Some Soviet Heavy Metal

Howdy folks,

As always I’m hoping all is well in your respective worlds and the challenges of the past long weekend are becoming a memory. 

Given the events in the Ukraine I have been focusing primarily on painting up Marvel Crisis Protocol figures, they have been a lot of fun to paint, and have certainly challenged my technique. However, I thought I would start to work towards my modern mojo, and I recently tackled some T72’s.

Admittedly they were quite quick to paint up and I kept their colours and markings very generic…if nothing, they will find home in the struggles of the 1980s Cold War or the imagi-nations of the coming conflicts in the Afropian region. Having painted up 10 or so T72s to date, I thought I would go with a bit more of a bright tone to this latest addition. I liked how they turned out and they are definitely in line with some of my previous Soviet additions, but also very much in line with the variance in tone and shade that I had seen with some of online references.

Enjoy the pics!

2022 Lead Mountain Climb

Painted

15mm               30, +6

28mm+             23

 

Bought             10

Progress          +43

Here we go X-Force!

I know, its a little derivative…

Hello everyone,

I hope all is well on your particular front. Those of you Ontario way, I hope you and yours are safe and sound, given the events of this long weekend it has been quite challenging for some. If you are reading this on the tail end of the weekend, then hopefully you are sharing good fortune and have had power and some normalcy returned. 

As the title of todays post says, we’re talking X-force baby! Now to be honest I did not partake in the super hero comics when I was a kid, mostly historical or WW2 for this kid. However, thanks to the MCU and the success of those movies, they certainly helped bring MC Protocol to my door. So, all that to say, characters like Cable and Domino are relatively new to me. A huge shoutout to my main painting mentor Sorastro for his first takes on these figures…very inspirational and some great elements.

Cable was a real challenge to paint up, the model is very dynamic and the shield required a certain amount of faith and OCD for me to get through. The various armour components really gave me a chance to test some new NMM techniques. Not to mention, I really liked some of the ideas that Sorastro brought to it, specifically the smoldering cape. Also stealing his idea of showing some wear/heat on Cable's weapon, I took a look at my photo albums and got a great reference from Forward Observations Group of a suppressor showing great heat damage/wear after a day at the range. The colours were really neat to see...so I tried to emulate that.

 

As for Domino, she was a fairly straight forward figure with some great dynamic action. It was a challenge to decide on an overall colour scheme, again there were some great internet images of previous comic book covers and I had the artwork that came with the packaging. In the end I settled on a mix of a couple of covers. I really liked the action around her riding a piece of concrete hurtling through the air, and the explosion was a great test of colour...I really liked how the heat of the explosion shows on the underside.

I hope you enjoy the pics.

2022 Lead Mountain Climb

Painted

15mm               24

28mm+             23. +2

 

Bought             10

Progress          +37

A few more Afropia thoughts...

Hello everyone,

I hope you are all doing well and as the weather starts to turn to shades of Spring and Summer...I hope you get some time and relaxation outside.

As soon as I finalized my last post on Afropia thoughts, I had a few more come to mind over the next day or so...as well, I had the chance to see an older post from Rabbits In My Basement on his imagi-nation experience and that got me further thinking on my initial 'hot takes' on my Afropian nations. You can check out his post via the link, but with post-colonial elements in my country overview, I wanted to be sure that I am not just re-hashing what has already been or worse minimizing significant histories for countries that have lived the worst of best and wrong intentions. There's alot of these histories that are horrendously depressing, and in the end I want to make sure that I'm focusing on the gaming aspect and not being locked into specific historic lines.

Not to mention, my main objective is to get miniatures on the table and not necessarily focusing on strict historical accuracy. So I guess I'll maintain the idea of 'post-colonial' in terms of working towards a model for size of the countries (i.e. populace and military forces). And like the name I've chosen, there will be elements from each of these continents.

 

I think my next steps that I identified earlier still stand...all I need to do is refine, and I will probably stick to 1-2 country profiles per post.

All in all, just a tracking of my random thoughts