Those Who Protect

Following on from animals: space cops.

pigs are a kind of animal, after all

These were all hell of great sculpts to paint, even if being armed kind of puts the 'civilian' aspect of this project as a bit of a lie. But I've done armed folks before and I will again. 

These are mostly Crooked Dice pieces from Colony 87: Wave Four, while the Judge is a Kev White sculpt from Diehard Miniatures. I'm pleased with how they've all come out, so let's show 'em off!

Colonial Police

These are great little guys. Crooked Dice have had them done in darker colours, but I saw these guys and immediately wanted to go for a dusty, Moebian look, using pale blues, pinks, and oranges and whites to try and do things I didn't usually do. Mixed luck, I think, and the orange was a real nuisance, but they turned out okay. They feel a little French, too.

I love that they have dorky little flashlights. These are not well-equipped Arbites in black body armour.

Not really a lot to say about them!

Caravan Guards

These guys were a DELIGHT to paint. I knew I wanted to go for boney, dusty robes, bland black masks and the like, and they've turned out basically exactly as expected. The trickiest part was deciding how I wanted to do the mounts.

I've got a dot-point mini-tutorial below the cut, partly to share but mostly so that I can remember if I ever want to do more like these folks.

Guard Captain

Like a lot of the folks around here, she has dark skin. They're a desert people! Feathers are from a Roc mount.

LOVE the masks on some of these guys. They're not dissimilar from the modern Necromunda wastelanders (one of which I used on a Mantis Warrior scout biker) so we'll see this sort of thing again. I loved every moment of painting these.

Can barely see his skin tone, but I aimed for a vaguely Middle Eastern, deep tone without quite hitting Black.

First Roc mount! Look at this great sculpt, hell yeah

And here's the second one! Only criticism is that it's hard to get a brush into the front detail on the rider/saddle so it's mostly 'push in some paint, hit it with a heavy wash and hope nobody looks closely'.

Love these guys. Can't wait to have them as a set-piece defending a caravan while space marines shoot each other around them or whatever.

Marshal/Sherrif/Judge

I have been looking forward to this one. She was a Kickstarter only (although she's still on the website at time of writing - so more a limited run than an exclusive) miniature from one of Tim Prow's Diehard Miniatures kickstarters. Tim's sculpts are great, but they often feel a bit large, so I tend to only go for the occasional knockout these days. This one's by Kev White and feels a bit more oldhammer-y in dimensions.

While Tim's paint job is a bit more cop-y, with whites and blues, I wanted her to be an Adeptus Arbites Judge... while also nodding to where Games Workshop nicked those guys from without even bothering to file off the serial numbers. This meant that I almost painted her belt and some armour elements in lime green but decided at the last minute (I had put green on the brush) to stick with the scheme from White Dwarf 169, in black and yellow, while nodding to the white with some ceramite accessories.

I had undercoated her white for some insane reason, which made getting the base colours down way harder than they needed to be, but it worked out because the non-dark parts are quite vibrant in the end. Incidentally, if you want an easy tutorial for all-black Arbites, check out Mengel Miniatures. See below for my notes on the red hair.

Windshield is my usual blue glaze over silver, but the really fun part was giving her red-and-blue siren lights and a brake light, because sometimes you have to make your own jokes.

That's it for these guys! I have a lot of civilians and two accidental projects on my painting table, as well as more scenery and the actual projects I wanted to concentrate on this year. But work is also keeping me incredibly busy and my son turns two at the end of the month, so let's see how we go...

Below the cut for some painting notes!

Caravan Guards

Uniform:

• White undercoat
• Pants: Steel Legion Drab, highlighted after wash with the same
• Coat: Zandri Dust, highlighted after wash with Zandri Dust and then some Ushabti Bone just to make it look worn
• Leather straps: Snakebite Leather contrast. This is also the base for some knife sheaths, but I usually mess with those a bit.
• Shoulder pads: Wyldwood contrast - my pot is all half dry and fucked up, so it's watered a bit and if I water it too much, I hit the pad with some Agrax Earthshade. Each one turned out differently and that's Okay.
• Gloves: Garaghak's Sewer contrast
• Gun bag: Army Painter Hemp Rope
• Water bottle bag: Vallejo Heavy Kakhi (72.149) - lovely weird greenish colour.
• I picked both of these on a whim years ago and use them Occasionally
• Pouches: Baneblade Brown. I then hit some with black and/or brown washes to slightly tint them differently. Should have done one with green just to see what happens.
• Basic Black Templar on the blacks.
• Everything washed heavily in sepia. Hardly anything re-highlighted (noted above).
• Guns, masks, equipment (including bottle tops): black/grey trio in rough highlights: Black > Corvus Grey > Mechanicum Standard Grey, then washed black. Bottle tops gloss varnished at the end.
• Boots: my 'black bluish leather' of rough highlights of Incubi Darkness > Sotek Green then washed twice with black (waiting for each to dry).
• I sometimes use other blue-green colours for this, I ain't picky. It leaves them black but bluish when the light hits a bit.
• Metals are mostly just dark iron, black wash and maybe some lighter steel highlights. Goggles are done as metal then glazed with Guilliman Blue. Captain's binocular lenses got Waystone Green instead.
• Cloth facewraps were thinly washed in sepia (and avoided the heavy wash) then highlighted with thinned Army Painter Mummy Robes, one of my favourite colours ever.
• See below for the captain's feathers.

Beasties:

• Masks and claws were done as grey equipment/the human masks, above. 
• Leather straps and metals as above.
• Baggage is a technique I fell in love with years ago, for worn cloth and undyed linen. Nowadays I use Snakebite Leather contrast > maybe wash it Sepia (I did here because I was doing everything anyway) > a lighter yellow brown (forget which I used here, Balor Brown is good) > Ushabti Bone. Leave more or less earlier colours for worn effects.
• Beaks were Cygor Brown, then rough highlights with mixing more and more Skrag Brown (because I just bought some and wanted to try it, washed with black, hit with a bit of brown wash towards the black, eh just muck about, bird beaks aren't usually very uniform and these are quite beat up.
• Saddle was Vallejo Flat Earth (70.983) but not really highlighted - hard to get to!
• Legs were Basilicanum Grey contrast and then lightly drybrushed/lazily highlighted in bits with Dawnstone.
• Feathers:
• The Fang > Coelia Greenshade wash > Thunderhawk Blue > Russ Grey
• The head and upper neck feathers were then on top of this layered with Lothern Blue and then Blue Horror. They were then glazed with Guilliman Blue to blend it all together and I'm not convinced that was the correct thing to do!

Varnish was Technical Stormshield and then Lahmian Medium to tone down the remaining gloss.  I don't usually varnish things, so still getting the hang of this.

Judge

Red hair:

This tutorial from MiniWarGaming is very good (regrettably a video), and I've used it before. Of course, I have to use substitutes for almost every colour in it but it's a good framework:

• Dryad Brown + Tukskgor Fur mix (my Tuskgor is pretty dry so it's mostly Dryad, oops
• Layer of Trollslayer Orange + a bit of Skrag Brown to brown it a bit closer to Squig (the previous was still a bit wet, so I guess you could call this a wet edgey drybrush?)
• Highlight of old pot of Vomit Brown (according to the DakkaDakka chart, this is close to Tau Light Ochre...)
• Wash of Fuegan Orange (I do have that one)
• Iyanden Darksun (the predecessor to Averland Sunset) - this is actually yellow, so I try to be sparing. Maybe too sparing here, she's still pretty muted, but I didn't want it to key off her yellow gear!