A Mutant Rabble

Well I’ve had ten of these painted but will I get the other ten done… might struggle. Hard to keep to one task without drifting away onto other things and just not getting the time!
Always the case, but I like the minis and I would want to get the lot done eventually.

This guy wanted to grab his coat before heading out to the uprising… still nippy this time of year after all.

The other one must have been in the middle of some nasty operation in an extra toxic area of the mine where he was wearing his helmet and air tank.

Just a break down of the painting process that I’m going to use for these guys. One thing I notice with the resin parts is just how much rougher they are in comparison to the original plastic parts. Only notice it with these close up photos so doesn’t really matter. Also notice how rough the areas are where I’ve cut the bits away that I wanted to remove, even with some filling and sanding it shows up in the photos.

Basing is done with XV-88 then dry brushed with Tallarn Sand. Onto that goes a covering of weathering powders, which mostly nullifies the previous step…

Might paint each mini in turn like this, reason being it’s quite rewarding to get to a finished mini quicker rather than batch painting all 20 in one go.

I’ve painted up one of the guys to a finished state to get the general idea of how they are all going to look. Orange work clothes with yellow detailing and pale skin. Simple enough but if they all have that same scheme hopefully it should pull them together as a group who all work in the same place at least.

I’ll do a break down for the next post to show the paints being applied.

In essence this project really is just painting 20 miniatures. To be fair, that’s more in one go than I normally tackle and far more flesh to deal with than I’ve ever had to paint!

The cutting and glueing had all been done before now but I have added some final things such as a bit of green stuff to hide joins or fill in gaps in the tattered clothing. Most notable on the bigger dudes.

I’ve primed them all with Zandri Dust, and had a go at a first layer of skin tones. A few I don’t like, and I’m going to go over them all with Ushabti Bone to get them lighter and pasty looking. These guys don’t get out into the sun much. The different first layers should add some variation across them.

These are the three converted Vox-Shamblers from the Gellerpox Infected set. Really happy how these had turned out though that may be down to the new heads from MaxiMini (had them in the bits box for a long time). I had 10 of those and I’ve used them all in the various conversions here. Really are good and add so much personality – hope there is somewhere else to get a hold of those MaxiMini bits online?

Also used a number of laspistols and things from Anvil Industry. So in the end I removed the improvised weapons the Poxwalkers had and made sure that each of them carried a pistol, just to get them all to spec for the Mutant Rabble rules.

That basically covers the existing, unfinished models and leads me to getting on with the challenge and painting all 20 of these guys.

In all I had 13 of the original Poxwalkers that were useful for these conversions, and not too over-detailed for trimming off the extra bits.

To get a bit more variety in, the Gellerpox Infected were really good for some bigger dudes to break up the overall sizes of the minis. With those added that had given me the unit of 20, and I’ll show some images below comparing between the proper minis from the kit and the finished results. That’s where this set has been for some time, so the next stage is to get them primed and start painting.

Oh and I’m not a great fan of painting flesh tones! Always found that tricky, and these guys are all sweaty dudes with their tops off with all that mining and hazardous substance handling…

The GW range of Poxwalkers and Gellerpox Infected are what I was working with as a starting point. The reason this idea came about is that after looking at the miniatures I had felt that they really needed simplifying. As with many modern minis they are terribly over designed, busy and detailed so a couple of years ago I started clipping away the “flash” in terms of removing all those added on spikes and protrusions.

Having done that I was much happier with their respective silhouettes, and with some arm, head and leg swaps I thought that these models could be the perfect base for a Mutant Rabble without all the exaggerated Nurgle additions.

I love the old Forgeworld Imperial Armour books, in particular the Siege of Vraks. In there are all sorts of army lists and I had always wanted to create a Mutant Rabble as a unit in a Renegades & Heretics force. I like the idea of these guys being herded out from their daily jobs, working in mines and pits and being pushed in the direction of the enemy to cause havoc. Their mutations due to working with hazardous materials and working conditions, and used as weapons in uprisings and riots.

So the plan was to build 20 miniatures, armed with Laspisols and their mutated limbs with a couple of special weapons included.