Space 2021 - A Star Saga

Please, go for your gun, we will pit the speed of your hand against the speed of my mind

Kizai Uru is another one of the more esoteric species that we see in the Warpath universe.  As a rule, things like this don’t really seem to appear in Deadzone or Firefight which is a shame because this, for me, is what makes it stand apart from the 40k universe (for which it originally started out producing cheap alternative models for).  You do see a few aliens in the Rebs lists for deadzone but at the moment they’re prety much defunct and aren’t currently available on the Mantic webstore (fingers crossed that means they’re getting new kits real soon!).  Dreadball is the place to look for all the myriad alien species that share the galaxy and it’s amazing to see some of these make their way into the Star Saga game.

Kizai Uru is a Tsudochan Monk, his weapon is his mind through which he wields telekenetic powers.  I love how they chose the Tsudochan for this, a sort of worm/centipedal type of creature with a somewhat slow, clumsy looking body.  It makes sense that they might not need the same speed and agility that a human does when they can just control things with their mind.  Another thing that I am enjoying about these miniatures is how easy they are to paint.  They don’t have all the detail of a citadel miniature (not necessarily a bad thing because they’re way less busy) but they also don’t have all the deadspace that I am starting to see in citadel miniatures;  space where you have to try and manoeuvre your brush around, behind and between various bits of model that just make painting them difficult. The simplicity of these models is far less stressful than the Blackstone Fortress models I have been painting for our kid.  Not once while painting any of these models have I been trying to paint part of the model only to find my brush has caught some other part of the model as I tried to squeeze it through a gap.

This also gave me an opportunity to play around with some of the army painter metalics, which I haven’t done in any great detail yet.  I think Nightscales – although the dark, blue tinted colour in no way matches the dark, borwn tinted colour on the label – is my new favourite base colour for silver.  It really allows you to create a steely blue finish rather than the traditional silver grey that you would get with tones like Leadbelcher and the final effect is a very clean, bright looking silver.  Also the Army Painter copper colours are vastly superior to the citadel ones, which I always found to be very weak and for some reason, more than any other metallic colour, would separate and the pigment solidify