and slowly build out the collection. I decided I wanted to start with the Ars Nova expansion as it seemed very different from the rest of the system.

These monks are plentiful but should paint up quick with the base coat brown already done with the primer. Some small details, a wash, and some drybrushing should knock them out quickly and then I’ll try out the solo/co-op scenario.

Back to Frostgrave and my Zombear, he’s coming along.

My sculpting didn’t turn out too terrible (though he kind of looks like bear/manatee hybrid). A bit of paint should get rid of the perception though.

I’ll also be working up this odd little construct from Privateer Press’ Hordes line.

I’ve had figures from the Circle of Orboros faction for a long time now and played a little back in the day. I never was able to work through what I owned so Frostgrave has given me the opportunity to pull out some of these older models and give them a new home.

This is his big brother that I finished up a few months back. This will allow for both small and medium-sized constructs.

I also picked up this old Reaper Bones model. This was back when their quality was really cheap with very soft plastic. This will paint up quick and easy as a statue lie hidden deep in Felstad. A wash and some dry brushing and this guy will be done easily.

Lastly, I pulled out the crappy samurai sprues from Test of Honour. I have this one from the Ronin set and I’m going to see if I can make something out of these.

I can’t understate how poor the ratio is in regards to the effort to put these together and the actual finished figure. If you had a lot of them together, they probably would be fine in a mass battle situation but putting them all together would take forever. Still there may be some potential here and I’m going to try to find it.

For inspiration, I’m starting with this Ronin Brute art. The pose is pretty simple and the armor isn’t too extravagant for the kit.

You can dry-fit a lot of the minis parts and the big items like arms and legs have some solid keyholes. This also limits things as the legs are not usually able to mix and match so you get what you get as a pair. The arms can mix though so that is giving me a pretty good approximation of the figure art. The plastic on these is pretty hard so I won’t really be able to give him as wide of a stance as shown.

One drawback is I like the big oversized shoulder pad armor pieces but the sprue only comes with one set.

I decided to correct that by sculpting a mold in green stuff and letting them sit overnight to harden. The top tabs will now come off since the mold came out well. Hopefully they will fit my brute but if not, I’ll use them on some of the other models.

Lastly, I’ll need a club and since the kit doesn’t come with one, I’ll try to sculpt that too. I started with a spear and cut it to length. Then I grabbed more green stuff and wrapped it around to get it to a baseball bat shape. Once this hardens a little bit, I’ll try to detail it using an exacto knife or maybe some other figure’s texture. For now I just get to wait until it is ready.