Spawn to be wild!

30 Thursday Nov 2017

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Greetings fellows, another quick update for you this week – been chipping away at my new Eru-Kin project and have three new troops to share with you, but first up I want to share a little terrain project that I have been doing on the side. I have been wanting to do a nice bit of jungle terrain for ages now – visions of steaming alien deathworlds, bizarre prehistoric ‘lost worlds’ and psychedelic fantasy jungles are all inspirations here. Two things have motivated me to finally get my bum in gear with this – 1: my Space Frogs need a home planet, and 2: the release of a certain Frostgrave spin-off called Ghost Archipelago, (which looks like a fantastic game!).

When thinking on how best to make this happen, I thought back to Aiden’s superb jungle terrain for the Inquisitor Cynole game at BOYL 2016, and to Paul’s stunning deathworld jungle project over on Sho3box. I’m not about to question such hobby geniuses, (genii?), so I decided to trawl the interwebs for suitable low-cost aquarium plants, and picked out a few brightly coloured examples to base up:

I’ve sprinkled a liberal pinch of skullage around the place – partly to show scale, but also because we all know that skulls are cool! And no… I’m not sure where the rest of the bones are either, (best not to ask I think). I’ll be adding more to this terrain set as time goes by, but I’m quite pleased with how this little side project has started out.

 

So, on to the latest spawning for my Eru-Kin faction – I have three more basic troops to add to the mix this week. These guys share the same body as the first three that I painted up, but have different weapons & heads so they add a nice bit of interest to the group. I also wanted to try out some new skin tones, so I tested purple, blue & a khaki green:

I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out – doesn’t it all make more sense in a freaky space-jungle?? I think I’ll repeat these skin colours with the final three troops. Here they are by squad – as denoted by the loincloths, just to give you an idea of how it is all coming together, (the General has photobombed a couple of shots too):

 

Anyway, that’s yer lot for this week! I’m aiming to get the final 3 troopers finished for the next post, plus maybe some more jungle terrain… I am also looking to dip back into Fantasy & build something a wee bit special for my Undead – hopefully ticking off something for Deadcember, and Azazel’s ‘Painting Decemb-uary’ challenge along the way! Catch you all next time :-)

More Space-Frog fun, and a random piece of scenery

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

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Greetings Humans, I have a super-quick data burst for you today. I have some more Eru-Kin to share with you – three duplicates of the second of the ‘basic troop’ sculpts, with further experimentation on the same basic skin colours… Not much else to say about these guys really, as everything I said in my last post applies to these guys! Here they are:

 

And with their spawn-mates:

 

More to follow on this project, but that’s not all folks – I also did this:

Aw Yeah!! My very own wargaming Tardis!! :-)  Ok, so this started life as a toy rather than a mini, and the scale is not quite there, but it’s close enough for government work and I’m really pleased with how it came out. Here’s an underneath shot to show how the bare plastic looked before I painted it.

 

A big improvement, I hope you’ll agree! I deliberately went for a beaten up & weathered look, and I’m so glad that I did. The wood grain in the toy was a joy to pick out with a drybrush, and the windows & signage just needed a few washes to tone them down a bit. Look! It even lights up!

 

I know this seems a bit of a random thing to paint up, but there is a method to the madness… Firstly, I can see this getting dropped in to many other games in general – Frostgrave, Necromunda, Rogue Trader – either as a scenario point, (in fact, I seem to recall that there was a Rogue Trader scenario that included The Doctor… I might have to dig that out), or just as a nice piece of scatter terrain. But more importantly, the games I run with my boys were getting a bit bogged down in the fantasy setting, but this will allow us to break out & play any genre of game in the future. Robots, pulp, aliens, dinosaurs, pirates – all are possible with your very own genre-busting Tardis to ride around in… as the 10th Doctor tells us, ‘People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.’ I plan to use this as a surprise plot point in a Crimbo game with the kids – hopefully right after the Dr. Who Christmas special  :-)

Anyway, that’s all for now dudes – more Eru-Kin to follow of course, but I also need to get planning something for Deadcember as well…  ‘tis the season after all :-)

A frog in the throat

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

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Hello there! A little bit of painting to share with you all today – some troops for my new Eru-Kin project. The Eru-Kin Kickstarter provided a wealth of cool and unusual sculpts to choose from, including a batch of 4 sculpts that form what I look on as ‘core’ tactical troops, (‘Braves’ in the RT Slann background). I’ve got three of each sculpt, and decided to batch paint them one group at a time, (so the next few posts are going to be broadly similar I’m afraid). In the interests of trying to make them look a bit more individual, I have incorporated some of the old RT fluff regarding skin colour & patterning and exotic animal hides – there is some rather extreme colour experimentation along the way… I’ll be honest, there are some colour combos that don’t exactly rock my world, but hey-ho, it’s an army of space-frog-lizard-men things so who am I to judge! I’ve finished the first batch so let’s take a look:

I repeated the grey-blue armour with the odd red panel here & there, as per my test subject last week, but with different skin colours & patterning for each… I suspect that they would’ve looked much better if I had stuck with yellow flesh, (as per the test mini I did last week), but then they would have been practically identical so it’s pros & cons really. I also picked out the loin cloths in different colours & added some exotic animal print patterns – again, a call-back to the RT Slann fluff, (I suspect that the base colour of the cloth might be used to mark out different units as the army grows).

From a sculpting perspective, these guys look much less ‘Predator-esque’ than last week’s test piece… The similarities are there, but I feel like there is a different design ethic going on here… I originally had my test piece pegged in to be the General, but these latest guys are actually far more typical of the range so I may end up changing my mind on that… I suspect that the Predator dude might end up being a sniper/assassin specialist type in the final army, but we’ll worry about that further down the road. Here they are together:

 

Anyhoo, that’s it for now dudes – short and sweet today, but worry not – there is more to follow :-)