dafruk

Having moved away from Malifaux figs for a while I came home last night, sat down at my desk and had 1 undercoated fig in my drawer which decided to grab my attention. I'd bought the Austringer a while back and of the two models vastly preferred the crouching guy who was pointing. But I'd not had the heart to come up with the new scheme for how my guild guards would look. Well that all changed last night and as usual with Malifaux models stopping painting was a real issue! I decided the guards were going to be the most civilian of all the Guild, so where the Death Marshals and Witch hunters have a very distinctive scheme that wasn't going to be the case for the guards, they'd look very much like my image of Joe Public in the world. So based off that cowboy stereotype they roughly follow I settled on denim trousers, white shirt and brown overcoat. I then played about with the hat, gloves and boots for a bit before settling on making all three the same grey/black colour which I'm very happy with. Pic so far is a wip, the falcon still needs a bit of work and probably could do with a highlight or two on the grey just to give it better definition but so far I'm really happy with how it's coming out. Not going to be able to work on it any further tonight but hopefully get some time later in the week. Looking back at the cloak I probably need to add a little green into my shadows to get the transitions a bit more natural. I'm quite happy with my denim, not really tried to do it before and wasn't quite sure how to approach it. Ended up I painted it a base grey which has a slight blue tinge and then stippled up with a brighter blue before giving a grey wash followed by an asurymen blue wash. I'm somewhat tempted to buy lucius's box so I can crack on with getting a complete crew of guards but I've already invested in Zorida as my first branch out of the Guild so will have to paint that up before I'll allow myself to get anything further as I'm on a mission to reduce my unpainted mountain after buying far too much this year (once again!).

Just realised I never posted up my judge to finish off the box set. Well here he is:

So it's gone a little quiet in here, I wonder if that ties into a little subject that hits most painters fairly often. How do you keep yourself motivated to keep painting and not hit those slumps where you just find you can't be bothered, or you're just too busy?

I wish I played enough malifaux to make tournaments and rankings a reality for me. At present I'm a rank amateur in the game, I've played a small handful of games, mostly intros to get other people in my area interested and I have a grand total handle on the rules of next to nothing and particularly know zero about how best to play my crew and the tricks and tactics associated with it. My malifaux credentials out the way I've been playing warhammer for the last few years and was sat at a top 5 dwarf player in the UK for a while and now playing woodies and ranked 10th in the UK. So top 10 with 2 races, wow I must be great right... Well look at the overall and I'm about 200th so clearly not. I don't intentinally take weak races but I'm not going to pick up one of the obvious top armies because I'd rather have fun working out how to play well with something a bit more challenging. The same translates to all my gaming, malifaux I picked up guild stuff on the basis of the way it looks, what I'm starting to feel is that it's not the right crew for me at present as they just don't do that much and I want to have a more fun experience. I can see how nino, Austinger and some other stuff can give you a horrendous long range game that nobody can match (but can still counter quite simply) but it's not the experience I want. Bringing that back round to rankings how exactly do they impact me if I attend a tournament, well I have my own special focus. Because tournaments can restrict by master or faction I'd imagine you can't readily track master statistics because in some tournaments it wouldn't be the same across the rounds. Personally I don't fancy trying to become 'the neverborn master' best in faction player, for a couple of reasons 1. I'm not good enough 2. It's far to open to targetting the best build. ie the dreamer alp bomb is often talked about as horrendous, I'd never play it because it doesn't sound like fun but excluding that from my options might limit me from getting certain wins (as a noob I'm taking an internet example, reality is I've no idea how good the combo is for winning games). For that reason I don't really see malifaux rankings working for me, but that doesn't mean there is no value in them. If you can have them as a game tracker it's awesome. I love beign able to look back at the list of who I played, what they used and how I did. It's a great way of giving you a reality check on where you commonly fall down. I love a bit of gentle smack talk based upon me usually proclaiming to be an utter chump and calling out better players to stomp me or live in shame!

Hey Luke, Who was it you subjected to the Alp bomb? Was looking at the Dreamer crew but turned elsewhere in the end purely because the bad rap of the alp bomb move. I know for sure there are certain people down my club who don't have those mrals though so maybe should make him one of my masters first to put them off for a while! Cheers Dave

Testors should still be available but they had to change the formula (think they were removing toluene), from what I've heard nothing different in the performance.

How do you approach picking colour schemes? Random inspiration, structured using things like a colour wheel, combo of the two?

