Kimera Models – Lokaris VIII

Well, this week did not go as expected hobby-wise at all and I worked on a number of different things as well so this post will be a bit longer than usual.

First up, I decided to give Batwoman a whirl and it didn’t go well. I talked about the size of the miniature previously and while she is close to Fallout’s scale, I started on her face which is really just her chin and lips and I could not get her lips right after three or four tries. I guess Fallout faces are more pronounced because I don’t have much trouble with them but I couldn’t get hers looking right and decided to throw in the towel. Its a shame as I’d enjoy working on these minis from a subject matter perspective but I tried to get going on this one and failed.

I realized that this is the cycle that repeats quite often in the hobby for me. I branch out and try something new and it fails or I don’t like it for whatever reason and then I go back to focusing on the things I do like for a while. The nice part is that it means I can spend money on other things that I’ve already started on because I was worried about how I could afford to get many Batman miniatures when I already have other things I’d like to buy. When you think about it, I have the following “projects” ongoing currently:

• Display Painting – Lokaris and Monsterpocalypse Diorama (I have two other projects wait to get started once these are done or at least further along)
• Fallout – Miniatures and Terrain – I’ve got a sizeable backlog of both waiting to be completed.
• Hellboy – Miniatures and Terrain – I’ve got a sizeable backlog of miniatures and a little more to go on terrain before I can knock that off this list.

That is more than enough for any hobbyist, especially a slow painting one like myself. Of course, this never stops me from trying new ideas out but sometimes I feel a sense of relief and renewed focus when the idea doesn’t pan out, which is exactly what happened here. In a weird way, this worked out about as well as it could. Will I ever learn or change my ways? Probably not! Temptations are many in this hobby and I love variety in most things in life and our hobby is no exception.

With Batwoman not working out, I watched quite a lot of scale modelling videos on Youtube for inspiration and decided to try a couple of different things. The first was something I saw where people add wood grain texture to scratch builds. I wondered if it could work on MDF so I got something at the local art store that is good for this purpose. It is called a wire brush and it seemed easy enough to use. You basically just scratch up the MDF (or balsa wood) in a somewhat random manner using this “brush”. Unfortunately, MDF doesn’t hold its shape well and kind crumbles/chips apart. So even though the wood is a little scored in the picture below, its really hard to get deep enough grooves/wood grain lines to make a difference when you paint. In the example below, you can see the piece of Farmer’s Fence where I tried it at the top and then a fully painted piece of fence in the middle. There’s really almost no visual difference and so this idea isn’t ultimately worth pursuing.

It was worth a try anyway and the tool might come in handy in the future, hopefully!

Still feeling inspired to do some scratch work, I moved onto the Hellboy “moving diorama” idea and I decided to try and carve some bricks out of foam for the first time. In hindsight, this is easy work and I don’t know why I never bothered to try it sooner. What I came up with is far from perfect and I certainly learned some lessons. The first is that I didn’t do a great job of keeping the bricks’ size uniform like I had hoped. Scratch work is a little tedious and its certainly repetitive and I found myself going too fast and imperfections happening as a result. Its also not as easy to cut straight lines in foam as I expected. The knife blade occasionally strays from the path you want/expect unless you really press it against the ruler you’re using as a straight edge. I tried my best to fix mistakes I made but the wall definitely has imperfections in it. I also did some other things like removing some bricks and pushing some in so there’s variation in depth. Its kind of hard to tell with just foam but once they’re painted it will become clearer and should look nice.

I certainly learned a few things from this and I feel a bit more empowered to try and scratch build in the future. Truthfully, I think sometimes I fear “failure” when working on terrain and I need to keep taking chances and trying to learn things so that I improve at it. If you develop your skills, there’s so many things you can do and without those skills you’re much more limited. I think I’m skilled at figure painting but can learn TONS more about terrain and scratch building so I will try and push my skills as much as I can in the future. Buying more modeling books and trying things out I see there would probably help so that will be a goal especially as my birthday and Christmas approach and I need gift ideas.

The next step for the wall is to get some spackle to try and recreate grout in the cracks. I’ve never done this before but it seems to be fairly easy. I haven’t had a chance to go out and buy some but once I do, I’ll pick this project back up and see what else I can do with it. Depending on the results, I can always try to make another brick well and see if I can’t do better too.

