Saturday, November 15, 2014

The Zoraida Proxy Part 1: Murlocs for Silurids

I had just finished painting the Perdita crew and was painting Seamus crew, with Marcus on deck for the distant future.  I really wanted to try another crew, but at the rate I finish  painting figures, I just knew it would be another box sitting in my drawer for at least a year. So I started looking at the minis I had, and realized I could probably proxy in a Zoraida crew.

First, I subbed the silurids with murlocs.  I had a bunch of pretty awesome plastic figures from the WOW board game.  I'd painted these back when I was exclusively using Games Workshop paints, didn't care too much about extensive basing, and hadn't discovered de-glosser.  

I proxied them for a  Malifaux game vs gremlins. While I won, I realized the bases were less than 30 mm which really shortchanged the silurid movement abilities. Also this is some of the first bases I ever worked on... and I knew I could do much better today.

Grabbing some of the ones where the paint job was a little better, I grabbed some 30 mm bases, put down a green epoxy base. Terraclips Streets tends to be my default terrain, so I wanted to put a little cobblestone in the marsh to give it a slight transition - sort of as if the swamp had taken over an abandoned section of the city.  I now use a template I got from miniGIRL for almost all my cobblestone bases.
NOTE: Got a little too much Vallejo Still Water on this purple guy as it was my first attempt using the product. The scotch tape around the base doesn't work if you have a rounded lip.  It just leaks out everywhere.

The disadvantage of plastic minis is definitely flash lines.  They are a pain to remove, easy to destroy fine details by using too much force, and nigh impossible to resculpt.  The advantage is small leg/hand adjustments after the figures have been painted.

Each murloc has this "sumo wrestler" stance that looks funny and not very threatening when a group of them are set side by side. I found the best way to vary up the positions was to make one leg go back to make it look like it was running.  The bent leg will slowly bend back to its original position but it is possible to get the position you want.  It's all up to the placement and angle of your pin, overbending when ready and super-gluing to the base before it bends back.  Testing hole placement before gluing is key.  The pin for this guy ended up being in the balls of the toes for one of the feet.  Once I got the holes drilled in the base, I would overbend the leg and quickly superglue it until I got the position right.  And I glued one of his arms to his knee...
And this blue murloc, I'm pretty sure I put the pin in one of his toes.  He really looks like he's in mid-leap.

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