Filling the corners

 Life has got me stranded among the usual thousand ongoing projects, job issues and family, so just the usual stuff! However I'm afraid I have slowed down my output recently. I was hoping I could show much more today, but any little progress is still progress, so here I am!

Last time I talked about my board it looked this way...

This project never ends!

You can see down left there's an ugly empty space, taking shape between the foamboard and the wooden box. Of course I will not suffer empty spaces on my board!

After doing rough caves, I fancied something different, something more picturesque...

I won't blame you if you don't know what the hell is going on here

No, a swimming pool is too much, even for me

Oh. Was that unexpected enough?

Does it begin to make any sense at all?

So that's it, I'm building a refreshing corner inside the cave. I just painted it all but the doors, in the hope that it will work at first sight.

I don't need it to be perfect. I don't even need it to be good!

I simply have to create the illusion

The place is built in a similar fashion to another tiny corner I had previously done, the tea room place at the end of the first slope (you can see it on this post). For the entrance I chose not to build a raw stone cave, but an arch in the same way I had done before at the entrance of the town (check the first pic in the post):

Kind of tricky thing to do!

I hope it all looks more or less natural at table distance. However, I thought I could still add something.

So I made this plant out of paper and a broken ballpen piece

Now the corner looks cozier and fresh!

I also added some more stuff on the board, but it has nothing to do with this corner. I got these antennae from Miniature Scenery:

Pretty straightforward to assemble

In the end, after the usual white priming and dirty weathering, they look like this:

Now that I see the pic, I want to sculpt a nest on top of one of them

I also built this antennae thingie out of varied trash:

Looks awful, doesn't it?

Once painted it looks even less reliable!

I am using them to fill strategic places which were too empty:

In fact I had wanted to build this piece almost since the beginning of the project!

My other option here was a lanfing platform. This looked more feasible

This is it for today. I have plans for the next stage, but they require quite a lot of work, as I'm afraid I'll have to build different elements at the same time, because they will be interacting with each other. For now I'll leave you with the foamboard piece I just cut and that will serve as the floor for the next expansion.

This thing is growing even crazier than I ever expected

I still have a lot of sketches and numbers to do, but I have a general idea of what I want it to look like.

More to come!

A jump into the infinity

 The day has arrived! After many years I've dared to dive into Infinity [you may insert a scared emoji at will]. I played Aristeia earlier this year, and I totally got the itch for the Infinity universe.

A pal of mine got the Code One: Operation Kaldstrom box, and he commissioned me to paint it. The challenge was highly motivating, as I had been toying myself with the idea of getting into the game for long. I guess there's no point in highlighting the obvious, as everybody knows by now, but... Oh, the minis! The minis!

They really are like nothing I had painted before. The whole design itself, the proportions (oh, why are those heads so small? Why are those hands so tiny? How come the guns fit into those hands??), the level of detail... It's everything about them.

The core box comes with two forces, Panoceania (galactic superpower) and Yu Jing (upcoming fierce rival). I decided to paint Panoceania first, just to get acquainted with the models.

Just seven of them. This can't be that complicated, right?

Oh my. I truly had to reinvent myself as a painter. I'm sooo used to Games Workshop, and specially to old models, that these were a totally unknown challenge to me!

First thing was to find out the correct proportions for colours on my mix. I came to this basic combo:

Crude colours, just to get my mind oriented to the final result

The minis asked for proper highlights, and it took some time for me to get them right, but in the end I was happy with the general direction of this thing:

Seriously, this guy is pure GI JOE. Change my mind

After endless trial-and-error days, I finally declared myself satisfied. This is how they were going to look like:

I finally found an use for that 00 brush!

I gave little concession to metals on the weapons. I knew I didn't want them to look like WH40K bolters, with a lot of bare metal everywhere (in fact my first instinct was to leave them totally black), but in the end I painted the magazines, barrels and so in metallics.

There are more hours involved here than those the pic suggests

Operation Kaldstrom is supposed to take place in a winter environment, so the bases should be covered in snow. However, my pal told me he didn't planned that, but urban bases, just to match his boards. Then I had to face a particular issue. This mini came with a metal piece for the base, which clearly represents open, irregular field.

Don't know what it is, but it doesn't look specially urban

So I had to improvise a solution:

No, I don't have a clue of how that beam ended there, or why. It simply exists

BTW, a pic of the cloak, to show the Templar cross (I'm currently not sure if that's accurate, please any background expert can tell? I've just read it's the Order of the Hospital?)

Still need to read everything about their fluff

But well, I think this covers pretty much all I did here. Let me show pics of the finished models:

Fusiliers

Orc troop (not a Greenskin at all) and Nokken (SpecOps guys)

Knight of Justice and Infirmarer

Here you have them all:

I may still add some detail to the bases. Rubble or stuff. But for now this is it. Quite an experience! I'll breathe some air before I start the Yu Jing guys, but I don't want them to stay on the bench for long...