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That reblog about cultural homophobia in South Asian countries imposed by colonizers really got me going coz I’ve been reading about the history of queer and trans people in my country before the British Empire fucked it up and I remember this part from the Devdutt Pattanaik book where he talks about how when the British came here they were horrified by the fact that transgender people were treated with respect and honour and were in the highest echelons of the king’s durbars and homosexuality was pretty much treated as a part of the circle of life with so many stories of both Muslim and Hindu poets writing about their love affairs with men and so much lesbian poetry was lost to time and destroyed after the East India company started taking over that we were treated as the “savages” and the concerted effort to “simplify” the complexity and variety of Hinduism and its stories to their benefit and impose their cultural homophobia through law ( Sec 377) and their narrow minded shitty philosophy which resonates in the current mindset of many Indians  today transgender is a “third gender”, homosexuality is a mental illness . I don’t kid when I say that we are a Victorian society with wifi 

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Not really ready to write up the LONG story on this thing’s completion, but, here you go: a Maghariba Guard, which is a Haqqislam TAG in Infinity.

God I love clear bases.

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It was a nightmare and a long time painting my first few large-scale infantry models, but these three folks from Infinity might just be my best miniatures to this day.

Infinity’s a lot of fun.

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Hey everyone! Sorry about my absence; I kind of fell away from posting here for a number of reasons. Long-form discussion on model-making seems better placed on Medium, and usually I just want to share pretty pictures of my miniatures.

Here’s a pair of PHR Type 1 Walkers that I recently finished. They differ from my other Type 1s because I magnetized the arms! The plastic box set comes with additional arms and I realized that this was a golden opportunity. I have another pair of chassises to do this way, sometime.

That being said, magnetization was a nightmare and it’s almost entirely my fault. I’ll have to plan better next time. Namely: the pegs were about as big as my magnets, and said Magnets kept falling off of or out of the pegs in one form or another. This was a failure in planning on my part and I’ll have to just glue the magnets onto a trimmed-down peg next time.

But hey, they look kinda cool regardless, right?

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So, this is the latest thing I've finished. It's a 90s Northern Gear from the Heavy Gear universe.

I wanted to emulate Heavy Gear 2's cover art with the pose, and Heavy Gear 1's cover art paint scheme. I didn't get particularly close in either of those directions, but I'm still pretty happy with the result.

This was actually a pretty significant custom-job. Originally, this Gear was carrying a rocket launcher, but in my attempt to emulate the cover art, I determined I needed to build it an assault rifle. But of course, it doesn't come with one. So I made one. The AR you see is made of a Battle of Zycanthus assault rifle, some 40k bolter ammo box (plus a bit of plastic sheet), and a Panzer mk 4 barrel. I pinned the barrel into the assault rifle's original barrel, then used a ton of glue, since having a bulge at the connection point would have looked good anyway.

The Gear came with four puny bits of pewter that I couldn't for the life of me interpret for a long time. I eventually realized that two of them were spotlights, and two of them were...lumps of pewter that vaguely resembled sci fi sensors. I glued one onto the side opposite of the gun, to give more visual interest to that side of the Gear.

To add to the visual interest of the Gear (and to replace a confusing cylinder that I think is one of the over-the-shoulder weapons that is on the HG2 cover art), I mounted a 40k rocket pod to the left forearm. This made more sense to me than...whatever was originally there. I figured the huge assault rifle was for general anti-vehicle work, and the rocket pod could be a sort of last-resort barrage weapon. Thinking about it now, what the Gear probably needs is an anti-infantry weapon, but Gears are weird and I was watching way too much VOTOMS while working on this thing.

Have I ever talked about how Heavy Gear's main mechs are a huge ripoff of VOTOMS? Look at those foot wheels. I think it's something they admitted themselves. But anyway.

