More Frugal Gaming: Grimdark Future Challenge, Part II

 In my last post, I introduced a project I'm currently working on: creating a 2,000-point army for Grimdark Future while spending less than £55. To create the core of my Human Inquisition army list, I picked up some Frostgrave and Stargrave sprues, and used them to assemble the Inquisitor's retinue. This is going to include: 

• four assassins, badass killing machine characters who eat up a lot of points. 
• three daemonhosts, hapless souls who blast out gouts of demonic energy. 
• three crusaders, heavily armoured sword-fighters. 
• three psychics, just this side of being a daemonhost. 

In this post, we'll take a look at some sample models I've built for each of these units. We've already seen the sniper assassin. 

Here he is again, though, just for completeness.

Here's the first psychic. I've decided to go for quite simple paint jobs for this army, but I think they'll look nice anyway. He has a Frostgrave cultist body and arms, with a hand swap from a Stargrave sprue to give him the regulation pistol as well as a melee weapon from the Frostgrave demon sprue. His head is another Stargrave head.

When you think of the Inquisition, you think of red robes, so I want to give all the models in the core retinue some red and off-white (except for the assassins, who of course will be in sinister black). 

The second psychic has the body and arms of a Frostgrave cultist, although I've replaced the blade of his spear with a bead to make it a staff. The head and holstered pistol come from a Stargrave sprue. His pistol is holstered for drawing with the right hand, which is going to be inconvenient if he's got a staff in it, but no one said these guys were military geniuses. I tried a little OSL effect from the staff, but it doesn't look great in the photo -- in real life, the different swirling colours on the orb are more distinguishable. I may touch up the face, but it looks OK at arm's length. 

Next, we have the first daemonhost. The body is another Frostgrave cultist, and I wanted to suggest that this is a former psychic; the other two bodies will be more Crusader-like just because that's what I have. The head is a Stargrave head, the arms are from the cultist sprue, and the tail is from the demon set. I wanted to give the impression that the daemons in these bodies have warped and mutated them but are still restrained by some kind of ward, so I gave him a glowing chain of relics around his neck. The daemonhosts are going to look quite different from one another, but hopefully the unit as a whole will work out. 

This is the first of the Crusader unit. These are heavily-armoured melee fighters equipped with energy swords. I used the body and shield from a Frostgrave demon sprue to give a suitably gothic look -- these are supposed to be very medieval figures -- but added a sci-fi head from a Stargrave sprue to link it in to the rest of the army. I reversed the balance of the white-and-red colour scheme seen on the psychics so that the unit will be easily distinguishable but the army's colours will stay consistent. I think he looks not bad. I wanted to make the armour look weathered and battered partly for thematic reasons but also partly because I worried the bright red would look a little too Space-Marine-y otherwise. 

The Good Bad Idea: Some speed-painted orks

 The other day I had one of those ideas that comes to you as though in a dream: an idea for how to bulk up my year's painting total, provide a team for anyone who wants to play Stargrave with me but doesn't have models, and test some techniques in the process. It preyed on me all of Monday night, and on Tuesday I got to work. By Saturday morning I had this: 

If you are a British gamer, I think you have some Space Marines. You may never have played Warhammer 40,000 in your life, but you'll have some. I think they grow in cardboard boxes or someone puts them through the letterbox. Only marginally rarer are the multi-part plastic Orks from ... Assault on Black Reach, I think? Anyway, I have a few, plus some other Ork kits, in a big tackle box, and I'm never going to use them because they don't blend well with my Ork army, which is in an older style. So I put some together, with some spare parts from the bits box (mostly Ramshackle Games stuff). This was actually a pretty long process -- about two to three hours. I mounted them on plastic bases from Renedra and textured their bases with acrylic modelling paste from Hobbycraft. 

I primed them with Halford's matt black spray paint and then gave them a zenithal spray with Halford's grey primer. This is a quick and dirty way of creating some shadow and contrast: very important for speed painting. 

Now the actual painting process began. I mainly used cheap craft paints in dark red, brown, ochre, silver, black, yellow, and white. I did use a few actual miniatures paints, which were: 

• Citadel Mephiston Red. My go to mid-red base colour. 
• Citadel Evil Sunz Scarlet. My orky bright red. Remember when Citadel reds were just trash?
• Citadel Warboss Green. This has been in my paint box ever since that lying swine in GW said it was a good match for old Goblin Green, which it is not. 
• Citadel Ushabti Bone. A pleasing colour for teeth.
• Your friend and mine, Agarax Earthshade. I actually intended to use Army Painter Strong Tone, but it turns out I haven't got any. 

I flicked brown, black, and white paint at the models with a toothbrush. This might seem like a mad thing to do, but it's really just there to help create a feel of texture and weathering that should show through the coats of paint. It'll save a lot of time, especially on the metallics. This process took about 10 minutes. 

Next I blocked in the base colours using thin layers. I didn't both to make the coverage very even on anything but the skin, and I really just jabbed the silver paint (mixed with a little black) onto the metallics. As you can see, they look rusty and nasty, which is what you want for orks. I did this in a series of steps, each about 10-15 minutes, but the whole process took about an hour and fifty minutes. Counting flecks, that's two hours. 

Here's the whole crew with their base colours hastily applied.

I did a tiny highlight of the skin with a mixture of green and yellow, and then I hit the whole model with that Agarax Earthshade wash -- including the green areas. It looks OK! This took about 15 minutes.

Then I went back and touched up and re-highlighted the skin with that green-yellow mixture. I also dotted in the eyes with ochre and then a little splotch of yellow in the centre. This took about another 15 minutes. 

Finally, I took each model and spent a few minutes doing the individual details -- picking out pouches, straps, fur trim, goggles and so on. I didn't want them to be perfect, and I could have skipped it, but it didn't take that long and I think it helps, particularly on fiddly areas like the captain's goggles. I rehighlighted some of the metals as well and just touched up a missed patch here and there. This was actually one of the longest phases, taking nearly an hour. 

When you add up all of that time, the process took just under three and a half hours. Adding in priming and some other things I'm probably forgetting, I'm happy to round up to four hours, or an average of 24 minutes per model. I think that they're pretty good-looking for that level of investment, and I 

The crew assembled

Captain (Cyborg) and First Mate (Veteran)

Two Sentries and a Commando, or a Trooper, I forget.

Gunner and Burner

Two Recruits

A Runner