Summer win, Autumn begins

I’m delighted to announce, somewhat belatedly, that my Ajax was voted joint first place in the Data Sphere Summer Painting Challenge. Nice that voters liked what I’d done with the crazy big dude and nice to see a front page post on the website where they picked out some key features they liked on the winning minis. Congrats to ibanezmark and Kenza for their cool entries.

Check out the post here.

Now that the summer campaign has closed we’ve moved on to the autumn one, which will be about specialists in game – eg engineers, hackers, and the like. I’m taking part again as it’s nice motivation to paint my minis and have decided to do the mercenary pair of Scarface and Cordelia. Due to contest red tape I can’t just enter the engineer Cordelia Turner on her own as her brother Scarface and his big TAG are part of the legal profile and so must be entered as a pair. Like I said, it’s nice motivation to get them both painted anyway.

Here’s a work-in-progress shot of Cordelia:

Shading’s looking a bit rough in the pic but I’m really just blocking out sections and testing the colour scheme. It demonstrates a little how I paint my minis, flitting back and forth between areas, ensuring colour harmony and picking the bit I’m most motivated to paint. It’s really thanks to the wet palette that I can do this because I don’t have to remix colours every time I switch. At some point I’ll go back over and tidy or smooth things until I am ultimately satisfied with the result.

While I’m happy with the way her stripey tights have come out I’ve actually decided to repaint her legs as wearing ripped black tights, in order to push the emo theme I’ve got going on – the reason for the domino eye make-up – and also to distinguish her further from the studio paint job.

In other news, I had a couple of games of Infinity over in Camberley at the weekend where three of us got together for our own little a mini tournament. My Haqqislam Qapu Khalki list went up against Tim’s Combined Army and James’s Nomads after the two of them had played each other in a veritable Hack fest, and things went pretty swimmingly for me in both of my games.

I’d been trying to figure out how to play the Haqqislam as I’ve really struggled to get any decent results with them but the QK Sectorial list I used turned out to be very powerful with its double fireteam of Ghulam and Odalisques. I also took Scarface & Cordelia out for a spin and they put in a solid performance. In the end I won my games quite convincingly and it has led us to question how balanced the Infinity fireteam rules are – at our level of play, anyway.

Tim had put together a very pleasing table just using a Micro Art Studios game mat and the Mototronica cardboard buildings. It looked great and was a pleasure to play on, though I was shamefully playing with unpainted minis. Scandalous. However, I was so impressed by the quality of the mat, and the difference a decent ground texture/detail makes, that I am fully inspired to get on with designing my bespoke game mat to complement the Bladerunner noir terrain I’m working on.

Anyway, regardless of results, we all had a great day of gaming, with every mission playing out quite differently and loads of cool stuff happening on the tabletop.

Infinity rules.

~ by Max Von Deadlock on July 28, 2015.