Those Who Play

Despite the bright colours, this might be the most grimdark set yet.

Children shouldn't have any place on a battlefield, especially not in the kind of warzones that Warhammer 40,000 describes. It's a bit bleak for tabletop gaming. At the same time, these were really fun models to paint. I imagine that they'll add a certain amount of charm to the townscape once I get around to some buildings and other terrain.

In the meantime, let's not dwell on the implications.

This set are from Copplestone Castings, sculpted by the delightful and talented Mark Copplestone. They're intended for historical or pulp games set in Terran Africa, but I wanted to make my table a bit less Caucasian, so I got some to see how they'd scale up.

tempting to put a skull decal on the pot

As you can see, they're a bit slim next to the chunkier Colony 87 casts, so I grouped them in with the children. The tall woman carrying a cooking pot comes off as an older teenager next to the others, while the others just come off as a bit skinny. Given how skinny I was as a youth (no longer!), this isn't unreasonable.

I wanted bright colours on these. This is partly to contrast with their dark skin, as that's always pleasing, but also to avoid the 'poor Africans, dressed in undyed linen' look which is more than a little problematic. Our teen pot-carrier's skirt even has a lil turquoise stripe for a bit of fun.

If I was a better painter, I'd have gone with some of the really fun patterns you can see in African cloth, but here we are.

The skin was an experiment in Contrast paints. I'm never entirely happy with the effects I've gotten with my darker skin tones, so I wanted to try something new. Karwansaray helped me out with this great little tutorial. I think the result would be better over Wraithbone, but I'd done these guys with white undercoats, so that's something to try next time.

This young lady was pretty easy, as I knew I wanted to match axiom's greys design fairly closely. The exception was her little pet, which I based on the homicidal lop-eared rabbit from a certain webcomic (which, it pains me to admit, is over twenty years old, making it old-timey).

Easily my favourite of this set! Look at his bright (if muddy) anorak! His happy blue gumboots! His ridiculous green alien toy (which he's dragged through the dust)!

I debated on giving him the red pants, but decided that children have zero sense of style. At least he's wearing pants, right?

That's it for this civilian instalment. Next up will probably be some starfarers, but I think I'll finish off something else first...