Batman (the Miniature Game) Beginnings

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It's tough to say which superhero in the current twenty-first-and-a-sixth-century-pantheon-of-superheroes reigns supreme.  One thing is for certain; Batman is on the Mount Rushmore of superheroes.

Batman's resurrection with Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy has kept Bruce Wayne in popular culture while previously popular heroes have languished.

I'm looking right at you, Superman.

Catwoman, Damian Wayne Robin, and Batgirl from Knight Models' Batman Miniature Game.

For about five years now, a small Spanish company known as Knight Models has been manufacturing DC miniatures for a skirmish game set in the Batman universe.  The models are in 35mm scale, and all are cast in a white metal.

I should stop now and say that Infinity has spoiled me.

I struggled for hours with Catwoman's round face.  I never could get her face to be worthy of the sexy Selina Kyle.  In fact, I decided to just leave her without makeup in my final attempt.

As great as the Infinity models may look, all of the details on Infinity models are exaggerated to make painting easier.  I have always found it surprising that folks coming from Games Workshop games struggle to deal with the details on Infinity models.  Now I understand their pain.

Batgirl from Knight Models' Batman Miniature Game.  I love this sculpt, and a happy accident made it even more awesome.

BMG models are wonderfully detailed.  Look at Catwoman's suit, it has two textures.  The underside of Batgirl's cape has a very subtle texture intentionally applied to it in order to help the cape have more sheen.

But all of the details are shallow.

Damian Wayne.  The least popular version of Robin.  Still, this is a wonderful job by a superb sculpter capturing so much of his character.

These are not models you rush.  Too thick of a base coat and the details are gone.

And now I feel spoiled by Corvus Belli's line.  Even when the Infinity line is considered difficult to paint, the details on BMG sculpts are so tiny that they're easy to lose.

That's not to say that the BMG figures aren't fun to paint.  Quite the opposite.  It's an exquisite experience having so much character emerge as you paint them, something that Corvus Belli's sculpts often lack.

These three models took about a week from assembly to completion, and I'm excited to dive into more.

The Monthly Best

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There's more to miniature painting that simply completing forces. 

... Duh.  

Sometimes when you get in a groove, you wind up in a rut. That's where I was stuck after painting forty Anglo-Saxon and Viking Warriors in five weeks. Burnout was on the horizon, and the easy way to stop a fire is to stop putting wood into it. 

A break was needed. Something different. Something without cloth or chainmail. Science fiction would do the trick, so Drakios and Hector from Infinity were chosen after an intense hunger games competition between toy soldiers.  Okay, really just a hunger games for my head, and my heart.

The Tinbot, Hector, and Drakios from the Steel Phalanx of Infinity.  

Determined to reverse the burnout from painting that many little soldiers to a low standard, Hector was volunteered as the model to receive the best paint job. The shift from focusing on speed to giving myself as much time as I wanted to finish helped reverse the burnout and motivate me to pick up the brush again. Nearly twelve hours later, triple the average Infinity model paint time, Hector was ready to put his chubby face on display to the world.  

Looking down Hector's revolver.

The ultimate intent of doing a model to the best of your ability each month is simple: deliberate practice.  

Hector showing off his back side.  I think this is the best view of the model, but that has more to do with the color choices that are obvious from this angle.  Had I chosen a better color scheme, the model would be much more interesting.

On Hector, the focus was smooth blending and a stronger Zenithal highlight. The result is good, but in the end doesn't quite fit the model. I think he would have turned out more interesting if I had simply done diffuse lighting, making everything pop.

The turn of this post is that even painting models as quickly as possible can be deliberate practice with a little thought applied to the process. For example, these wolf pelts that I recently painted on a few Berserkers. 

Saga Berserkers parading their wolf pelts. Thankfully, the animal rights group hasn't found Saga or Vikings yet...

Saga Berserkers parading their wolf pelts. Thankfully, the animal rights group hasn't found Saga or Vikings yet...

The pelts were an easy combination of  dry brushing and applying washes. The focus was painting them quickly, but some before and after thoughts on them, as well as feedback from the experts at my FLGS, help turn it into something more than just painting quickly. Those extra efforts and thoughts are the key to improving.

This post was originally intended to emphasize the value of painting a model a month to the best of your ability. It is a good idea, and will help you improve your painting. Instead, I would rather exalt finding the nuance in all of your painting. It's in this nuance, and the celebration of it, that improvement lies.

A New SAGA

Vikings are the coolest.

Full stop. There is nothing more awesome than bearded dudes angrily destroying everything in their path.

Go back a month, and you'll find me drooling over this amazing picture of SAGA Vikings from Gripping Beast. Turns out, the rules behind SAGA are surprisingly cool for an "old man's" historical game. (Yes, the therapy has not yet helped me accept that I am an old man.)

I got hooked.  

My FLGS had a few Gripping Beast army packs in stock. They also had a cool Black Friday sale that involved rolling a D20. As an ALEPH player, I dutifully rolled a 13 (either a crit, or more to my luck, a miss by 1) and went home happy with 13% off my order of a plastic Saxon Thegns box and a 4 point Crusader starter army.

Most of the first group of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Danish warriors.  In total, I painted 30 miniatures in a little over 3 weeks, a personal best.

The Saxon box was cracked open first. While these are technically my second line of plastic miniatures ever assembled, I gave up on Malifaux after assembling the first Crew box. Screw you, Electrical Creation... 

