A farewell to arms (and legs, and forcibly grafted prosthetics)

It's a minor celebration today. About this time nine years ago, I built a small handful of miniatures that I thought represented everyday servitors in the Imperium of Man. I've just finished the final 3 of the original set, plus another from Forge World that I added later. This means it took not quite a decade to complete what turned out to be a 17 man* squad. Embarrassingly it's probably one of my quicker challenges.

The characters in the above photo are based on the following miniatures: on the far left is an Inquisitorial servitor from Forge World, now available as part of Solomon Lok's retinue, third from the left is a mildly adjusted Scrap Thrall from the Privateer Press Warmachine range, and the other two are both conversions of out-of-print bad guys from Rackham's Confrontation.

I've talked about my converted civilian servitors before, sharing some of the other miniatures as they were finished, and going into a little more detail on the subject. The original post can be found here, with updates here, here, here and here.

But who can really be bothered to click on all those links? So below are all the completed miniatures from this project, including the two Track Team members that I added after starting this blog.

Another four painted models drops my Addiction Challenge score down into the seventies. This means at the current rate of progress it will be roughly another three and half years before I'm allowed to buy any new miniatures.

In reality I don't know if I can hold out that long – which is kind of the point with addictions – so I have a plan to speed up my progress. It's basically about dropping my already bad paint quality even further, and batch painting a whole bunch of miniatures using only the most basic techniques. It's hard to believe, but the miniatures on this blog are likely to get even worse in the coming months.

ADDICTION CHALLENGE
REMAINING: 78

*Man, woman, cyborg, bio-mechanical victim of a brutal regime.

Meat for the grinder

Imagine a really skilled painter. A painter who specialises in tiny plastic toy soldiers, just over an inch high*. Now imagine you stripped out all of that painter's skill and technique, removing every shred of their artistry, and replaced it, instead, with the crazed fumblings of a middle-aged man-child.

Well, imagine no more. Welcome to Torva Tenebris.

It's been nearly a month since I posted anything, so I'm slinging up a couple of pictures to show what I've been doing.

I've finished another two of the miniatures that have been sitting around on my desk. They're both inhabitants of my Imperial hive city, Kruenta Karoliina Arx Rotunda. The kind of characters you might see if you were unlucky enough to have to visit the place**.

The first is a bounty hunter or hired gun that I constructed back here. I've used a paint scheme I was eager to try out, where the slightly battered armour panels are a bright, vivid colour, but most of the rest of the model is muted and knocked back. 

My painting technique (or lack thereof) is about trying to convey a quick impression of what my characters might look like. I sometimes think of it as a middle ground between the bright, primary coloured approach of something like Warhammer 40,000 second edition, and the don't-worry-too-much-about-painting-within-the-lines style of Blanchitsu. But with all of that aforementioned skill stripped out.

Now if you thought the painting on the first chap was bad, wait till you see this next guy. He's meant to be an officer in some kind of Imperial military facility, and was based on a character from a Rogue Trooper comic. You can read about that process, and see an unpainted picture of him here. I originally intended to lavish attention on this model, to really go to town. I was going to showcase the very best of my ability. But every tiny mistake I made, somehow seemed five times worse after I'd tried to correct it, and it wasn't long before the model looked like an old pantomime dame wearing too much make-up. So I changed tack, and decided just to get him finished as quickly as I could. Being able to move on to the next model has become increasingly important ever since I began my Addiction Challenge.

Talking of which, here's the new score:

ADDICTION CHALLENGE
REMAINING: 82 


*The toys are just over an inch high. Not the painter.
**Yes, I am aware it's not real.