The Brotherhood of Venice

As with many boardgames, Assassin’s Creed comes with a metric tonne of PVC miniatures, of varying quality. Although in most cases the quality of these is reasonable, they’re not a patch on the sort of plastic or metal you would get from a dedicated miniatures range. That, combined with the sheer volume of plastic that requires painting, generally leads me down the speed painting route. If we look at just the dungers alone, there are:

• 30 Crossbowmen
• 10 Agile Guards
• 10 Seekers
• 10 Brutes
• 10 Cavalry

That’s before you start adding some of the recruitable elements that come in multiples of 4, such as rogues, courtesans and condottiere. In total the box has 145 miniatures, some of which are actually really nicely sculpted and posed characters, some of which are voluminous and repetitive nobodies. I am going to break the back of the project by doing the latter first and speed painting all of them, using the slapchop method which I have come to love. Slapchop, as well as having a silly name, actually takes a little while longer but it really does increase contrast on brightly colored areas. However I will also be using standard metallic Paint for any metallic areas. There’s a six step process for getting my miniatures ready to take the speed paint.

1. Black basecoat
2. Heavy grey drybrush
3. Light white drybrush
4. Recoat metal areas with black
5. Paint metal areas with a light silver
6. Wash the metal with a mix of black and blue wash

In this case, I also felt that the face and plume were a little dark so I painted them in pure white. What I have found in the past with other slapchop projects is that the speedpaint flesh tone doesn’t really work very well over anything other than white. Also, I wanted the plumage on the helmets to really stand out, so again, painting them with pure white, while reducing the contrast between high and low lights, massively increases brightness.

Once the basecoat was done, it’s a simple case of adding the speed paint over the top. I also added a little bit of dark yellow onto some of the armour areas to create the impression of detailing in either gold or brass. This was more to add a few spot colours than any other reason. Although the game seems to use red for the Guards’ uniforms, I have opted to split them 50/50 between the red uniforms of the Borgia and the blue uniforms of the city of Venice – this is as per the video game.

The first models I did were the seekers.  In the game, if suspicious of the presence of an assassin, these guys will go searching, using their polearms to stab into potential hiding places.

Following on from the seekers, I have also completed the Agile Guards and the Crossbowmen using the exact same technique.  The Crossbowmen are relatively self explanatory – they will shoot at any Assassin they see, usually placed atop buildings to get a better vantage point.  This makes fleeing somewhat more difficult as they will shoot you as you attempt to climb buildings.  The Agile guards are lightly armoured and will chase fleeing assassins down, being able to run as fast and climb as well as the assassins.  Their job is to force the assassin to stop and fight, slowing them down until reinforcements arrive

The next set of models will use a slightly different method as they are more heavily armoured and the predominant colour on them is silver, so it makes more sense to use a different method