Yeld - yellow gold?

And lo, comes the final member of my Spyrer team, the bewinged Yeld:

Dark bodysuit, as befits a model that has the ability to camouflage himself in the darkness of the underhive, contrasted with gleaming gold and silver pinions, because hey we're the rich kids on safari, so we're going to flash the cash.

I imagine that the wings feature some sort of holo projector across the surface, which would blur the edges and make the individual's silhouette harder to make out. Well, that's how I justify to myself painting them as such bright metal! (rule of cool wins again).

Midway through painting, I was googling to look at other people's painted Yeld looking for colour inspiration for his weaponry, when I realised that what I had painted as his bald head and a very prominent brow should perhaps have been a metal skullcap:

I quite liked it though, and decided to leave it as is (picturing him as the slightly older, sees himself as wiser self-appointed leader of the group), but when painting the lenses on his cybernetic eye I coincidentally painted them red and green, inspiration struck and I knew that I had to give him a wobbly freehand spider tattoo on his head:

Spider Jerusalem, in case you aren't familiar with the source of inspiration, explaining democracy:

Finishing him brings the Tally to:

45 vs 40 = +5

and actually completes a playable force for a game system, in a shocking and out of character turn of events:

(I really need to stick a weight under each of their bases to make them a little more stable...)

Can I use this momentous milestone to justify ordering myself the new Necromunda? Probably not, this close to Christmas, I should probably wait and see what Santa brings to avoid raising the ire of the wife...

Given that Games Workshop seem to be planning to update all of the existing main gangs, as well as adding some new ones, I'm intrigued to see what a redesign of the Spyrers with 20 additional years of technology and experience would look like...

Malcado, Malcadon't, it's all the same to me...

Thirdly comes my favourite of the Spyrer Hunting Rigs, the Malcadon. Because if you're a scion of the noble houses killing for thrills in the Underhive, you're obviously going to choose the suit which is a cross between Spider-Man and the Predator. The other types can seem a little silly when looked at with real world sensibilities ('I'm agile and hope you shoot me with energy weapons!' 'I'm punchy!' 'I'm kinda a birdman'), whereas the Malcadon is genuinely threatening and unnerving - you could imagine him stalking his prey through the decrepit gantries and vents, unseen until the very last moment when he drops onto his prey, seen only for an instant before there is the flash of steel (and I seem to recall there being a short story in Inferno magazine back in the day that went pretty much like this).

Unlike the other Spyrers, who got a dazzling selection of brightly coloured suits and greeblies (as they're basically marching into the Underhive with loudspeakers blaring 'we're here to murder you in these high tech killsuits'), the Malcadon got a much more muted selection - reddish purple bodysuit (as I thought 'what colour best describes murder'), and the pipes and tubes of his web spinners and helmet were painted in muted greys and blues, which makes it look almost carapace-like (as I imagine that having a chap that looks very much like some sort of technologically advanced murder beetle drop on you from above would be even more terrifying to the average Necromundan resident)

The only 'bright' points on the model are the pistons on his legs and his claws (which are still a much darker metal than his companions) and the three red dot lights around his eye...

Side note - the Malcadon is the Spyrer that didn't come in the original large box of miniatures, and was donated by my buddy Jimchenko who remembered that he had a broken model when he found out about my acquisition of the other three. A quick repair to reattach an arm and six years later we have a painted miniature ;)

Other side note: I've been considering picking up another Malcadon, as in the Community Edition of the Necromunda rules Spyrer teams have to consist of 5 members, but I'm just not as much of a fan of the other Malcadon sculpt as I am of this one...

Tally

44 vs 40 = +4

Honestly, the main thing holding me back from ordering the new Necromunda at this point is that it would plummet the Tally back into the negative, and so close to the end of the year I'd be unlikely to get it back into the black... So for now I'm just stocking up on Pringles and bottlecaps and considering making some terrain...

Orrus you sure about that? Wow, I'm really losing my touch with these punny titles...

As hinted at in my last post, it's not just a single Spyrer I've been working on;

Next we have the bruiser of the group, the Orrus:

Honestly, I can't remember how I got to the decision to go whitegrey and green as a colourscheme. He looks a little like he wouldn't be out of place fighting mid-90's Spider-man.

Not a lot to say about him other than that, really (except can you see how I snuck Arcane Blue onto him?) - I was oddly unmotivated to paint this miniature, and he was sat with only his flesh painted whilst the other miniatures that I was working on simulataneously approached varying stages of completion, but once I threw myself into painting his armour I started to enjoy him some more! I went for a much cleaner style that my usual, which was very odd - almost like panel lining a model tank painting dark shade in between each armour panel and then sharpening the edges with the highlight colour, rather than my usual approach of slap it on and then scrub around some highlights in a slightly slapdash fashion!

I'm also not sure why I wasn't more inspired to paint him, as my most enduring mental image of the Orrus is from the Kal Jerico comic, where they look like an absolute badass:

I mean, until he gets taken out with a lascannon:

Although at the same time I guess that if it takes incredibly rare and expensive anti-tank weaponry to take you out, that's still fairly respectable...

Tally:

43 vs 40 = +3

I'm starting to consider getting the new Necromunda, and thinking of it as buying a bunch of models that I can use with old Necromunda that also happens to come with a free Necromunda themed board game that I could also play if I wanted to... 

I can't think of a pun that fits Jakara into it... Jakara be kidding me? No. Dammit.

So, as you probably can't help but have noticed if you have internet access, Games Workshop have recently re-released a version of the pinnacle of skirmish wargaming, Necromunda. It's probably not just nostalgia talking, it was genuinely the best thing ever.

Rather than rushing out and snapping up a copy of the new game that would most likely just end up atop the precariously stacked pile of games that I will one day get round to painting and playing (I'm looking at you copy of Officio Assassinorum Execution Force) I thought I'd dig through my pile of half-finished projects and finish something up from the last time I decided to journey to Necromunda.

Six years ago, I bought a box of secondhand miniatures on a well-known gaming forum, that I dutifully stripped and set about repainting. I was halfway through typing 'a selection of which you've seen posted', but a quick snoop through my posts reveals it looks like I've not actually finished a single one of the 95 miniatures that were in that box... 

One of the reasons that I bought the box were that I saw that it contained three different Necromunda Spyrers, a gang that I had always coveted as a youth, and one of which is the first to get finished and posted, the Jakara:

I was somewhat conflicted over whether to give her pink hair, as such punky affectations tend to be reserved for gangers, but 'rule of cool' won out in the end. The bone and blue colour scheme was chosen by me sitting down with a post-it note and scribbling out pairs of colours that I misremembered seeing the Studio models painted as in old issues of White Dwarf.

The mirror shield got painted as shiny and single toned, again due to my vague recollections - me remembering that it was called a 'mirror shield' and assuming that the surface was, well, a mirror, whereas actual descriptions of it have a number of different nodules that store energy rather than just reflecting it straight back...

I had a play with trying out a crackling energy / alien technology effect on the blade (having finally cracked open my pot of P3 Arcane Blue, which is such a lovely colour that you will be seeing it creep in somewhere on the next few posts), which looks a bit crap, admittedly, but I kind of like it anyway...

All of her tubes and equipment were painted as shiny as new, figuring that this is her on her first jaunt into the Underhive, and the little chambers on her backpack were again painted with Arcane Blue with white squiggles, to look like containment cells for captured energy waiting to be unleashed back against her foes!

Finishing her brings the Tally to:

42 vs 40 = +2

Death doesn't stalk the Underhive alone though...