Malifaux: All my prize winning Swamp Fiends

I took the Swamp Fiend's to a tournament in Sheffield last weekend (32 players).  Gaming-wise I did terribly, with 2 draws and a loss.  Painting-wise I did excellently and managed somehow to win Best Painted Crew!  I didn't get a picture at the event, but here's the full lot:

I was absolutely amazed and delighted to win!

Malifaux: Swamp Fiends!

Apologies for the sizing of the pictures in the post.  Turns out the Blogger iPad app is gash.  Click on the photo for a full view.

Ahead of a tournament this weekend, I've finally got all my Swamp Fiends done.  I've now got one of every Swamp Fiend model in the game, with the exception of Wild Boars since they don't look like they'll work that well with Zoraida (might be a future crew though...).

First up, Waldgeist:

No prizes for guessing the origin of these.  I don't have a problem with the current Wyrd Waldgeist, it's just it looks naff all like the card.  The foliage is from Army Painter/Mininatur and is called poison ivy but you can see if works quite nicely as generic leaves.

Next on the table was the Spawn Mother:

This was a great model to paint.  The base was a bit of a challenge as it's very flat given it's supposed to be water, plus I had to try and get it to look OK with all my other bases in the crew with going over board on the green colour.  I went for a kind of blue green in the end.  If you're painting one of these, then learn from my mistake and paint the base separately to the model.  Getting all the babies painted without messing up the Mum was a pain.

The Spawn Mother of course needs some Gupps:

Gupps come three to a blister so I stretched mine out by putting two per base and I think it looks OK with the extra bits of detail I added to the base.  I made some spawn egg markers as well but they're a bit rubbish.

So that finished all my Neverborn Swamp Fiends:

I'm happy with how they turned out and the basing scheme I chose for them.

But, now I needed some Gremlin Swamp Fiends.  Next was a quick paint job of some Bayou Gators:

I managed to find a shade of green I hadn't already used!  These guys are from Titan Forge Miniatures.  They're resin and cost me about £3.50 a piece from Element Games.  They are fairly substantial though (those are 40mm bases) so I'm looking forward to seeing how the official Wyrd ones eventually turn out.

McTavish was next up.  I don't really like the official model so I went with a proxy:

This is Fon the hunter from Tale of War.  I can't believe that they didn't design this as a McTavish proxy, he's that perfect for it.  This was a great model to paint.  With a weapon swap you could also make this guy into a pretty convincing Johan as well since the Gator is a separate piece.

McTavish is on a 50mm base and this model is not actually that big so I bulked out a base with a bit of scenic base work.  It look good, but it's really nothing special.  The bulk of it is a scrap of insulation foam I shaped with my fingers.  Beyond that I added a piece of slate, sand, stones and half a barrel from an GW Ogre model.  Once painted I added the reeds (old paint brush bristles), tufts (Army Painter) and bits of flock.  Looks pretty good I think.

For all my bases I have used Vallejo still water effects.  It's really good stuff, I'd recommend it highly (I used it before on my Hamelin crew) and I've even used it to make large ponds.  For pretty much all the bases here, after I poured the water effect I stirred green ink into it to give the swirl effect.

The crew is going to be in action this weekend at Rumble under Gaslight 2 at The Outpost in Sheffield.

Malifaux: Zoraida Crew, Mr Graves and Mr Tannen

During a pre-Vappa lull, I managed to get some more Neverborn models finished off.  I was keen to get these ones sorted as at Vappa I put my rulebooks, card, fate deck and a few models out on a table so that I could talk to people who were passing about the game (always henching).  I used my Lynch and Zoraida crew along with my Nightmare Teddy to show to people the kind of models in the game.

Anyway, here's the completed crew for Zoraida:

I'm happy with how these turned out.  For the Silurids, I wanted to try and make them look like green poison arrow frogs which I saw at an aquarium a few weeks ago.  It's not quite how I thought they'd turn out but I'm fairly happy with them.

I've been playing Zoraida exclusively for the past few weeks and I'm still getting to grips with what she can do.  There's alot of things she can do so I'm still finding when and where to best apply here abilities.

The other model I wanted to get done was Mr Tannen.  I finished Graves a few weeks ago, so I got Tannen done to go with him:

I'm looking forward to giving these two a try out in wave 2.  I'll try them with Zoraida of course since she can pretty much work with any crew.

Vappafaux 2014 Best Painted Crews

The standard of painting at Vappafaux very, very high and almost every crew picked up at least one vote.  Players were asked to choose their top three favourites in order.

I tried to grab pictures of every crew which you can see below.  Some of the pictures don't really do the crews justice as I was grabbing them on my phone while doing a million other things.

