Another Merc

Here's another member of the Mercs squad.

I was very gratified that all the different designs that I made of the snow bases (Sculpey, cork, Apoxy Sculpt) all worked with these rather bulky figures.

When I first looked at them, I figured it would be difficult to make any of them work.  Instead, it was almost like I had a plan! :-)

What you see, and what you don't see!

I meant to put this up about 6 hours ago... somehow that didn't happen!  My apologies.

Here you see a collection of miniatures that you might recognize.  Yes, these are the miniatures that were painted for the kickstarter videos.

It was so difficult to put them all in one place, it required an entire 30 x 40 inch piece of matboard!!!

I am not sure what is scarier... the fact that this does not represent all the figures I actually prepped and even painted, or the fact that there are NO bases or terrain pieces in this image!  Those will come during the week.

For nearly every figure you see in this image, there are one or two more that I prepped, based, primed, and even painted.  That is when I was still trying to find out which figure might work best for a given technique, etc.

It took hours to set up these shots and then take the pics, etc.  That's how many there were!  I was trying to reorganize them, since many of these will be part of an auction series on ebay in the next few weeks.

As I have mentioned before, the plan all along was to do something like that to secure additional equipment.  Obviously, there was going to be a whole bunch of minis once this was done.

While I will be bummed to see some of them go, the equipment is definitely needed.  Some of these are not very practical in terms of shipping, so those won't be included.  The vehicles will be incorporated into my Sisters/Imperial Guard army for next year's Adepticon.

It was quite the journey painting all of these.  I learned quite a lot, and I hope that you will be able to learn a few tips as well! :-)

I refined a number of my techniques, and I even developed a few along the way.

Every time I look at these images, I am stunned at just how much there was!  Many thanks to Raging Hereoes, Reaper, Secret Weapon miniatures, Cool Mini or Not, Ultraforge, and so many more!  Thanks to Caius and Mark for supporting the latest effort... to Rich and Marty, Chad, Domus and so many more.

I am still working 12-18 hours a day on this project, if you can believe that.  When you ponder this horde (and the two additonal batches of Terrain and Bases), I guess one should not be surprised.

More on the way!!!!!!

Someone sat in my spot.

Here is the complete set of images on the Sheldon Zombicide character.

I did some Google searches to see what outfit he should be wearing, and I decided to go with the Green Lantern look.  I figured that green would contrast well with all the blood that I would be adding!

Researching the comic books, on the other hand, was far more difficult.  It was a real bear trying to get my hands on any interior art.  I found a few small bits, and tried to paint those in the sections of the paper that stood out the most.

Since this was so tiny, I had to exaggerate the characters and images on those pages, so that you could see Wonder Woman, Batman and even the Joker. :-)

I did some gloss coating of the Molotov cocktails as well...

He is on ebay right now as I try to bring in some funds for additional terrabytes of storage space for the videos!  Here is the link:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/321203354919?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

I've got this...

Another Zombicide character!

This time it is the Machete spin off.  With a little help from some Secret Weapon body parts!

It slices, it dices!

But wait, there's more!

And more...

Buy one... get more zombies?

This thing's got quite a kick

These are some very unusual figures.  More from Mercs.  Again, using some of those snow bases done with the weathering powders...

Very heavy, solid metal minis.  Certainly very different from what I have been painting lately...

Why does it have to be snakes? Again.

We continue with the bases and movement tray for Kroak's Temple Guard unit.

By this point, I had glued the pieces of sculpey to the foam core pieces.  I also cut the 'edging' pieces, and glued those as well.

With all the edge pieces glued in, I made sure that all the individual bases fit OK.

Once I knew that all those bases were where they should be, I placed the ring around the Sacrificial Pit.  This pit will be filled mostly with the chopped up body parts and skulls from Secret Weapon.  I think I will be tossing in some Empire heads as well for good measure!

I started to do some preliminary 'ageing' of the edges on the bases.  I didn't get too crazy with this, since I wanted to make sure the designs would have plenty of space!

Soon all the bases had been aged around the corners.

There will be designs radiating out from the central pit.  You can see the sheet metal through the hole cut for the pit.

I am hoping to have four snake heads emerge from the four cardinal directions that go all the way out to the edge pieces...

Time to magnetize these bases!  Out come the refrigerator magnets.

Each base gets a magnet.  Next they will get numbers.

Remember the little snakes from the last post?  Here they are!

Stay tuned for the Pit filler and the designs being carved into the bases!

While I'm at it...

I needed to film a new segment on Baking sculpey for the basing videos, which meant rolling out lots of new sculpey.

Since I did not want to simply roll out a pound of sculpey without much additional purpose, I tried to gear it towards current projects.  Among these was the new experiment with more unified movement trays for fantasy units.

In this case, it was the new Kroak/Temple Guard unit.

The concept it to have Kroak's Palanquin floating above a sacrificial pit.  The pit would be located right in the center of the unit.

There would be significant obstacles to deal with, not the least of which is how tricky it can be to get Lizardman infantry of any kind to rank up.  I had to abandon the original plan to have multiple levels to the unit.

The bases would all have to be the same height.

So, I cut out a bunch of 25mm bases in the unbaked sculpey.  I also made the cutout for the pit on Kroak's base, and a bunch of snakes to put out around the movement tray for extra effect.

Once that was baked, I cut some foam core pieces which would give a little bit of height to the bases... hopefully just enough to make the pit viable.

The baked sculpey pieces were set out on the foamcore, and the hole for the pit was cut.  The shiny surface you see is the sheet metal used to attract the refrigerator magnets.

In the next part of this post, I will show some images of the weathering and magnetization of the bases and how the rest of the movement tray is formed.  Stay tuned!