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Dr. Matt Lee (mattl)

Web standards, accessibility, free/open source software, old UNIX/TV/Music and occasional wargaming

Weekend of painting and gluing (2011) (2011)

After my Scotlings arrived on Friday, I was dying to put them together and paint them up. I spent most of the weekend painting and gluing things (including my fingers) — including my Scotlings, a unit of metal Wraiths, a Ghast, a unit of Dwarf Berserkers, a unit of Dwarf Ironguard and the Twilight Elf Sorceress. I even made a start on my Undead cavalry.

Impact Scotlings

  • Normally, I don’t like metal miniatures — they’re often too fiddly (Dwarf Berserkers) or too heavy to realistically assemble (Dwarf Gyrocopter), but the Scotlings did work to relieve some of that hatred.
  • The Scotlings were nicely packaged, with very few mold lines and little flash.
  • The bases were round 40k slotted bases, which was a little frustrating as the models don’t have a slot, I wound up supergluing a penny to the base, which covered most of the hole.
  • Only one of the models, the guys carrying the caber was a multipart model, and even then it was just a pair of feet. I stuck these to the base first, smothered them in glue and attached the rest of the model. It looks good, and will look even better when I’ve had an opportunity to base these models.
  • Base coat was Armory Black Primer (Dork Tower characters on the can) — not as good as the Army Painter primers, but certainly better than the Citadel sprays.
  • Paint scheme is as follows: GW Foundation Orange for the beards and hair with Coat d’Arms Enchanted Blue for the clothes, Coat d’Arms Gold for the hats and wristbands. The kilts are mostly a mixture of bright blue and bright pink/purple taken from the GW range, with Army Painter Strong Quickshade and Army Painter basing materials for the bases.
Mantic Undead Wraiths
  • Nice, good-looking single piece models from Mantic with a single multi-piece model that was a snap to put together.
  • Again, Armory Black for the primer and Army Painter basing materials for the base. As I’m doing with all my fantasy battle figures now, I assembled them onto a fixed base for Kings of War — in this case, a single strip of perspex I picked up as a potential base for some Warmaster figures, before I realized nobody wants to play Warmaster and instead put the figures aside for a diorama I’m planning.
  • Not much painting on these done yet, just some Coat d’Arms Chainmail on the weapons.
Mantic Undead Ghast
  • Picked this guy up for only a pound during my last Mantic direct purchase — it comes as a ghoul sprue, two bases and a metal part to replace the body — as with everything in the Mantic ghoul/zombie ranges, it’s a total delight to put together, taking only a decent blob of superglue and a little pressure to dry and fit together nicely.
  • Primed with Armory Black.
  • Only color on the model so far is a nice coat of the shocking pink/purple I picked up from GW. I’m trying to get my undead to be quite bright so they look good when I’m done quickshading them.
Mantic Dwarf Berserkers
  • I don’t like these models, I will get that out of the way now. They look quite different to the rest of the range and they have little spindly arms that are a paint to glue on.
  • After quite a while (these were ordered on July 23rd 2010), I finally got these to a place where I no longer dread having to put them together. A fresh bottle of Zap superglue and some Zap accellerant, and I’m finally okay with the fact a couple of them are missing an arm — casualty from a previous battle I’m saying.
  • Based these on a fresh piece of GW movement tray kit, 2×5, Kings of War style.
  • Based coated in Armory Black.
Mantic Dwarf Ironguard
  • Feeling pretty good about getting those Berserkers off my to-do list, I set about putting together the unit of Ironguard I have.
  • These feel like proper dwarfs — chunky and solid.
  • Putting them together was a matter of putting them in the Mantic bases, adding the few weapon choice pieces and putting the whole lot on a 5×1 base. I have another unit of these somewhere, and I’ll prepare them in the same way.
  • No primer for these yet.
Mantic Undead Cavalry
  • These are very nice models — resin plastic, which is Mantic’s mid-way material now, between metal (cheap to tool, expensive to produce, tedious to assemble) and plastic (expensive to tool, cheap to produce, a breeze to assemble).
  • As they’re resin plastic (or restic, as they’re known) they come in a bag, and not on a sprue, and you assemble them with superglue, not poly cement.
  • The bases for the cavalry are the green cavalry bases from Renedra.
  • Primed these in brown a while ago, started adding Coat d’Arms metalics to them.
Mantic Twilight Elf Sorceress
  • This is the first of the new Mantic Blister Pack range, and the only model in the Mantic Twilight Elf race now.
  • Fiddly to assemble, but thankfully not of the Dwarf Berserker extreme.
  • I decided to base it on a round display base complete with some rocks I have from a spare Dwarf King.
  • No primer yet, but will probably go with Army Painter white.
In other news: As I eagerly await Warpath, I picked up a full 110 model Undead Army box on eBay for super cheap — only $50!

Berserkers

Published: Mon Oct 17 2011 06:53:35 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) by