Today’s post features my final model from June as well as one of my early completions from July. After my little rant as part of my previous Last Chancers post, it’s good to see that there’s nothing here that could possibly offend any… oh.

I kind-of jest here. “Demolition Man” is obviously partly-based on some Russian and Soviet stereotypes, but there’s a little more to it than that. While his headgear is a Ushanka, (as also worn by the Valhallan Guard), and his Lasgun has a long, sickle-style magazine, reminiscent of Kalashnakov rifles, the cut and style of his pants look to be based on Cossack pants, so he’s really much more of a 40k-style composite of tropes and elements – kind of like the Space Wolves who are Scots-Irish Viking Celts covered in Wolfskins. Still, I went with those feels and painted his lasgun in the orangey-plastic colours of the “traditional” AK, and the fine lines on his shirt to turn it into a telnyashka – though in my research it turns out that a lot of other countries in the Post-Soviet region wore in their militaries as well.

“Animal” has much more of a Pentinent Legion feel to his sculpt, though I’m not sure why you’d gove someone like that a chainsword and a meltagun. The chainsword looks way oversized, and that’s because the sculptor appears to have simply slapped a plastic Astartes chainsword onto the green’s back – and did the same with the Auspex scanner tucked under his right arm, resulting in his gear looking comically oversized, which is a key reason I painted them dark – to make them a little more understated than if I’d painted them in bright ’90’s yellow – as was one of my first thoughts. Since Animal also has that (explosive) collar, I decided to paint his pants in a “prison orange” which again serves to draw the eye away (at least a little) from his Space Marine-sized accessories. I also gave his melta-barrel the old heat treatment by putting it onto the stovetop until it discoloured. Possibly.

The reason Animal wasn’t completed for June was because I wanted to add some serious tribal tattooing to him – in the style of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. It just seemed to fit, but then when I got ill, painting those fine details just wasn’t going to happen. I also wanted to continue with the subtle variations of skin tones that I started with Warrior Woman and continued with on Brains and Shiv, so I went a little more ruddy with Animal using my old hex-pot-era Citadel Dwarf Flesh, to give him a more sunburned look. It’s really become apparent at this point that attempting to paint in the whites and pupils of these models’ eyes is a fool’s errand, as most of them have only sculpted slits for their eyes rather than the more usual sculpted eyeballs. They do have some nice eyelids, to be fair, and the models still work very well.

I’ve really been enjoying the painting of these models quite a bit, as their status as (now-classic?) unique characterfully-individual sculpts really lends them to taking more time than I would with mass-army models.