With that done, my attention turned towards the title of today’s post. I had previously taken a break from Lokaris because the wolf pelt worried me a bit. Wolves are really tough to paint realistically and I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing when I worked on this one. My initial idea for this mini was to paint a white wolf which would be quite visually striking. However, I had second thoughts because a good rule of thumb with miniatures is to make the face brighter than the rest of the mini to draw the viewer’s eye to it. If I painted a white wolf, that would draw more attention than the cool-looking helmet which I definitely don’t want. So instead, I decided to go in the opposite direction because I didn’t want the wolf to overpower the miniature and I also realized that gray/black wolves look pretty cool.

I used this photo from Pinterest as inspiration and reference. The more I worked on the wolf though, I realized that the wolf can’t really be black and look good on a miniature. You need contrast so the more I worked on it, the more contrast it has and the less dark it appears overall. It took quite a few goes on some parts but I think it is getting there, for the most part.

I also got the dagger near the wolf pelt painted which was straightforward and enjoyable to work on. None of the photos show it terribly well as it seems to be in the shadows in both pictures above but hopefully it shows up better from other angles in the future. I’m starting to work on the metal parts on that arm/shoulder now and once I get those done, I can attach the hand and weapon so this mini will really be coming together. I’d like to get this guy done in the next couple of months because MMSI is coming up and I’m starting to lean towards exhibiting and bringing this miniature with me. I’ll talk more about that as I get further along with the project though. I’ve been taking as much time as I can to do my best work and I don’t want that to change. I also want to get back to working on Monsterpocalypse soon as I’ve been reminded how much I enjoy the style of those minis and have started contemplating more projects beyond the diorama in the future. But I don’t want to do that until Lokaris is finished, if possible so hopefully that will also keep me motivated.

Since I’ve decided to change directions and not paint any more Batman miniatures from Knight Models, I had a little bit of spending money freed up and so I ordered something pretty big and cool for Arkham Horror: Third Edition and it is coming from Budapest, no less! With the ongoing tariff situation, I have avoided buying anything internationally since our illustrious leader was elected but this is something I really need and so I decided to brave it. The company I ordered from scared me a little bit when they provided info a day after I placed the order that US Customs might delay the order for weeks and there’s several things I might have to do to actually get my order. Fortunately, as of today, it is in Indianapolis (a 2.5-3 hour drive away), cleared customs in no time, and is coming on Monday so that is very exciting. I will definitely share what it is next week as I think board game fans might find it interesting, especially friend of the site, Spalanz, who also enjoys Arkham Horror: Third Edition.

I’ve also been formulating some other plans on how to spend my monthly hobby budget (besides on comics from the comic book store each week which is not changing) and I think I will try somehow to start collecting the remaining Monsterpocalypse stuff I need for the diorama and also continuing to buy as much “First Edition” Fallout stuff as I can. It sounds like Modiphius is basically retiring the older resin sculpts and replacing them over time with plastic ones that are slightly different scaled. From what I gather, the newer plastic sculpts are more heroic with larger heads. While I like the idea of larger heads, because they give better results generally, I don’t think you can have the plastic and resin miniatures sitting side by side next to each other very well. I’ll include a picture of the resin miniatures and the newer plastic ones to give you an idea of what I mean. I should get a box of the new plastic sculpts to see for myself how stark the difference is but I see no reason to discount what people are saying online that they don’t think the minis mix well together.

The other thing I’m going to start doing as my limited budget allows is to try and buy one volume of a comic book series each month digitally so that I can finally start reading some series that I started and really enjoyed but never finished. For example, I loved Nocterra but still only own the first of three volumes and I really need to change that. I know I’ve complained that digital comic books are overpriced (because they are) but it is the only game in town for me because I don’t have room to store tons of comics books. I also don’t mind reading them digitally so my hope is to gradually start filling some holes in my collection and finishing series that I’m interested in. While I doubt this impacts what I discuss on the website much, it is something long overdue and I’m excited to make some progress, assuming I don’t get distracted by other things. I’m curious if I can hold myself to this and budget my money accordingly. We shall see!