Tank Girl and Friends

Here's one of those slightly irritating "How it started/how it's going" posts you see on social media. This week, I have been repainting one of my last Escher gangers. This model is a juve with a stub gun and a pick. I've mentioned before that the Eschers seem to have been influenced by Tank Girl, and this one really looks as much like her as GW could manage. She's even got the slightly pigeon-toed stance that Jamie Hewlett often used to depict her.

This model is particularly interesting to me, as I first painted it about 15 years ago, and thought at the time that I had done a really good job. It was always one of my best-painted models and I was somewhat reluctant to strip it and start again. So, here is the old paint job:

And here is the new one:

I definitely think I've improved, and I'm surprised at how much better the second one looks to me. Sometimes it's quite hard to tell that your painting - or maybe any artistic work? - has got better until you stop to actually make the comparison.

Here are a couple of other Eschers, both of whom use the same not-Tank-Girl colour scheme (and unusual boob armour). There's less room to personalise these models than there is on the Eldar harlequins, as a lot of the Eschers is either leggings or bare skin. I've tried to vary skin colours to provide some extra variety, which I think has worked quite well. We've got a heavy with a massive heavy stubber that looks as if it was first used at the Siege of Stalingrad, and a ganger with a shotgun and pistol who is definitely showing off. As ever, the sculpting and details are superb.

Also, I made a few more horrid little lowlifes for the Scavvy horde. The advantage with making inbred, filthy lunatics who live in a rubbish tip is that you can mix and match pretty much anything to construct them. The guy with the musket has a zombie body, and medieval arms. His friend has a WW2 body, and arms and an axe from the Frostgrave cultist sprue. Both have cultist heads. Weirdly, the musketeer's shirt ends just above nipple-height. Perhaps he ate the rest of it.

Back in the day, scavvy gangs could take mutants, who had pretty daft, cartoony miniatures. One of the options was to have a big claw. I found an old Mantic zombie body and added a claw from a plastic daemonette and a Stargrave head. The whole thing was a good opportunity to try some shading with glazes, which I enjoyed. I like the results and might use this technique more often. Here is the nasty little creature:

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I've also decided to keep a tally of how my efforts to paint the Bretonnian footsoldiers is going. I'm not going to post my progress until I've finished a load, but I'll provide a weekly update (hopefully). The plan is to do three guys every week. So far, I'm ahead of the curve!

Peasant Progress:

Archers: 10

Foot knights: 6

Men at arms: 6

Escher Leader and the Start of a Necromunda Skavvy Horde

 While not painting inexpensive dinosaurs with egg yolk, I've also continued to work on the old Necromunda Escher gangers. These two are a leader, who has a boltgun and a laspistol, and another ganger with a lasgun. I've already got one copy of this model, so I tried to paint this version as differently as possible. One of the things I liked about Necromunda was that the weapons weren't just better or worse than one another, and it was often easier to equip your men with low-powered lasguns than fancy stuff. Anyway, here they are.

Whilst rooting about for more Necromunda bits and pieces, I remembered that I had bought a few scavvy plague zombies many years ago. The scavvies were a gang introduced in the Outlanders book, which was an add-on for the basic game. Outlanders included a few gangs, some monsters and some new (complex) rules about being outlawed and subsisting in the wasteland.

The scavvies were the lowest of the low: filthy and often mutated dregs of society, who lived in the rubbish of the undercity and were equipped with battered weapons that often broke down. They included mutants of various sorts, and even had special rules allowing them to eat each other to avoid having to pay for food.

One option the scavvies had was to attract plague zombies to the battlefield: unfortunates who had shuffled off this mortal coil and then shuffled back again, looking for brains to eat. For 10 credits, d.6 zombies would show up. While they weren't good fighters, they were a handy nuisance and could perhaps turn the enemy into other zombies, which was certain to make you popular with your friends. 

Anyhow, I was surprised to find that I'd bought 12 of these guys at some point. Some of the zombies would need repairs, but I was able to paint up one of each of the standard metal miniatures. They are very small models (maybe the plague shrinks you?) and are clearly sculpted on three basic bodies. Not brilliant miniatures, but likeable enough.

Braaaiiins...

I painted the zombies in a range of nasty flesh tones. They look a bit cartoony - I think it would be more realistic to paint them in the usual way and give them a blue or purple wash. But I like the variety and the rather drab "outfits". They certainly make a change from the jolly colours of House Escher. Perhaps I should do a gang from both of them.

More Escher Gangers

 Another week passes, and I continue to find myself surprised by the number of views that this blog is getting. I can only conclude that it has been hijacked by some sort of super-efficient automated Ponzi scheme, so if you receive messages from "me" offering to sell you inexpensive timeshares, a Nigerian goldmine or compromising pictures of Brittney Spears (my knowledge of internet spam ended in 2005 or so), don't click on the link. I do not have access to these things.

Anyhow, I've been painting more gangers from House Escher this week. These ones didn't require any repairs, and are as they were originally released. They are very detailed models and really good sculpts, although the sheer smallness of the models - especially the juves - makes them quite intimidating. I've found that it's easiest to paint the stuff closest to the model's skin - including the skin itself - and then work outwards. 

