Tuesday 20 December 2016

Nananananananana Batman!

Way back when Knight models were first talking about doing a set of rules for gaming Batman on the tabletop, I had a Spanish-speaking friend translate the beta rules for me. They looked pretty interesting, and so around the time my daughter was born when they released the finished rule book I ordered one (also because by ordering when it was first released I got a Limited Edition Alfred miniature), and told myself that I'd paint up some proxies from my stash of Heroclix to try the rules out before investing in the boutique range of miniatures. Then I went to Salute and bought a ton of Knight Models miniatures in order to get a free Limited Edition Red Hood Joker, because that's the way the world works.

A short couple of years later, Pow! Here's that originally selected proxy Batman:


Wham! Including a shaky freehand Batman logo! I drew it in first with a soft pencil, because I am not good at freehand. I was briefly tempted to use the old school 'bat in a yellow oval that would literally paint a target onto the wearer's chest' but ended up going with a more modern black on grey.

It's not a bad sculpt for a Heroclix figure (which are generally fairly variable) - the musculature is nice, as is the drapery on the cape, although his eyes are a little squiff and took a couple of goes to get to a level I was happy with.


Zap! Bat-cape! I was originally planning on painting him with a black cape starkly edge-highlighted with a very dark blue, but got a bit carried away and ended up going for an overall dark blue cape, from a black basecoat up to Dark Reaper mixed with Caledor Blue (one of the good things about comic characters is that over the years there have been so many different costume variations that you're spoiled for choice when it comes to canon!)

[side note - I spent some time picking out the different bricks on his crumbling gargoyle base with various different coloured layers of paint and shades, and you can barely see it on the finished miniature]

Batman might hate guns, but he'll happily kick a mook while he's drawing a gun so that he shoots his own dick off it seems.

Finishing old tall dark and brooding brings the Tally to:

55 vs 342 = -287

Recently I've been thinking about making terrain a lot (in part due to infovore.tim posting stuff on instagram), but to do so I'd need to clear my hobby desk off of the hundreds of pots of paint currently cluttering it up, but if I did that I know I'd then end up wasting a bunch of time digging for the right paint to finish the half-finished miniatures also cluttering the desk up... I guess I need to set a line in the sand, choose the miniatures that I plan to finish in the next fortnight,and then clear the desk off to build terrain once they're done and dusted. However, realistically, I'd probably finish two of the miniatures, and then get an irresistable urge to start something else, and so the cycle continues...

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