Those Who Work

The lifeblood of Empire.

♪ ♫ one of these is not like the others ♪

The end of the world has sapped a bit of my motivation, I'm afraid. The fact that I am horrific on my brushes doesn't help, and my usual small detail brush is getting a bit bristly, meaning that it's even more difficult to get any work done.

Also, we got a kitten.

Thistle

Still, I spent the past few days getting started on my Old World Army Challenge Project gnomes and doing these working-class folks as a palate cleanser. (I then ran out of white undercoat, so getting the gnomes done might be a bit of a challenge!)

Three of them are from the Colony 87 range, the same as the majority of my civilians. The lady with all the gear is from Crooked Dice's Paranormal Exterminators range, although I just picked her up cheap in an order from Bad Squiddo a couple years ago just because she looked like fun.

For more photos, we go below the cut...

Jane, lay technician

Janey was fun to paint, with all her weird greeblies on the backpack and a few points of visual interest without being as overwhelming as a lot of the current range of Citadel sculpts from Games Workshop. Most importantly, the fact she was wearing a solid coverall which I knew I wanted to be orange made it easy to break through my lack of motivation: I basecoated the orange, and she was 80% finished already!

Jak Fenwick, courier

Jak Fenwick was also relatively easy. I had a bit of trouble with figuring out what I wanted to do for his fine hat - too bright a colour and the miniature would become messy, too generic a brown and it would just look like a leather hat and I didn't want that. I think I've managed to strike a balance here.

His yellow and orange details give him a bit of a bike messenger air, especially when combined with his cool fingerless gloves, which I'm pretty pleased with. You can see a little mould slippage on his left leg, but it doesn't really bother me. That sentence is just so that you know that I know.

Korl Feldspar, lay technician

Painting miniatures with overalls is so much less stressful. Half the design is already done, and once you do the first colour's basecoat, you're almost finished! Korl Feldspar was really fun to paint. His apron is actually basecoated with Russ Grey, while the gloves were done with a self-mixed Contrast grey (Templar Black & Apothecary White), but after I washed it with brown, it kind of came out the same. Such is life.

Asa Stent, lay technician

Asa Stent was a bit more involved than the others, but by now I was on a roll. My starting point was Will Beck's original sketch:

© Will Beck, 2016

In the original design, Asa looks Black. In the sculpt, her features are possibly slightly more Caucasian, but I wanted to add a few more skin tones to the civilian project, so she was it. I don't know how well the skin came out, as I still don't have a firm system for darker skin tones, but the only way to get better at that sort of thing is to practice, right?

The other colours were comparatively simple. A orange high-vis vest, blue-grey work pants, a hat of similar design to Mr Fenwick's, white protective greaves done the same way as my Heresy-era Death Guard's unpainted ceramite - done. Except her weird tech greebly. Oh, wait, Asslessman called it a battery, so I should totally do it in gold with a black stripe, like some future oversized Everready. Done.

Stripe didn't turn out great - maybe I should have made the end a solid black - but whatever, she's done!

Coming up next: Trying to get white undercoat...