Through the looking glass

I've made some more progress on the World of Twilight stuff. Today it is turn for the character of Loranti Pargal, which was the mini that lured me into the KS in the first place ;)

But what's life without challenges? My pal also got one, so I went over the mini twice at once :)

To add some more flavour, I had a weird idea for my own mini; I'll be turning it onto my RT setting, so I can use it in combination with other minis. Well, let me explain what I mean with an image...

Slight conversions, but enough for my purposes

The mini is sweet, evocative. A merchant from afar, coming to do some bussiness. Cool. Now I was to make mirror versions of it...

Similar, yet not the same at all!

Following the general path I'm on with my pal's minis, I kept the colour splash approach...

Piñata Lizard!

While keeping a more moderate pattern for my own sci-fi merchant, I liked the way it all was turning out, so I was losing the fear to colour. For both sunshades I chose essentially the same pattern, but in different fashions. One was meant to be bright red, but for the other I thought a sakura motif would be nice:

I'm a sensitive man able to paint these too. Cool for mojitos!

I gave the sakura pink pastel parasol to the colourful one. Not only was my pal's favourite one, but also provided the right point of balance to the gaudy colour explosion. I think it works...

I'm so delicate in all my lizardness

Japanese parasol and chinese vest. Not sure if those two combine at all...

After some basic basing... ;)

Trading all sort of colourful things

Far East piñata rider

Sorry, Studio Ghibli are not doing an anime based on you

About the sci-fi one, it's just a reverse mirror exercise. It's colourful too, but not so much. But the red parasol gives the counterpoint it needs.

It's so comfy travelling the galaxy like this

Standard space fashion

Floral decorations are also galaxy standard

Why did I sculpt that particular suit and chose these colours? Well, in my mind the project involves gorgeous Barcoon Krobosh from the Colony 87 set and no less marvellous Eru-Kin guys from DieHard miniatures:

They will be painted when Wave 2 arrives, so will do them all in a row

That's the seed for a future warband, but that will come when its time arrives... For now, you can see both minis alongside:

Almost twins

Step by step I'm doing some progress. Yet more Twilight to come!

Ballads of War 1x09

We now need something to actually happen! Still more people coming in, but the plot begins to move towards some point.

So we got all the field team, we just need to meet the pilot of the ship and the navigator (I left that character for another page, to avoid too much fuss; I think you still have a lot of people right now to get acquainted with).

I guess the thing that will raise some eyebrows here is the design of the Adeptus Arbites. I owe an explanation. At that time I was toying with different colours for the Arbitrator minis and trying to give them a more classic Police-like appearance. Hence the blue and white. I eventually abandoned that idea and later on I painted all my Arbites in black (if you fancy having a look, here they are). Now I see these and I chuckle, but it looks like I thought it was a good idea back in the day. You can see I also redesigned the helmet. The classic Arbites helmet is iconic indeed, but didn't look quite functional to me, so I made up these mirror goggled helmets (you'll get the chance to see them better soon). Well, I don't think too much of it. It was an art decision that was made and that's all.

The vehicle you see there is in fact the one I built for my Arbites :D

In its original blue/white colours

Of course this being but a puny attempt of doing something in this fashion:

So you see where I took the blue and white ideas from

Now in its current state:

Paint it, black

Enough. You got the link to my full Arbites force above (or here it is again).

You'll have some Arbites action in the next few pages :)

The previous pages can be found HERE.

More coming soon!

Interlude: Roman Centurion

You need to totally change subjects from time to time. Leaving your comfort area is healthy and good in every aspect. That's what I've done this time.

I've been wanting to paint some Roman stuff for ages. I have some 28mm Legionnaires lost in some drawer (in heavy need of love from my part, sigh), but I was looking for something different, kind of a bigger mini for the shelf. Then I found a real beauty from Nocturna Models.

When assembled he will look better

72mm scale, resin. Incredible sculpt, amazing casting. It was exactly what I was looking for. Some days later I came to this:

There were some steps before, forgot to take pics

When in Rome... you know

I'm happy with the results, but extremely unsatisfied with the pics. I tried different techniques for the several textures, and I enjoyed it all pretty much.