Painting was pretty straightforward. I used a tan and then I washed with black. The black wash made it much lower-saturation than I perhaps intended; I've recently bought a dark brown wash that I'll probably use in the future. Still, it makes for a fairly realistic desert tone. The metal bits were done in a metallic mid-tone, which also received the wash. Working on some minis recently, I've realized that washes really help tone down the shininess of metals. For better or worse. (Here it's for better.)

The brown I used for the dust-bagged joints in the legs actually complimented the pale tan really well. I just noticed it very late in the build. It's a shame that said bagging only appears in the legs.

I struggled a lot to apply weathering powder effects here and it shows. I kind of forgot how to drybrush. The "dry" part is more important than you think. Use UNTHINNED paint, soak it into your brush, but then wipe off as much as you can. Then swipe it aggressively along edges. (You will want to use a bad/dead/cheap brush, because this will completely destroy your brush.) If the paint's too wet, it smears transparently and looks like paint. If there's too much paint on your brush, you get sludgey effects instead of coloured edges. If you drag like a regular brush, you risk creating lines and streaks of the drybrushed colour instead of "worn" edges.

I'm trying to find another solution for applying "soot" to my models. I have a Tamiya weathering powder palette with "oil smear", which looks like oil, not soot. So I applied it, regretted it, and then tried to apply charcoal as a dry pigment. That didn't work either, hence the weird spackling of big black particles everywhere. It looks okay on the gun arm's shoulder hit, but. I'm not very impressed with my work there.

As far as Camera Glows go, purple makes for a good base colour to apply pink highlights onto. You should still do a little speck of white on your lens, at minimum, which I didn't do. With light background colours, you should also make some effort to bracket the light source with a darker colour to help it appear brighter. This is something else that I didn't do.

The base was an interesting experiment. I used flock, but instead of white glue I used old CA glue (so it would dry more slowly). This results in an excellent bond, but you're going to get a glossy finish if you're not being absolutely thorough with the flock you sprinkle onto it. Plus, as I discovered later, CA glue dries *thick* and if you're not careful, your mini will kind of hover above the flock you've laid down. I'm still not good at flock.

As of writing this, I'm working way too much on a Dropzone Commander PHR army. I finished this a bit into working on that army. It's yellow and blue. Stay tuned for that.

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Probably the last Warmachine mini I’ll do, because I hate Warmachine. Infinity seems kinda interesting, though - I’ll probably sell my unpainted minis for Infinity stuff.

This thing was a nightmare, too. Some 14 parts, only 3 points where gluing differently poses it rather than just makes it look like a disaster. Lots of areas that needed full paint coverage that would not get it fi you painted it disassembled first.

I learned a lot about mounting pieces for painting while working on this. (Notably: use big beefy electronics clamps and then just touch up the bite areas later.)

Some fast and loose fire effects on this, but they turned out pretty well. I’m impressed. (Just put yellow and Ferrari red on a wet palette. Red base, black at the ends of the flames, yellow at the bases, and then blended paint for the mid area.)

I learned that black wash on pale colours doesn’t make them TOO much paler; much better than trying to guess the proper colour to wash them with. (My last crotch banner looked like it was made of caramel....)

Base went really, really well. “Painted” it with white glue, dumped a brown gravel flock mix on it.Then after it dried I soaked some superglue into spots and poured on some grass flock. The grass flock holds better than the non-superglued gravel, of course.

Onto some quick kitbashed buildings next...

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So uh, this is done.

First time I’ve ever pinned anything. Pinning is actually an excellent tool and I highly recommend that everyone at least tries it. Use actual pins and cut them with wire cutters. Drill holes wider than your pin if you’re worried about alignment. (Look up "pinvise", I use one of those.)

I painted this almost entirely in pieces, held up on toothpicks. It gets infuriating late in the project when the putty starts giving up and you have to put your goddamn fingers all over everything anyway, but it lets you avoid the inherent fury in being unable to bend your brush into right angles.

