Welcome to the Wasteland

With the quarantine in full effect and Games Workshop closed, I’ve mostly been focusing my hobby efforts on Fallout Wasteland Warfare.  I am only going to show part of what I have painted up this week because most of the rest of it, is not quite finished yet and will look more impressive once they are done.  It is also allows me to show off the plastic sculpts from the Starter Set and then show what resin looks like next week.  Some of the minis I am going to show off have been varnished and look nicely matte and others have not and are a bit shiny.  I’ll try to mention that with each mini and I’ll explain why that is a little later on as well.

As you can see right away, the face is pretty rough on Nora.  There just isn’t much detail there to guide your paintbrush.  I usually try to paint eyes fearlessly and will try to put eyes on any mini I can, but I tried here and it just didn’t work so I tried to shade them instead.  As you can see, I also painted her in TMM style as you’d probably expect since that is all I paint.  Well, she may end up being the only mini I paint that way for reasons you’ll see in a little bit.  I started with Nora because she is used in most of the scenarios in the box so I know she’d be someone I needed to get done.  Overall, she just looks alright and part of that is due to how soft the details are in the sculpt.

The bases proved an interesting challenge for me as I wasn’t entirely sure what everything was or how they should be painted and Modiphius does not provide the 360 degree images that Games Workshop does unfortunately.  So I got some practice painting wood, brick, and metal pieces on these minis.  It wasn’t until I took these pictures that I realized that that middle piece of metal should actually be another wooden plank!  It is humbling to paint something so different as I quickly realized I have plenty to learn about painting in the post-apocalypse.

Another miniature I painted up is the Enslaved Tech who is a bit shiny as I have not varnished him yet.  Once I get the chance to do that, I will, add some rust effects to his gun and the metal pieces on his base.  The sculpt is kind of odd as he kind of looks like he is into S&M but he is meant to represent someone that was enslaved by Super Mutants or recently freed by the survivors.  He has some weirdly sculpted details on his pants that I had trouble painting well and I probably could have put more time into but I started to get a bit frustrated with the plastic sculpts and decided to paint a few more of the plastic minis like this one that is not cheap or easy to get in resin and then switch over to resin minis from here on out.  More on that in a bit!

The last plastic pieces I painted (which are varnished this time) are the Super Mutant and Super Mutant Hound.  I did the Hound first and tried to figure out how to paint mutant skin.  I’ve seen a lot of people paint it in different ways but I referenced images from the game and I think I’ve gotten a lot closer to what mutant skin looks like in-game than most people have achieved thus far so I’m quite proud of that.  The hound is a nice sculpt in plastic and is easy to paint.  It is the only one in the Starter Set that I felt like I painted fairly well and am proud of.

The Super Mutant also has a nicely painted base though I need to add some tufts to it to round it out.  He is waiting for a second round of varnish because I tried out some new enamel paints for rust.  In a sense, the Super Mutant was really one big experiment and I was fine with that because of the terrible face sculpt that really lacks detail.  I learned a lot working on this guy.  For example, I should have picked a duller color for the mutant’s armor (that blue is too bright) and I don’t think I blended the rust quite as well as I could have.  What is crazy is the AK Interactive Enamel paints don’t really fully show up for a day or so and you can use white spirit to move the paint around on the mini or adjust your application.  So you have to be patient with the paint and be willing to give it time to dry so you can make any necessary adjustments.  You also have to varnish your acrylic paints before you use enamel paint so it is definitely a much different and longer process.  This mini is my first every attempt at NMM which wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be looks fairly good once you apply rust effects on top of it.  For future minis, I will try to make the lighter rust color blend better with the darker color so everything is a bit more muted.  As it stands now, he is just waiting on a final varnish and then some tufts and he is done.

After getting a bit annoyed by the lack of detail in the plastic, I decided to order myself resin sculpts so I can move on from the plastic ones.  As it turns out, you can buy Core Sets for Mutants and Survivors and not really need to paint the plastic ones in the Starter Set so that is exactly what I purchased.  Modiphius sells resin versions of the box set but with their webstore closed, I had better luck on eBay and Amazon.  I scooped up the following sets recently:

So yeah, I’m well stocked on Fallout stuff now and it will probably be my main hobby focus for the next couple of weeks.  I don’t have too far to go to get enough painted up for a game (minus terrain of course) so I’m excited at the prospect of getting some more gaming done in the near future and I’m curious to see how I like the rules before I commit to the game fully.  Expect an even bigger and better update next week as I show off the resin stuff I’ve painted!