This one finished in third place:

This was the winning crew.  The photos don't do it justice, there was some amazing freehand on the back of each model:

And finally this was the second placed crew:

Malifaux: Nightmare Edition Teddy

I've been a bit lax with blog posts as I've been prepping for Vappafaux this weekend, but I have got my entry for this months Tyrants of Painting contest which is being run by the Malibros.  Basically it's a themed motivational challenge each month with this months theme being "Heavy Hitters".

I got my Nightmare Teddy in the Black Friday sale so I thought I'd build him and get him done for this contest as he not a hugely detailed model so I knew I could get him done quite quickly.

I pinned the head and arm (arm required some gap filling after I cocked up the pinning), but the claws were a right pain.  Every claw on his feet and left hand is a separate piece and so some judicious use of Zipkicker was required to get them in place.  After filling and priming he was ready for the base coat:

The panda theme I stole from Mike3838 like all my best ideas.  Base coat was a a light khaki for the white and dark blue for the black parts.  This is the stage that actually took longest in the end.

Next up the white got a wash of sepia ink, then brown ink in the darkest parts.  All the fur was then highlighted with lighter versions of the base coat.  I decided to hand paint the highlights rather than drybrushing (my usual go to method for painting fur) to give a better finish which I think it has.  Here's the finished entry:

The newspaper was fun to do.  I outlined the method for doing it in a previous blog post only this time I managed to find a customizable newspaper template online, in fact it was a PowerPoint slide that I just changed the text on:

Just adds a cool little detail to the model.

The #MFXTOP voting starts tomorrow (28th) so why not head over to twitter to vote and check out the entries on the Malibros blog.

Basing: Newspaper

This is something I've tried out yesterday on my new Mr Graves:

Looks pretty good I think and it couldn't have taken me less time.

Like all my good ideas, I nicked it from someone else, namely an entry in Wyrd's recent Rotten Harvest contest of a Zombicide Female Walker by Wren (you can see it here in fact).  I thought it would add a bit of extra interest to the street basing.

This was really easy to do:
1 - I did a google image search for old newspaper headlines and picked a suitable looking one.  Obviously avoid the ones that look too modern or say something like "Elvis is Dead" on them.  Mine says "Giant warehouse fire ravages city street" on it.
2 - Copied the image and pasted it into Word, then reduce it in size down to something suitable.  I wasn't sure on the exact size so I did three or four copies of it at different sizes.  Then I printed it out on the cheap printer paper we have at home.  This means the final result is not too thick.
3 - Cut out the one you want a position it on the base which I had already painted.  Crinkle it up as required, but be careful not to show the non-printed side.  I used super glue to attach it.
4 - I gave it a light coat of PVA here to strengthen it but I'm not sure that is really required.
5 - Finally a light wash of Gryphonne Sepia, particularly in the folds and you're done.

Really easy, took me about 5 minutes and it looks pretty good.

Here's a rubbish photo of the final Mr Graves that I took on my phone:

Terrain: Renedra American Church Kit Review

Following on from my previous post about my graveyard terrain set, the main piece on that board is going to be a church.  The building I will be using is by Renedra:

It suitable for all times periods from 1750 onwards it says on the box so it fits in well with Malifaux (which is set in 1902).  The cost of the item is around £18.  The box contains the sprues only, with the build instructions on the back of the box:

Inside we get 5 sprues.  The first three are the church itself:

The top and left sprues in the picture are identical, being the two sides of the church.  The sprue at the bottom is the front part of the building.  The details on the outside is nice.  The reverse of the pieces in smooth so don't expect a hugely detailed interior section.  There's also a couple of gravestones included on the sprue.

Also in the box are two sprues of picket fencing (100cm worth according to the box):

That's a nice added bonus and can easily be used to make a enclosed space next to the church or mounted separately.

Building the church was very simple, I managed to put it together in about 45 minutes.  There's very minimal mould lines throughout so the cleanup was simple.  The only part you need to pay attention to is putting the bell into place before spire floor.  This is clearly shown on the box.

The crow is taken from the Renedra Graveyard kit I talked about in a previous post.

I based the model on a couple of 5mm foam core pieces, the bottom one larger than the upper one then stuck them on a hardboard base which gives the model a little bit more height.  Groundwork was built up with DAS modelling clay, gravel and sand:

The paint job was pretty easy, the weatherboarding was just drybrushed khaki and then a lighter blend of khaki and then any wood picked out in brown:

Overall I like this kit very much.  It makes an excellent centre piece for the table and it was easy to build and paint.  The scale is a tiny bit off for Malifaux, maybe a couple of millimetres too small but it still works fine for what I want.

Terrain: Renedra Grave Stones Kit Review

I'm going to be running the Malifaux tournament at Vapnartak this year (the one that I fluked my way to winning last year) and so I'm building terrain.  Lots of terrain...