I failed again to jewel the cockpit, but the white highlights helped. I need to use more water in my paint so I can blend. The white glossy effect on the top panel was entirely accidental - the paint seems to have smeared during topcoating. I should probably give a week before topcoating in the future or something.

Using multiple colours of wash is okay. Just treat each wash as a separate "paint". You may want to paint all washes in one go, though. Washes need to coat the entire model to avoid paint rings and thus look proper. Thus, if you wait for one wash to dry and then apply the other adjacent to it, you'll probably get ugly effects at the transition area.

I used some Tamiya weathering powders here. Soot on the AC10 barrel (the shoulder gun), silver on the rest of the mech to suggest stripped paint. Also kind of worked as a highlight. I didn't highlight/drybrush. I should try it again sometime, maybe.

Yellow and purple compliment each other, but it still feels a little jovial for Battletech's atmosphere. I'll stick to meaner paint schemes in the future. Maybe ashen grey for the secondary colour next time, or red...

I didn’t do anything too special with the base. Pinning for the first time and using powders again was adventurous enough for me. “Front” hex face painted white because I hate confusion at game time.

The base is wooden, the model is pewter. It’s slightly top-heavy, but it’s only really unstable towards the back hex face. Weight distribution sacrificed to ensure that the arms wouldn’t spill over the base too much. I’m pretty happy with its general “volume distribution”.

Some recommended listening, out of nowhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf0e-Vwx7BQ

Next model up is the Avatar of Menoth.

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Line of Contact.net is Dead

When I wasn't looking - which was apparently since 2015 - lineofcontact.net went down.

It was a huge Steel Battalion fansite that was completely in depth about what the game was. It was a place from which I built a daydream about a game that I never got to play, a game that embodied almost everything I've ever wanted from the mecha genre.

You can still access it - sort of - through the Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20140111061045/http://lineofcontact.net/

You can also watch a few recordings of online matches through Youtube. If you like game history or whatever you probably ought to download those before they disappear too.

EDIT: Oh man, also, a brief look at an archived page shows that the training videos they put up are still up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX5WeKsgzdw

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Warmachine is Pretty Clunky

A few disorganized thoughts about excesses in Warmachine's ruleset. I have been playing once a week for two months or so. Maybe my opinions will change as time goes on.

Lots of particulars written on cards give small edges to players. They are exhausting to keep track of in their entirety.

Reminding each other of +2s and -2s to every 2d6+(stat) roll we make is just...too much.

I don’t know if I like the first-check-defense, then-check-armor system as it stands. There’s reasonable rationale behind it - guns may be more or less destructive, but aim might be better or worse. However, it’s not implemented in a simulationist way, and thus the labour behind it feels unnecessary. There’s depth to having two checks that some units are safer against and some units are better at making - but it’s still fairly intensive and thus it slows the game down. Instead of adding a number and 2-4 dice together and comparing it against defense/armour, it would make more sense to simply roll 1-5 different dice depending on the unit’s rating, and then comparing the resultant total to the opposing unit’s statline. It would also reduce the minutiae between faction models when the game already adds minutiae through the per-unit card rules.

Did you know that there are technically three or four steps to a model reduced to 0 hit points actually dying? Normally you don't consider any of it, BUT there are several models with passive abilities that point to different parts of that "death", and thus the "order" matters. I don’t field any models or play against any players that make thorough use of on-death abilities, so I can’t comment on how much any of that even matters.

Sometime in the 80s, someone decided that every dice-rolling game needs horrible grappling rules. Thus, Warmachine’s throwing rules are bad. Warjacks can throw models up to their size (fine), it takes a strength contest if the opponent is not disabled in some way (fine), you roll to check how far you can throw them (why not use the roll-over value from successful strength contests?), if they didn't hit anything they Scatter (at least this one almost makes sense), and Scatter can result in the unit ending up closer to you than when you started the throw (what the fuck?).

A case study on card minutiae: here’s Ashen Veil.