Only played a handful of games vs a handful of crews so hardly any experience and I've never played Warmachine/Hordes. What I have done is play a fair number of Warhammer tournaments, which I know you've done too, and from playing in them I can easily say it is a game that isn't terribly well designed for tournaments and yet I still have a lot of fun playing it that way. Because of how Malifaux games are structured imbalance of crews does not necessarily have the same impact. If you pick the right objectives then you should be able to stand a chance of achieving them even against a force which is designed to kill yours. But that's where malifaux is a bit odd. To look at it you'd say that certain things would walk all over others, but that is thinking in the traditional way of 'I've got to kill their army'. If that isn't your objective then it's somewhat irrelevant as long as you can do what you're given objective is. Warmachine/Hordes has 1 mission (from my understanding of it) - Kill the opposition Caster (master equivalent). Do this and you win the game. The variety comes from how those casters interact with their force and how that impacts your approach to killing them. Malifaux says - here's a range of objectives. Depeding on force selection criteria either be flexible enough to achieve all of them in your starting build. Or where only selecting your faction up front, pick the right models to achieve your objective from the faction available to you. Oh and by the way, you're opponent is trying to do this, guess what they'll take and how you might stop them at the same time. I can see how WM&H offers a very tight and structured tournament style where everyone is always competing on the same basis. Malifaux is a lot more expansive and the balance is achieved through flexibility rather than necessarily having incredibly tightly balanced crews vs each other. The downside of the malifaux approach being where people pick the wrong crew they will face situations where they literally cannot win barring a miracle. With WM&H that should never happen because you can never get stuck designing for the wrong objective. Personally I like the idea of variety in my gaming experience rather than repetition with the only change being the tactical approach of your opponent. But millions of people love chess which is the ultimate in same experience gaming. So WM&H - chesslike competition Malifaux - varied competition (can't immediately think of an equivalent game, buying shares maybe?)

Half the guild masters are people with disabilities, Lady j is blind. I never even thought about it before now. Cool to hear how people are drawn to this game for various reasons.

I'm in the UK, so it's a UK site but I've used the BD 132 airbrush shown on this page: http://www.airbrush-pro.co.uk/index1.html Here's the most recent thing I did with it Prior to this I'd really only used it for basecoating but clearly you can get blends going with it. I'll be trying to scale this down to a 28mm figure for my next efforts and reckon it won't be too difficult with the airbrush I've got which is priced at £17 (~$25-30). Obviously there is the requirement for a compressor and other parts on top of that but I only spent ~£90 on the whole kit.

I went the other way on my exec. He's smooth as a newborn baby. Instead of furrying him up I put a fair amount of time into blending up the skin to give it some real depth and reckon it looks pretty sweet. But I do like what you've done with him too.

Sonnia Criid's crew are all 1 piece models except for the sword on her back, don't get much easier assembly than that! Lady J's lot are also fairly simple, the death marshals arms can need a bit of filling for gaps and the Judge's sword hand is just begging to snap off each time you put him into packaging but generally pretty simple stuff.

I just bought over 200 skaven, but no worries, there's no rush.

Another thing I find important is variety. Recently I blew through most of my Lady J box in a weekend but the judge didn't quite get there and it's taken me 2 weeks to get back into the mindset to pick him up and put a brush on him. In that time I've painted a bunch of Epic stuff, built some some warhammer figs, played about with my basing on a few things and played a few games. I finally sat down last night painted up a couple of eldar tanks for epic, looked over and saw the judge and inspiration hit me, I picked up the model and just started flying through what I had left to do on him. He's now sat proudly beside the rest of the crew and I'll try to get some pics up soon. That does bring me to desperate times though, I've only 1 unpainted malifaux model left, I forsee another spending spree!

Here's a couple of mine, not the best at the effect as this was my first time trying it. Colours used - snot green basecoat Knarloc green shading Scorpion green highlights Scorpion green & white mix highlight possibly a green glaze over the top, can't remember now.

I've had that problem in the past, you've got to be in the right mindset for painting and sometimes it's incredibly frustrating. I tend to paint a little and often and because of that I seldom target 'i'm going to finish this by then'. If I'm in the zone then i'll just keep going but it's not worth forcing it. That said I have found Malifaux models tend to captivate me and I'll end up trying to finish a whole model in a single setting.

I'd much rather see some cool variety in the models than have exact matching stat card weapons to what each of the models is carrying. The whole WYSIWIG thing that some games insist on irritates me as it is usually applied at the cost of models looking good. The variety in the witchlings is what drew me to them in the first place, if it had just been sword and pistol for them all they'd have been a lot more boring. When you're dealing with 5-6 model crews I'd hate for them to become repetative.

her totem can hurt itself then let her violate it to get a witchling on the cheap. But apart from that not something I've considered taking and I've never tried that trick yet as there are usually better things for her to be attacking since you're usually having to burn a stone to get violation off it doesn't really add much.

hats are an awesome addition, lovely characterful figs. What was your process for the orange, I never like the way mine comes out but yours is great.

The guild continues to grow! I'm still working on the judge, I'm having trouble deciding how to paint his trousers but making good progress but everyone else from Lady J's crew are now complete.

Because I have her painted I'm saying Sonnia but give it a week or two and I'll have Lady J done too and then it'll be a toss up. I really like the idea of hoffman but haven't picked him up yet and finally Perdita seems very good but I didn't like the fact that her crew was straight up 5 humans so avoidded her.

Started working on the death marshalls. Decided I'd not try and link the scheme between the sections of the guild.

bases are win, crews looking real nice. Really liking the limited pallette on the witchlings really suits them. Thanks for sharing the name for the bases definitely going to check them out.

Love the updated bases, figs look tonnes better with it. Great looking crew. The green/blue contrast on the newer stuff looks spot on too.

all looking great in the pre-paint state, can't wait to see how they look with a bit of brush work.