Raise the Black Kickstarter Rewards

So I originally thought I would have lots of free time over the weekend to work on these but as life often goes I ended up with almost none at all and ended up sort of rushing these a bit Monday night in an effort to keep the momentum going on this project so I did paint 5 minis all in one shot but they are a little messier than usual in my opinion. I may go back and try to tidy them up at some point (who am I kidding I always say this and never do).

Didn’t have a lot of time or energy this week to paint as much I had hoped so only got one more done before the weekend but hoping to get a big batch done in the next couple of days.

I went a little overboard on the contrast with his pants and I’m not super happy with how they turned out but I also rushed him a bit overall so maybe I will go back and fix some things when I have more time.

I’ve started painting two units of Sea Dogs woth 4 men each. I was going to batch paint all 8 of them and then realized almost none of them are wearing the same clothes anyway and decided to paint the weapons and skin and any common colours and then finish them in sets of two. Here are the first two done.

So I’ve decided to build all of the starter box sailors to match the army lists shown on page 137 of the softcover rulebook in the starter box. It lists crews for Blackbeard and Robert Maynard that you can use for the new scenarios specifically for the starter.

The first unit I built and painted was a 4 man unit of Able Seamen for Robert Maynard’s team which are armed with a brace of pistols and a standard melee weapon.

I expertimented a little with contrast medium while painting these. Normally I thin my paints with just water or sometimes Lahmian medium while mixing paints or adding highlights but for this I had a while bottle of contrast medium I bought ages ago that I never really used and thought I’d just start seeing what it was like for thinning regular paint for layering. It worked pretty well for highlighting all the folds of cloth that make up most of the models.

Managed to find some time to finish the rest of these dead pirates on Saturday. Not sure why they took so long but glad to have them done. I did take the opportunity to experiment a bit with some colours that I might want to use on the other crews I’m painting next so they were good practice despite being awkward to paint since they are baseless.

I’m hoping to get most of these done all at once but I didn’t have a lot of time or energy today for hobby stuff and only managed to finish this one unfortunate seaman.

I guess maybe he’s having a bit of a nap? What’s that? He’s not responding? Oh dear he’s got a sword through his chest? Well then…

I’ll try and take better/proper photos of them all once I get the lot of them done. It’s a surprisingly unusual challenge to properly light and photograph minis that are flat on their faces.

From the Kickstarter bonus sprue (of which I received two) comes this little monk fellow. Apparently he adds Fortune Points. Having not really read the rulebook yet I’m sure those are super awesome, whatever they are!

I think I learned a lot with the first ship and changed things a little with the second ship which is a little brighter in the brown tones and also I wanted a bright blue and gold for Maynard’s coat and ship colours to match. Quite happy with how everything turned out!

The colours came out a bit darker than I think I originally wanted but I decided that a nasty pirate is probably fine with a dark colour theme on his ship. I haven’t added sails yet because I’m not entirely sure I want them for gameplay reasons but I do see people adding them on the Facebook group and they do look really nice. I saw a post about making them with paper that looked easy enough to try and the results were really nice and I might give that a shot.

Edward “Blackbeard” Teach assembled and painted! I haven’t really decided on the overall colour tone I want for the whole game so I’m going along with the cards and what most people seem to be doing. I see a lot of bright and bold reds and blues and yellows on a lot of these.