Ashen Veil is a passive buff that gives the model evasion against ranged attacks and makes enemy units within 2" less accurate in ranged and melee. It's a fairly small buff (+2 evasion added to usually 10, which must be beaten on a 2d6+~6 roll) and only certain units in certain factions get it. And you have to check for this and tell your opponent if/when it applies. And it doesn't apply if your opponent's attacking model has Fire Immunity (which few models have outside of the faction that heavily features this ability). And your army could have any number of unique effects like this on individual models throughout your ~20 models. And no buffs with the same name are cumulative, so a cloud of ash cannot get thicker when several sources of ash are nearby one another.

Ashen Veil is unrealistic, too - why do ranged attacks suffer BOTH penalties when enemies are up close, but melee attacks only suffer one? Why does this difficulty in aiming only apply to enemies? As mentioned before, why doesn’t the veil of ash get thicker when several veiling units are closer together? And lastly, if the goal is to create the option of making "zones" of buffs there are faster ways to do it. 

You could have a single buff like this, let it cause more accuracy issues when models are clustered, and make it the ONLY buff affecting aim rolls that the faction can gather.

It would create about as much room for strategy (the game has "spray" and "AOE" weapons to exploit clusters of enemy units as it is) while minimizing the labour for all players involved.

Battletech is big and sloppy and laborious, but at least every roll and every rule simulates something in Battletech's world. Warmachine seeks to increase its skill ceiling largely by overwhelming a player with factors to consider during a match. It has an interesting effect in that larger-point-total games are explicitly more difficult games to play - but otherwise, it’s simply laborious, and it contributes nothing interesting to the game.

This reminds me of another issue. Remind me to write about Warmachine’s floundering between being a board game and being a miniatures game, some time.

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Third Warjack I finish. It’s a Crusader, as fielded by the Protectorate of Menoth.

I’m really happy with how this turned out. I can see the problems, but I’m finally at this point in painting and model-building where like...I know what (and where) I do wrong, and I know from this point on it’s just a matter of practice.

That point when I know I just have practice ahead of me, and/or learning that I can handle...that is where my insecurities about my work dissolve. That is when I start putting out my fastest work, and at the same (or climbing!) level of quality, too.

If all goes well, you’ll see miniatures posts more often from here on out. Stay tuned.

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Exhausted by my attempts to paint things. Started a thread on twitter; help if you can.

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Here's the tank I finished. I actually got it done before the infantry I posted last week.

White basecoat, unpainted past there(!). Washed with black, painted certain panels blue.

A bit too much topcoat, so the model looks a little...blurry. Oops.

Splotchy flat grey over flat black + light brown wash makes for quick and decent asphalt.

This tank is magnetized. Pretty proud of getting that done well and on my first try.

Plan for this (and a few hover vehicles I'm working on) is for them to be police drones. The infantry are the Resistance.

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I haven’t updated in far too long. Here are some 25mm infantry.

They’re fucking puny and I didn’t basecoat well enough. This became the biggest source of my frustration throughout the project.

I tried doing Non Metallic Metal on the visors but...those visors are each about 2mm at their widest points. There are tiny glimpses of it, if you look at the models at certain angles.

Pretty proud of how well those barrel glows turned out. I just kind of slapped them on late in the project.

ESPECIALLY when you’re painting things this small, you gotta do certain things. Lay down flock before you start painting, IF you intend to paint your flock. You can always paint some flock now and then lay down the not-getting-paint flock later.

First time I posted any progress on these guys beyond basecoating was June 24, so...jeez, I spent more than a month on these brave people.

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Thanks again for reading. Next time I post, I'll share my Tokugawa (painted in colours for my homebrew project) - and after that, you'll likely be treated to some 25mm infantry.

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And here’s the Commando I mentioned in my last post.

Trying to figure out how I can highlight the existence of laser barrels and spotlights. Black outline + bright colour inside is probably my best bet; it's more or less what I did on the Battlemaster's missile pod.