The most important part of assembly was figuring out what army I was actually building. I settled on building 31 Anglo-Saxons and 13 Scots. A box of Gripping Beast Plastic Dark Age Soldiers will flesh out both warbands.

Three days of glue later, all 43/44 models in the box were built and primed... Because I forgot to glue one of them to their base.

The Hearthguard models practice prior to the big battle.

The recipe that I am using for the chainmail armor is simple. Start with a drybrush of Reaper's Blackened Steel, then do two highlighting drybrush sweeps of Lead Belcher and Runefang Steel. It looks pretty good, and I am able to get through a group of 8 in about 20 minutes.

The tunics on these guys are super-basic. I am just base coating them and hitting with a wash. For the next batch, I want to be a bit more selective on the wash to clean them up and save some time.

RelicBlade Project Wrap

When I saw the first few RelicBlade minis on Ash Barker's weekly painting recap, I thought they looked cool.

Current RelicBlade Lineup. L to R: Cave Bear, Wild Elf Druid, Thief, Cleric of Justice, Questing Knight, Relic, Dark Wanderer, Dark Watcher, Pig Men Horde.

After painting my first set, I have confirmed my hypothesis. 

My favorite sculpt of the box was, to my surprise, the Druid. The sculpt was clean, and little details kept popping up as I painted. She was a joy. In fact, she's the only figure on the box that I do not have a vision for the next paint. 

Advocates from RelicBlade. L to R: Spirit Hammer, Cleric of Justice, Wild Elf Druid, Thief, Cave Bear, Questing Knight

The sculpt I thought I would like most was the Questing Knight. I did enjoy painting him, and like how he turned out.

I definitely have ideas for the next version. I think the sculpt has an air of tiredness to it, and I want to paint him as a seasoned adventurer wearing a hodgepodge of equipment.

Dark Wanderer and Dark Watcher from RelicBlade.  A very beginner-friendly sculpt that was fun to paint.

Dark Wanderer and Dark Watcher from RelicBlade.  A very beginner-friendly sculpt that was fun to paint.

Some other highlights were the Dark Watcher and Dark Wanderer. They are featured in the coming Bone and Darkness kickstarter, but I picked up 3 of them I the original Kickstarter. 

For the third, I want to paint him more like Sauron. Dark, sinister armor with red glow in spots, and a bone white skull. I am excited to get back to this version.

The Cleric of Justice is another highlight. I still think I am bad at NMM, but I love how the NMM gold turned out on her.  

The next iteration of the Cleric I want to paint is a red dragon with a flame spirit weapon. I think she'll turn out awesome. 

The Pig Men of the Adversary from Relic Blade.

Probably my least favorite sculpt was the Thief. Unfortunately, she had a mould line running awkwardly over her face that negatively impacted the model. Faces are the most important part of miniatures to me, and the fact that I had to struggle to get her face close to where I wanted it was disappointing. 

RelicBlade was a good 3 weeks of painting joy. I experimented with airbrushing on the Pig Men to great result. I still have 4 Adversaries (bad guys) and 5 Advocates (good guys) to paint before I am at 100%, but now it is time to play!

Track Your Minis

I once overheard the following at my friendly local game store:

If you do not have a collection of unpainted and unassembled miniatures in your closet equal to your weight, then you do not actually like miniatures.   

It was a joke. A bad one, but a joke regardless. 

And the joke applied to me.  

When I was on travel in LA and desperately searching for any SAGA content at all, I stumbled across the Wisco Horndog's YouTube channel. It is a bit bro-dacious, but he is actually a skilled (if unorthodox) painter.

One of his channel's features is the 100% Painted Challenge. This instantly forced a very basic question in my own head: 

What percentage of minis I purchased have I completed?   

The answer? Not nearly enough...  

When I did my initial cut of painted, and just looking at "war games", not board games like Zombicide or Imperial Assault, I was at 406 minis with 18.97% painted. If you estimate that I have spent $100/month on minis since I got into miniatures a more than a year ago, that's at least $1000 of unpainted toy soldiers. Probably more, but therapy hasn't helped me accept that yet.

This picture represents about 150 miniatures from 5 game lines... There's more scattered throughout the basement...

Disheartening. 

I decided to come up with this rule, Old English-icized so that it has some kind of holy power: 

Thou shalt not purchaseth a new miniature of a line that thou ownest until thou hast reached 50% painted.

Yeah... There's holes larger than a Kardashians recently puffed lips in it, but it is a starting point!

Most of the current wargaming miniatures I have painted.  I'm strategically not including board game minis, like Imperial Assault and Zombicide.  It would be too depressing...

I would argue that having this kind of rule, and empirical data to check it against, is a good thing. It kept my wallet safe through the Black Friday.

The other impact it has had is that it helped me prioritize what I paint and what level I want to paint to. After generating the list, I assigned emotional weight to each of the miniature lines. Higher emotional weights were both high priority, and will be painted to a higher standard. Lower weights I can now accept at a lower quality just to help them get done. 

So, if you are like me, and instantly rush out to buy any model you need (okay, want) regardless of the queue on your desk, then I would encourage you to take stock of your current miniature collection and form your own rule. Maybe, like others, you feel compelled to get your overall painted count up to some threshold. Perhaps you need some purchasing control.

Taking some time to inventory your collection so that you can make better decisions with your wallet and your time is a good thing!