It all looks too flat in the pics! :(

The shield took more work than expected

'Romanes eunt domus'?? How dare you!!

That Superman guy asked for my cloak. Ha, he can hold his breath

What do you mean 'Mordor'? All roads lead to Rome!

As said before, the sculpt is simply amazing. The tiny details, the way they all complement each other... It's absolutely gorgeous. I'm no expert at all, but having been through a few books and references for research, I also happen to find the mini quite historically accurate, which is also certainly something. So esentially 12/10 for Nocturna Models, I have enjoyed enormously going through this mini. A more skilled painter would make wonders out of this one, but for me this is more than enough.

Well, after this unexpected break, I'll be coming back to my regular stuff. Or irregular stuff, I know the difference no more :D

Ballads of War 1x08

Yet more characters come in! With these we have our field team complete.

If I ever were to rewrite the comic, I'd certainly introduce Vix in a different way. I mean, the moment the reader/spectator meets the girl, you can see there are (serious) issues with the boy. That tension inevitably becomes belligerent sexual tension (which is in fact a thing in scriptwriting) and it all leads to romantic interest. It's all way too a cliché. This really needs a revision.

I never wanted to do a Manic Pixie Dream Girl of her, i.e., an overbursting female whose sole function is serving as a support for the leading male character by bringing energy and adventure but little else. She was in fact envisioned as quite a complicated person with a major role in the plot. I'd change some things about her, for sure, but that only reflects how I've evolved myself about storytelling and characters.

Now, the main issue here... she's a half-Elda! :D You can imagine I got some serious criticism from 40K fans (or at least a sector of them, the ones more attached to then-current fluff). I just sent them to WD #97, specifically to the Ultramarines section in the magazine, and then asked them about that special character called Illiyan Nastase (yup, you know, GW and names... Someone at Nottingham was really a tennis fan back in the day). My point:

Before Tigurius ever existed

No more questions, your Honor. In my universe, the possibility of a half-Elda is real. Not only it's a thing in classic fantasy settings, but it was once officially sanctioned by GW. I was tried to be convinced that this aberration could be sustained no more in 40K, but I insisted (and still insist) in all those things about the galaxy being so large and that anything could happen blah blah.

Anyway, it's not an idle question, the half-Elda thing was meant to be important for my narrative. One day I'll talk about the whole plot...

The other two characters have a supporting role. I was concerned about the fact that I was introducing too many people in just 8 pages, but they were needed for the crew to be... well, a crew, not a couple of badasses. Credibility asked for a whole team, but the reader could be confused by the pouring of names and faces. I decided to attach them to a common theme so I could introduce them at a time and move on the plot. Hence the siblings thing. As I was designing them I begun to think about the minor plots and character building stuff such a relationship could offer, and I was pleased of the perspective. They were worth of further development, though for the moment I needed the story to move forward.

That will be happening in the next page, promise. Don't let the fact of having new characters to be introduced divert from the action that will begin to unfold!

PS: You can read the previous pages HERE.

Descent on a budget. Sir Alric Farrow

A new character for this side project. Sir Alric Farrow is another evil Lieutenant. As seen in the rulebook and official illustration/miniature, he is an ironclad warrior as well as a magic user. Quite a combination. My pal provided me this mini (remember, from the Reaper ranges):

The warrior and his amazing magic sword!

The conversion was simple. Rather minimal in fact. I took the shield apart (and repositioned the wrist), added a Bretonnian head (without the helmet crest, which had to be replaced with some greenstuff) and, facing the impossibility of totally recovering that sword, no matter how much boiling water I used, I eventually replaced it.

Now he reminds me of that 40K Emperor's Champion...

The paintjob couldn't be simpler too. Metals, blue garments and a puny attempt of depicting red energy glowing from the fist.

Looks like he squished strawberry chewing gum though

Given that it's a quick job I'm happy with the result. Those metallics look fun in the pic, but work fine in hand, so no sweat, another character done and I can move onto the next one, hehe.

