So when you are talking about miniatures, you always end up talking about modeling and painting. Just about every model that you play these kinds of games with (Malifaux, Kill Zone, Blood Bowl) start as gray metal or plastic pieces attached to a sprue. A sprue is just the plastic or metal piece that the model parts are attached too. Sometimes as many as ten pieces even for a normal model that might measure an inch or two high and an inch wide. All those pieces have to be removed from the sprue, the flash and mold lines have to be removed, then you figure out how the pieces attach to the main section of the model. For plastic models, there are usually posts the will only insert to a specific hold in the model, with other plastic models there are just two flat plains that have to be attached. Instead of super glue for a plastic model, there is plastic cement you can use that will fuse the plastic pieces together.
With metal models it is a little different, there are almost never posts in the metal, so you create those posts yourself, typically you use a pin drill and part of a paperclip or wire. Once you drill out the top of the arm for instance you insert a part of the paperclip and then drill into the body until you can sink the other half of the paperclip and superglue the whole thing together. The paperclip works to make the attachment that much stronger then just trying to stick the arm on with superglue alone. After you have the arm attached, then you take a look for any gaps or misalignments between the arm and the body. There is always something that shows a gap. Then you get putty out and work with a couple different tools to get putty into the gap, and smooth it out, so that once you do prime and paint them, you wont see the gap. Depending on how much work you want to put into cleaning and puttying, it can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 4 hours to clean a model properly.
Once you are done with this step, you already have a lot of time into a single model. While this doesn't sound that bad for a smaller game with 7-12 models, in larger army sized games, there can be hundreds of models to clean, prime, and paint.
As you have looked at the pictures throughout this blog post, I wanted to give you an idea of what I am working on right now. This was a special order Malifaux crew that was released in green dayglow plastic. It is my new Pandora crew. The first model I am showing is the Poltergeist, it is Pandora's totem, so it is connected to her and only she can use it in the game. I have never had one, so I was happy to get it in the new plastic crew box. The little kid is Baby Kade, the model that first drew me into Malifaux when it first came out in 2009. That little kid, sitting there with his diaper and knife drew me right into the story. The little plastic piece shown below is his right arm that I am having a friend of mine Chris help me to set just right. Usually when you put a model together you can fudge connections and leave little gaps because you will putty the gaps to fill them in, and then paint the whole model so it covers all those little "indiscretions". In this case there will be little to no paint on the model at all, so the fit needs to be pretty clean. I will post pics after I finish getting it assembled, and maybe tell you a little more about Chris once I ask him if it is ok.
This is one of the things I really enjoy about gaming overall. Gaming encompasses more then just playing the game. You can play, or paint, or sculpt or any combination of the three. You can spend as much or as little time on hobbying as well, while there are tournaments that require all models have 3 colors on them (the minimum standard), very few players will required that for normal play. I have never told anyone that they couldn't play against me just because of how their models looked.
This is one of my first posts with pictures. At least of Malifaux models. I hope you enjoy it and I hope to hear if you liked it. I am going to play around with the formatting a little and see if I can make the page look a little better too, especially if I am going to keep posting more pictures.
Thanx for the reading...
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