Sawdust with sparse grass makes for excellent "drylands" basing.

Proud of the (reverse-wash?) I did on the Commando's eyes. Basecoat was white enamel, so I loaded my brush with alcohol and brushed away the red that I splotched on its eyes. The result was a white highlight amidst a red background, giving the appearance of glowing. The red itself is not very evident at all, however - so this mostly just looks like white eyes on a weirdly bloody background. Perhaps just a consequence of the Commando's visor blotting out external lighting; but if you have ideas to improve this effect in the future, do let me know!

This was completed concurrently with the Battlemaster, as will the next 'Mech that I will reveal - the Hunchback. The Hunchback was a much more rushed paint job than the other two, unfortunately.

I'm still struggling with washes and drybrushing. I'm going to try some new techniques in the future.

As always, thanks for reading! Comments, reblogs, and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

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It’s #miniaturemonday on Twitter, so now is the day I upload my finally-complete Battlemaster. Some build details below.

Discovered that like CA glue, modelling putty gets worse over time as well. Bought a tube of some Tamiya putty and it treated me well. Always give your putty a day to dry, add more than you need, and then shape the dried mass via gentle sanding.

Though I wouldn't recommend wasting them on this (and I would strongly recommend making sure the paint is dry before trying), inking pens are a good way to get pitch black into very specific spots of your miniature. I did this around the missiles inside the SRM rack to the left of the Battlemaster's head. They might look slightly shiny before your topcoat, but it'll work out in the end. The main issue may be that the outlines are very defined on both sides. Maybe not preferable if you don't want your mini to look cartoony; maybe solveable by brushing the desired areas after putting down the ink.

The most important thing I learned was that thinning your paints is not the only thing you need to do to get an even paint job that doesn't drown details. The next most important painting tip in the entire hobby is load your brush sparsely. The more paint you have on your brush when you touch your model, the more the paint will form "rings" as dries, and the more it'll flood into bulgey masses on your model. I can explain some mechanisms at play here sometime, if people are interested.

Combined some sawdust with my sanded-foam grass flock. It didn't turn out great, but it worked much better with my Commando. (Pics once that's finally sealed.)

Did some very fine detailing here (by my standards), which I was proud of. The secret to absurd miniature details is to stabilize the brush and the model as well as you can. Stabilizing the model is easy - mount it on a plinth, or just sit it (on its plinth) on the table. Stabilizing your hand and the brush is harder. What I do is lay my forearm and/or elbow on the table (or the table edge) to stabilize my arm. Then, I use my other hand's fingers against the brush's to stabilize the brush's tip.

Got a kinda cool "edge glow" effect with my attempt at cockpit glass jewelling, but didn't get enough on-surface glow, IMO. This is because of the flooding issue from earlier. I'll do better next time. Maybe even do the lighter colour first, then muck up the edges with black...

I'm...really tired for various reasons, but hopefully this was worth the read. Thanks for stopping by!

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I have finally finished my Ginkei kit.

This was a monster of a project by my own standards. Lots of small parts, lots of superglue-only connections, and, well, it was just very, very intimidating because it was clearly a kit for good modellers. 40USD on sale for 20USD back when I got it.

I don't think I'm a very good scale modeller. It's part of the reason why I'm sticking to miniatures.

Early in the project I was having enormous issues with the glue-only joints on the wings. It was then that I looked up "does super glue expire?" Guess what: it does.

Cyano-acrylate glue (CA glue, super glue, etc.) gets worse over time. It dries more slowly and it bonds worse. I was using CA glue that was several years old and wondering why the hell nothing was sticking together/drying. I bought new glue and that helped a lot.

Now the Ginkei's sitting upside-down while I let glue dry within its base. I threw some metal junk into the underside of the base because it could use some stabilization.

I suppose I’ve done well enough on this that I’ll be proud to display it, and not just because I managed to finish it.