Oh, and on the World of Twilight stuff. And the comic. And all the other projects...
Ahem.

Ballads of War 1x07

New page. Time to introduce more characters...

First thing here is that we learn something more about Brent. Looks like he's entangled in something big without having a clue of what it may be, hmmm...


But the important issue here is that we begin to recruit the team :) The character of Arbos Holdstat was something I deemed not only necessary for the development of the story, but appealing in other ways. I mean, a rogue tech-novice, had you ever seen that? :D
I simply envisioned him as a RPG player. Of course keep in mind this was 2005, way before the WH40K RPG games saw the light. I had quite an inspiration coming from the classic Lord of the Rings RPG and of course the Warhammer Fantasy RPG; the careers you could choose for your characters were absolutely delicious, they covered every corner of the fluff. Anything you could imagine was there, no matter how silly or rare. You could shape your character as you really pleased. Wow, that was great. Honestly, I haven't played the later WH40K RPG, so I don't know if that is possible (I hope it is!).


I digress. The point is that I was trying something similar here, so I came with the idea of an initiate in the science/art of 40K tech who had resigned. Maybe he begun to toy with forbidden knowledge (which, let's say it, that's a wide open category in this universe!) Maybe he was set for a lobotomy and scheduled to become a mindless Servitor, so he escaped before the sentence was executed. Then he learned to live on his own in a hostile galaxy. Half adventurer, half religious zealot (given that his religion is, of course, the Machine Cult). Maybe having a loose screw (pun intended). You know, a somehow interesting character with an unorthodox point of view about life.
These were the ideas I had behind him. Unfortunately the series never got as far as I would have liked to properly show his background story. I had a weird plot of him breaking into Necron programming on a Tomb World (you know, when Necrons were quite different from the current fluff). Maybe one day I'll explain all I had in mind, hehe.


But for the moment this is it. You can read the previous pages HERE.


Anyway, if you think this character was crazy... just wait to meet the next one!! :D :D :D

Back to Descent

Long, long time ago I painted the Descent boardgame for a friend (Here you have the Adventurers, the small creatures and two posts of the big creatures -here and here). One of the major setbacks we found is that there were a number of special characters that didn't have a mini, but just mere card tokens. Unwilling and unable to suffer such an ignominy, as expected of any gentleman, we needed a solution.

Unluckily, the only official minis for this purpose belong to an expansion that covers only certain evil characters, the Lieutenants (so not even all the minis needed, as there are also some good guys involved), and the price for those... well, let's just say that my pal was wisely reluctant to pay what it was asked for the minis.

Instead of that, he got several Reaper minis that more or less fitted in the theme. So I have a new project! They are really unexpensive (I think that the whole cost for all the minis was still under the official pack for only the evil guys) and they are the best material for conversions, hehe. The bendy plastic can be a fuss, of course, but it was little issue to me as I was going to reshape all of them.

First character will be the infamous Splig, the Goblin King. We used this orc:

Sooo, let's turn this into a Goblin

I'm not even trying to mimic the original minis, as it would be pointless. I'll give a reinterpretation based on the texts in the rulebooks and my raw materials. Regarding Splig, we only know that he is a big fat goblin who is torturing prisoners when the Adventurers arrive. A helmet is mentioned, but little else. So I had quite freedom of action.

The main issue here is that the orc looks like a warrior, not as a fat, lousy leader. But if I replaced the arms for some others not so powerful, then I could make him look fat, given that belly. So that was the solution. I used pieces from GW 'The Hobbit' not-goblins (you know, the ones I used as mutants). Specifically both arms and the head. For the helmet I used the chamber pot of the hanging scribe with the spikes from the Golin King crown. Apart from all that, I thought that a coat would reinforce the idea of being a big fish.

So I came to this

Voilà! The paintjob itself has been quite quick, I didn't want to make much more complication out of this model.

Where is my breakfast!? Where is it!?

So it starts! I'll be bringing more characters over here!