The Hunting Pair

I am slowly but surely adding terrain to my Carnevale collection. I’ll have to make a post about that eventually, when I have a full table worth of buildings done. I’m almost there, with only needing to use a couple cardboard buildings last game.

In the meantime, I took a break to paint some miniatures instead of terrain, adding a pair of new models to my list, to hunt the opponents of the Guild: a fisherman and an arbalest. We started to play bigger games, and this will let me swap out some models in between games. I did a quick modification to the fisherman, to match his card weapons, by adding a net to his hand, made with cheese cloth, white glue and bits of green stuff for the weights.

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First foray into the Rocavivas

Now that I have enough Orphans painted for a small force, all they were missing was an opposing force. Since I initially got into the game with the Arbonte’s Menace two-player starter, I already owned the start of a Rocavivas army, which I reinforced with a faction starter back in the 2010s. I wasn’t looking at the rules when I bought them, but by a strange happenstance, both my collections come to about the same point size, so that was perfect.

The recent announcement by Zenit Miniatures that they are relaunching the game couldn’t have come at a better moment for me, as I was already invested in painting and trying the game. That also meant that I want to play it sooner than later, to know if I really like it, before they launch the upcoming Kickstarter project. That made me make the decision to try out painting the Rocavivas a bit faster than the Orphans, in a more army scale way, starting with a test unit of Kyanites.

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Dark Object

The always productive Kawe from Westfalia Miniatures has just launched a new crowdfunding project for a sombre and gritty sci-fi game, and the models that go with it: Dark Object. I had the pleasure of painting a set of the preview models for it, so let’s take a look at them!

The models were hand-sculpted by Boris Woloszyn. He’s an amazing sculptor, and do really well with dark and moody subjects like this set, but you should check his previous work with Westfalia, as there are a lot of really nice pieces from him in the catalogue. The models are cast in resin, and have sharp details. Some of the pieces are quite thin, so progress with patience in the cleaning and assembly, not to break anything.

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The army of Arbonte is Growing

Over the last month, I started working on my second Nemesis faction, the Rocavivas, as I mentioned in the last post, cleaning, assembling and priming them. However, I’m not sure yet on the colour scheme or basing, so I decided to continue painting the other Orphans I already had prepared, to keep the motivation going.

These new additions round out my small force quite well in terms of gaming diversity, and also continue the theme of having an extremely colourful warband. Luckily, the forest bases tie them up together visually.

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Delta Station

I don’t do much commission work anymore, but I was recently contacted to paint a small line of civilian sci-fi models. The project was interesting and small enough to be manageable, so I took the plunge.

The models are from Wyrm Forge, to be released in an upcoming crowdfunding project on Kickstarter. You can register to be notified of the launch. The models were hand sculpted, and they have an old school sci-fi vibe to them.  The look I was asked for was “colourful 70s sci-fi”. I made a colour montage board for it, that you can see below, and followed the mood.

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The orphans of Arbonte

Back in 2012-2013, I bought into Nemesis, by the Spanish company Zenit Miniatures. What really sold it to me was the Orphans faction, a group of unaging kids disguising themselves as insects, protecting the living forest Arbonte. I painted a single model back then, one of the Mantis, for a painting contest, but the lack of opponents, combined with other priorities, relegated them to the back of the pile.

Flash forward to last month. I was doing some digging in my pile of opportunities, to clear out and sell some projects I now know I won’t get to, or lost interest into, when I stumbled upon the box containing my Nemesis models. Being between projects, and wanting to paint something colourful, I decided to get them out again, and finally paint enough to try out the game. It just took a decade to get back to it…

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The Doctor and the Assassin

Last December, before the start of my recent painting slump, I finished the year with two new models for Carnevale, after also painting a good amount of terrain. The first was an addition to the Guild in the form of a Rialto Assassin, to add power and range to my mainly tradesmen collection.

The second model is a female Plage Doctor, a start for a small second faction. That limited edition model is such a beauty that I had ordered her at first just to paint. However, after some games, I liked the game enough to grab a starter for The Doctors to have options and maybe give demos.

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On to 2024, well, what’s left of it

Last year, I pledged to post a bit more, even if shorter posts. I managed to do so for part of the year, but after September, my hobby time slowed down, and what I did accomplish wasn’t as worthy of posting. I failed at keeping my posts short, though, so they ate up a bit more time than I really had, and making shorter ones for single pieces of terrain didn’t feel quite right.

I like to make nice photoshoot of completed projects, and while I did a bunch of small stuff, I didn’t have any bigger, meaningful ones. I’ll have to juggle between length and content again this year.

This post comes up later in the year, because of the same reason. I was in a small hobby slump since December, but that’s over now and I have a bunch of projects I want to tackle.

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People of Venice, unite under the protection of the Guild

I have been aware of Carnevale for some time, but never really put much thought into it until earlier this year. Strangely, it’s terrain that gave me the initial spark. After seeing a crowdfunding project for Venetian terrain, Waterspire, I looked back at the game and enjoyed the minis and theme more than I remembered. And then I took a look at the rules, and just loved how dynamic the movement system felt, with free jumps, parkour, 3d terrain fully integral to the game, including jumping from rooftops and swimming in canals, etc. So I got myself a starter and some extra minis to try out the game.

The project took a bit longer to ramp up than I would have like, as other priorities came up first in the painting queue, amongst other things. One of the hurdles was how to base the models. In the end, we opted to use the texture from the floor tiles of the Waterspire project and make base toppers, so the models would fit with the eventual streets we might print. They are a bit tall to my taste, but thinner toppers might have warped during printing, and I didn’t want to file that much resin in a room I share with the kids.

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Pox and dirt in the grim dark future

If you go back a decade or two, I was primarily a Games Workshop games player. Mainly Warhammer Fantasy Battles, but I did play some Warhammer 40,000 too. Since, I have switched to mostly skirmish games, requiring fewer models and playing space, but once in a while, I jump back in. It happened last year with Fantasy and my zombie pirates army, but the most recent occurrence is with 40k and its new 10th edition.

Death Guard badge, © Games Workshop

It’s getting talked a lot in our gaming group, and I do like the blank slate that comes with all new simplified armies when they fully reboot their systems. I already had some Death Guards painted from the Conquest magazine subscription we got for my son (he took the Ultramarines side), and the small new format Combat Patrol made for a good target to get playing fast and try out the new system. It was the time to get some more baddies painted.

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