Monday, October 30, 2017

Kingdom Death White Lion Armor Survivors

Kingdom Death
I've finished magnetizing and painting the Lion armor kit from the Kingdom Death: Monster core game. This set presented some interesting challenges when it came to the magnetizing. The first was the inclusion of a bow. I used some of the empty hands to hold the quiver and the two different kinds of arrows for use with the bows, rather than attach the quiver to a body. I think this works pretty well, though not all of the arm positions are really suited for a bow wielder.

Another issue I had is that the big collars make it impossible to fit many of the heads on these bodies. The major issue, however, is those little claws at the wrists of all the arms. They make it very difficult to fit some of the weapons, and this is compounded by some of the weapon hands being awkwardly positioned and difficult to make look natural to begin with (such as the cat fang knife and the katars). In retrospect, I should have just cut those little claws off at least half the models so I would have at least one male and one female who could hold pretty much any weapon without them getting in the way. Honestly, I may eventually go back and cut them off (maybe all of them) and just touch up the paint job. It would probably be worth it.

The painting on these was pretty straight forward. I just tried to paint them pretty much how I painted my White Lion. I tried to make sure there was enough difference between the flesh color of the survivors and the color of the lion skin so that they stood out from each other. I gave the one head orange hair because I thought he looked like Lion-O from Thundercats.

Unlike the other armor kits, this one came with five sets of body/legs. Two of the pairs of female legs were identical, so one of them I posed leaning way forward to make look different from the other one. The problem with that is that her head is facing down and she's not looking where she's running. I wish I had thought of that before hand and put the magnet in at a different angle to have her looking straight ahead.

Monday, October 16, 2017

Kingdom Death Phoenix

Kingdom Death
I have finally tackled painting the Phoenix for Kingdom Death: Monster. I wanted it to look more colorful than in the official artwork, and more colorful than the other monsters I've painted. I went with a red/orange/yellow look to the feathers, which also goes well with the name of the monster. I did a really simple paint job on the feathers. I base coated the whole thing white, then painted bands of red, orange, and yellow ink, with some overlap in between. It worked pretty well, but in retrospect I should have done some dry-brushing or stippling where the colors meet, especially the orange and yellow, to get it to blend together better. Obviously it could have looked better if I had painted the feathers individually, but I wasn't going to spend that much time on it. For something quick I think this looks decent, and maybe I'll go back and blend it together better sometime in the future.

After I finished the feathers, the rest was pretty straight forward. Most of the rest is painted a fleshy color, with the little sores or whatever they are in a pinker shade. I don't think I've ever painted something this big that wasn't terrain, so it was interesting trying to paint the huge areas of flesh. But I just painted them the same way I would paint any area of skin, including a wash at the end, and it worked fine. I don't know where to get a 100 mm diameter clear acrylic base, so for now it is temporarily on a plain black base. I think the branch he is standing on is supposed to be up in a tree anyway, so I think it would look a little strange no matter what kind of base he was on.

Have a look at the pictures below and let me know what you think.