One of the boards I'm doing is going to be a graveyard board.  The centre piece will be a church which I will talk about in a future post.  Naturally, there will also be alot of gravestones required for this.  I toyed around with making some but I wanted them look decent so I went for buying some.

I settled on the gravestones set from Renedra which set me back a total of £9.50 shipped off eBay.  You can pick up the same set from elsewhere as well including Wayland Games.

They arrived pretty fast.  The packaging for these from Renedra was nothing special so I didn't bother photographing it:  it was a plastic bag with a piece of card at the top.  Inside you get two identical sprues:

I've flipped them over so the back of the sprue is on the left in the picture here.  There's a total of around 40 gravestones of various types on here and a couple of crows which are a nice finishing touch.

The detail on the front of the stones is nice, they have inscriptions, RIP that kind of thing.  The back of them is a little disappointing though.  A couple of them have some detail on the reverse (just a stone texture and a crack) but the rest of totally flat.  The backs need some work to get them to look decent.

Clean up and build-wise they were easy to do with minimal mould lines, just a few marks where they are attached to the sprue.  I took a knife and file to the back of mine to add some texture to the reverse of them and also added some patches of sand which I painted up to look like lichen.

I've based mine in small groups on MDF board and built up the groundwork around them with air drying modelling clay:

The bases were then textured with some basic sand and gravel to add some interest to them.  I glued some small patches of rocks (a mixture of model railway ballast and fine gravel) in patches and then added sand to the rest of the bases.

Paint jobs were very easy:  Primed with brown spray paint (Maple for Rover cars from Halfords), painted various greys for the stones mostly Vallejo's Heavy Gray with some brown/black washes applies then drybrushed:

The bases were finished off with some green flock and tufts.

Here's the graveyard master himself surveying his domain:

Overall, I really liked this kit.  They've painted up really nicely and I think they'll look good on my graveyard board.

Malifaux: Jazzed up Pandora Crew

I've got a tournament coming up which uses the "Lost Love" format:  Starter box, totem, one blister and one model to summon at 25SS.  I thought about going with Hamelin since I can summon rats.  However, I don't like Hamelin as much at smaller point sizes and the round time limits are 80 minutes which I don't think I can play him in that time.

As such I've decided (at the time of writing) to go with the Pandora box set, Primordial Magic, Coppelius and Alps as my summon.  My Alps still need painting so they're next and the Primordial Magic hasn't arrived yet.  I painted Pandora and Coppelius about a year ago, so I thought I'd get them out and spruce them up a bit:

I've just been over them and added some extra highlight layers, re-done the OSL on Pandora's Box and made Coppelius' eye a bit more gory.  I'm reasonably happy with them for now.

Game-wise, I've played a couple of games with the crew and it is pretty filthy.  Coppelius paralyzing stuff combined with Pandora triggering Mental Anguish is just nasty.

Malifaux: (Almost) Finished Hamelin Crew

Hamelin the Plagued and his crew are pretty much done now.  I've still got a couple of Stolen and 3 rats left to do when I get chance.  I entered them in the best painted competition at the last tournament a week ago in York and they were pretty well received (didn't win, but came pretty close to the top):

Hamelin himself, on his fancy base.  This is my most successful attempt at OSL as well:

Nix, complete with drool (see one of my earlier posts on how I did this):

The Obedient Wretch and Rat-Catchers.  I wasn't fond of the sculpts for the Rat-Catchers when I bought them, but they've sort of grown on me as I've painted them up:

6 Malifaux Rats.  The rats are colour coded and have corresponding colour blobs on their stat cards so I can track which is which.  Honestly, it's not that easy to keep track of them, especially when alot are dying and coming back.  There will be three more in brown of these.

The picture I took of the little girl Stolen came out blurry, but you can see her in the group picture anyway.  I'm pretty happy with her, she adds alot of character and colour to the crew.

Overall, I'm very happy with how these came out.  I think they're better overall than any other crew I've painted.  These are also the first crew I've painted from start to finish using my new Games and Gears Pro-Studio brushes which I got on Kickstarter, and also much of the paint is now Vallejo as I begin to transition further and further away from the GW paint line.

Game-wise,. I've got in around a dozen games with this crew now against lots of different crews and masters  including some power house masters like The Dreamer and Colette.  I'm still trying to get the hang of it and the complex interactions between the models so I'll post up some thoughts on how the crew plays.

On a related note, I've spent a bit of time on updating and expanding Hamelin's Pull My Finger wiki page so any comments or feedback on that would be handy.

Malifaux: Finished Hamelin the Plagued

Hamelin the Plagued surveying his horde of plagued minions:

The base is from Model Display Products.  I've used their sewer bases on all my Hamelin models, but this one is part of their Diorama Display Bases.  The base gives Hamelin extra height, like he's looking down on his horde of rats and Stolen as they surge past him.