It strikes me that it would have been really tricky to play Necromunda "properly", as the rules say that you were required to show all equipment and upgrades on each model. This would lead to some very fiddly conversions as the game went on, especially if people lost limbs and gained bionics.

I also discovered a nice way to shade purple. I usually just add white or pink to purple to lighten it, but I've found that adding a light, fuxchia colour as well makes the shading look more vibrant, which helps for "neon" style pink.

Anyhow, the first two are standard gangers. The lady on the left has a lasgun, and the one on the right is carrying a length of chain - presumably a flail in game terms - and a laspistol. 

And here is another juve. I really like the variety of expressions that the juves have. You can't really see it here, but this one looks really alarmed as she blazes away with her massive (but not very effective) revolver.

That's all for now. I have more House Escher models to paint, including a heavy and two leader models. I'm not sure if that's what I'll work on next, but there's plenty of stuff to do. 

House Escher: Spares, Repairs and Very Big Hair

Who remembers Necromunda? Not the recent one, which I've never played, but the mid-90s skirmish game. It came in a box with cardboard terrain and awful plastic models, and involved odd-looking gangs fighting it out in the depths of a hive city. It was complex, interesting and probably an inspiration for Mordheim, which had a similar basis but removed some of the more awkward rules.

Several years ago, my friend James and I played quite a few games of Necromunda, and we enjoyed it a lot. It's got some weird features: like Mordheim, it's designed to be played in a tournament-style campaign, and a winning gang quickly outstrips the gang it defeats. Also like Mordheim, most games end with one gang running away, and the rules as to which of your minions survive are pretty crude and arbitrary. Unlike Mordheim, Necromunda puts a lot of emphasis on pinning your enemies with gunfire, and making them lose their turns. It's an interesting mechanic, but a potentially irritating one too.

Necromunda certainly had its problems as a game, not least the needlessly complex and so-random-it's-unfair dishing out of territory at the start. You could just award each player $200 every time they fought a battle and have just as much fun. One of the things I do like, though, is the comparative lack of detail in the backstory. Most of the details are, unsurprisingly, cloaked in shadow. I really like this, as it gives the player the opportunity to make up pretty much whatever they like.

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Gangers of House Escher, by Mark Gibbons.

One of the six big gangs (like Dune, Necromunda calls them "houses") is House Escher. Escher is an unusual organisation, as almost all of its members are women. They're basically amazons in space, and their skills suggest that they are fast and good at close combat. Escher fighters have an odd visual style, as if someone decided to make them "sexy" and changed their mind at the last minute. As it is, they look like a punk band about to do some kind of yoga class. I suspect that their design owes a lot to Tank Girl, who was big in the 90s.

That said, the old metal miniatures look much better than the modern plastics, which all have weird metal clogs as if they've just removed a pair of skis. One of my pet hates in miniatures is female soldiers in high heels - I can almost understand some maniac running into battle in their underwear or even barefoot, but heels just look silly even by the silly standards of Warhammer.

Anyhow, I've been avoiding these models for a while, or more accurately summoning up the courage to attempt to paint them. The amount of detail on the Escher miniatures - designed and, I think, sculpted by the excellent Jes Goodwin - is incredible. They're very slight, and there's a lot of opportunity to paint detail and get it wrong. Unlike orks, they've got human faces and, unlike eldar, they don't have the decency to wear helmets. That's just not on. 

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All of this week's models are repairs of some kind, because it was cheaper to get the models broken off ebay and to tidy them up myself. Also, it adds variety, as I've got some duplicates.

The ganger on the left was missing her left arm, so I replaced it with a dark eldar arm. The woman on the right didn't have her right foot. I made a bionic one out of a skeleton foot and a cut-down necron arm, using the elbow joint as a metal kneecap for her. I think it's worked pretty well. 

The next pair are juves: young members of the gang who are weedier and less reliable than the seasoned fighters. One thing I really like about the old metal juves is that they tend to look worried and frantic. Necromunda has a much better range of expressions than 40k (space marines have one face per chapter). Neither had a head, so I replaced them with Stargrave heads, which were small enough to look right on their scrawny bodies and had some suitably extreme haircuts.

Finally, we've got two models built from the same body. Bear with me here. Each Necromunda gang had access to heavy weapon soldiers, imaginatively named "heavies". Most gangs had two or three heavy models, one of which would be armed with a stubber (a clunky, WW2 type machine gun). The Escher stubber body seems to be easy to get hold of, while the other heavy model, who has a plasma gun, goes for silly money.

I found what seemed to be the plasma gun variant, but wasn't. I ended up with two spare copies of the stubber body, and so I converted them both to be doing new things. This model was given pistols and a mechanical arm from Stargrave:

And this one got a new arm, a gun cobbled together from various bits and bobs, a backpack from some kind of Mantic robot, and some sculpted armour to cover the gaps:

After all that, here they are painted!

While there's no uniform here, I've tried to use a set of reoccurring colours. The outfit designs are vaguely inspired by old GW paint schemes and Tank Girl comic books. I've tried to introduce variety by varying the skin tones a bit, although it might not be obvious.

So, join me next time for more brightly-coloured Necromunda loonies. Or possibly not. I've got a lot of fantasy miniatures stripped and ready to go, and I've just bought some goblin green paint...