BaP sailors and special characters

I wanted to make a few special characters for the European factions, but I wasn’t sure exactly what parts to use to make them. The recent kickstarter came with a drum and drum stick hands to make a drummer, but no specific bodies for it.

There is a special character called a drummer boy, and that gave me an idea. The wargames atlantic conquistadors have the same problem as the Aztecs, they are slightly shorter than the Firelock models. But that means they might be perfect for the drummer boy, since hes a kid.

Once I attached all the pieces, I was quite pleased with the result. I did a quick zenithal with the airbrush, and then painted him up. I used the same process as for the sailors, just using speedpaints and then tidying up some of the details with regular paints.

I decided that the best bodies for most of these special models would be the sailors, and I had already painted them all. So I went through the models I had painted, and started remixing them.

The first one was the lime green shirt. I snapped off an arm and a leg and attached the hook hand and the peg leg to make a grizzled veteran. Arggg

Next up is the standard bearer. I took this man’s gun away, and then attached a banner pole to it. I don’t have a solution for the banner itself yet, but the model is easily identifiable and maybe one day ill figure out a way to make a flag.

Next up I wanted to make a master gunner. There isnt a specific way to make them as far as I know, but I had extra equipment for the gun crews. Normally it consists of 4 models, each with a different tool. I decided to snap the weapons off this guy and attach 2 different cannon tools, cuz obviously a master gunner is just a regular gunner who multitasks.

Now that I have started playing the game, I noticed that there are many special characters which don’t have dedicated models. I don’t want to proxy these models, cuz WYSIWYG is better, so I started thinking.

I didn’t have any extra Natives laying around, so I started looking through my collection. I had these Aztec models from WA that I haven’t done anything with. The Natives in Blood and Plunder span most of the Americas, and even though the Aztecs are a bit older than the period we are in, they aren’t far off.

Unfortunately, I compared the models, and the WA models are much shorter. They are kind of weirdly proportioned, they don’t have a stomach or midsection, their waist just connects to their chest.

I decided to cut the WA model at the waist and try to add some height to it, a few extra millimeters should do the trick. I cut the model with a sharp knife, and then tried packing form greenstuff in there. I’m not sure if this is the best way to do it, but its what I had handy so I went with it.

After a ton of fussing, I had a rough shape of a torso, and the height looked much better. I let the greenstuff dry a bit and then started smoothing it out. I don’t think im good enough at sculpting to add abs, frankly I don’t even think I’ll be able to smooth out the joins, so it won’t be noticeable. I’ll be happy of I can just get the texture smooth so that it isn’t super noticeable from 3 feet.

After that I slapped on the arms from WA for a drummer, and the drum hanging off the front should hide some of my crimes.

I decided to do the same think to make up a standard bearer. I don’t know what the Nahuatl word is for a sashimono, but this thing is pretty cool, so ill pretend it’s a standard.

After putting them both together, I pained them in my standard medium brown skin tone. Aztecs were known to wear some bright colors, but I wanted them to fit in with my other natives, so I did plain colors for the clothes and accessories.

To be honest, they didn’t come out great. From 3 feet they kinda just look like they have some scar tissue around their torsos, which isn’t too bad. But as soon as I finished these 2, I realized im gonna need another box of the multipart natives to do a few more commanders and special characters. I think ill keep these 2 in my army anyway just for fun.

I have all of the special named Pirates from the Pirates of Legend box. I dont plan to play Pirates much, but Natives aren’t allowed in big boats, so they might be fun to have on deck (heh).

Blackbeard is cool, but everyone is gonna play blackbeard. Black Caesar was on Blackbeards crew. He was an escaped slave who was found trying to blow up the boat when they were captured by the British. Seems like a badass to me, so lets do it.

I have no idea what he looked like, but Firelock was nice enough to include art on the box for these pirates, so I’m gonna go by what their art shows.

I painted up his skin with a reddish black. I put down some base coats on his clothes and equipment, using a military green, a khaki and a few browns. After everything had some color, I hit it all with a wash.

I then went in and started adding some highlights. His color scheme isnt really gonna pop, so im hoping that the red and khaki will stand out a bit on the table. Also the big gun 🙂

Next I went in and did all of the metal by brushing on some Vallejo airbrush dark aluminum. If you’ve never used that line of paints, I highly recommend them. Life changing.

I then covered all of the little detail bits. Bandanas, headwraps, belts, hats, weapon handles, pouches. I used a variety of the xpress paints, but for the pouches I mostly used brown, and for the clothes I mostly used blue and red, but I also mixed in some yellow, gray and green.

The last thing I did was hit all of the metal bits with black wash, since they are the only things I didn’t paint with xpress paint.

The goal here was to whip up a lot of minis as quickly as possible. It was super effective, I got 40 something models done in 2 afternoons, about the same time I will usually spend on 2 or 3 Malifaux models. The quality isn’t fantastic, but they are passable for sure, and Im sure folks will be happy to use them as pirates if I demo the game.

I think I’m gonna turn this project into a more broad P&P thing, cuz Ive really got the bug for it at the moment, and I have some cool stuff to work on.

Next I started using the dwarf skin xpress paint to cover the exposed skin on some of the pirates. I didnt love love this color for skin, it was fine but it looked a little cold to me. I ended up mixing a few different varieties by putting some red and different browns, and even used some speed paint that I like.

Next up is the fun part. Pirates wear a ton of different colors of clothes, so I started going through the Xpress paints and just picking different pieces of clothing and painting them. Really fast and easy. The only goal was to try to spread the colors out so I wouldn’t end up with all models of a specific loadout having the same colors on.

I mostly based the color choices on the box art that Firelock has put out. When I got sick of those colors, I tried looking up what Pirates would have worn historically, and I found that in addition to the colors you would expect (Blue, White, Tan) they were also known for wearing dark green. Very cool.

I recently found out there is a small Blood and Plunder scene at my FLGS. Between than and recently getting my kickstarter delivered, I think ill paint me some pirates. I have kept up with painting the Natives as ive gotten them, but I havent painted nearly as many of the Spanish or pirates. Having backed several of Firelocks kickstarters, and generally having a distinct lack of self control, I have quite a lot to do.

I recently got my hands on some of Vallejos new Xpress paints, so I think ill try to get a whole bunch of work done fast by using the slap chop method.  Its a dumb name, but a pretty effective paint technique.

Step 1: Prime and Zenithal

As a side note, the new plastic kits from Firelock are really great. They give you lots of weapon options, and give you the ability to add a whole bunch of variety into your units.