Ragman

Another miniature finished, this time for the Batman project:

Ragman!

You know, Ragman:

No?

My road to Ragman is something of a convoluted one - I first saw this miniature way back in the misty days of the past in an issue of Inquest Gamer that had a full visual spoiler from the then brand new Heroclix set Collateral Damage (back in the day when physical media was still a thing that you could purchase) and, though it wasn't a character that I was familiar with, thought it was a pretty interesting and dynamic sculpt. Many, many years later, I ended up ordering one randomly whilst picking up some other bits and bobs from Blue Rat Games with the vague idea that maybe I could convert it into some sort of fantasy wraith.

Obviously, I stashed it and didn't get around to converting it.

For the last couple of years, I've been working my way through a backlist of Batman comics, in in-universe order, starting with Year One, and this year I hit some comics featuring Ragman. A guy with a murderous cloak of rags that makes him kill nazis (well, the Ragman from the era of comics that I've been reading, as opposed to the other that a quick google suggests also exist), although he struggles against it, that I already own an interesting miniature of? Consider me sold!

So, a-painting we did go!

This is a difficult miniature to photograph, given it's dynamic pose...

The angle where you can actually see the rags of DC's 'Tatterdemalian of Justice', each of which is the captured soul of an evildoer. Except for here, where it's just a random daub of paint, which was oddly therapeutic to do...

My original idea was to give the body a wash to grubby it up a little, but I ended up not doing this as I liked how bright some of the colours were in contrast to the rest of the model...

Tally

54 vs 342 = -288

I've dug a random assortment of half-finished bits and bobs out of the painting queue, so we may even see another post or two before the regular end of year post!

In other news, apparently this little corner of the internet hit over 100,000 page views at some point in the last fortnight - even if only 6 of them are real people that have found my stuff and liked what they saw, that's okay with me!

Anarky in the UK

I like Anarky, the anarchist sometime foe sometime ally of Batman that wears his influences very clearly on his crimson sleeve (I seem to recall that in his first or second appearance he is pictured having a copy of V for Vendetta in his room). I enjoyed the structure of his first appearance, where it is only revealed at the end of the story that it is actually the teenage Lonnie Machin under the costume rather than his father as you had otherwise assumed from the story (which Batman realises based on how he takes a punch, I seem to recall). So I decided to paint myself a model of him! As I've occasionally mentioned, I'm mostly reading 90's Batman comics these days, which introduced me to the character, and having a rummage round some old boxes of heroclix, it turned out I already owned a miniature of him!

Like most heroclix, he was a little flimsy though, so after removing him from his large base I started out by removing his bendy staff:

And took a donor pole from a Perry Miniatures sprue (from either a pike or a standard from the WOTR European mercenaries kit), rebuilding his electrified shock staff with the original knob on the end:

And then came base fun! At last year's Salute, I bought a number of resin bases to experiment with using with my official Knight Models Batman miniatures, but most of my rebased and repainted heroclix have been getting cork bases - not as fancy as the resin, but still a shade fancier than my usual sand and grit basing method.

Fun discovery: rather than trying to trace the inside area of the top of a lipped base, a pound coin turns out to be the right size to use as a template!

I cut the piece of cork in a jagged fashion (entirely ignoring my sketched guide line it seems) and then cut away some material from the bottom of one piece to make them different heights to add a little visual interest and make it look more like wrecked asphalt (as there seems to be something cataclysmic going on in Gotham every other month or so) - I'll add some road markings at the end of painting to drive this idea home (pun intended). This was all done several months ago, before Christmas I think...

Time passed, and I tended to carry Anarky around in my portable painting kit as something of a backup - he was base coated whilst waiting for other miniatures to dry, generally, until a week or so ago when I decided to get him finished!

Being mostly red, he was fairly straightforward to paint, although I did try to have several shades of red appear on different areas of the model by varying my highlights mix - his body is overall a darker red than his cape, for example.

I did briefly consider some of the alternate colour schemes for Anarky, when I was almost finished with him: like most comic characters, he's been drawn differently in various different appearances - in some his belt is yellow, others his holster is too; but at this point I was quite happy with how the different shades of red had come out so I decided to stick to my guns!

And after my comments on painting coats and capes in my earlier Elsa post, this cape was a delight to paint - if I were to do it again though, I'd probably try and make the application of the brighter tones broader, to make the whole cape look brighter overall, but I'm generally happy with how it turned out after adding a couple of brighter glazes to make it look more like I had envisioned!

Finishing Anarky takes the Tally to:

20 vs 360 = -340

But what to paint next? Elsa and Anarky were my two 'on-the-go' figures, so what should take their place? Clear some figures out of the project box, or give in to my post-Salute craving to convert some more miniatures for the Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire project?

Take my love, take my land, wait, wrong Firefly...

I like Batman's roster of villains - you've got the Joker, insanity personified; the scarecrow, the master of Fear; but then you've got guys like Garfield Lynns, a pyromaniac who gets taken under the wing of Killer Moth (chortle) and so pootles around with a pair of wings and a flamethrower. Chortling aside, he makes a few appearances that I've enjoyed in the Batman comics I'm currently reading (Knightfall era), including one where he gets a girlfriend, but she is disappointed to discover that his idea of the next step in their relationship is murdering her with fire whilst ranting about how he sees ladies dancing in the flames rather than anything more traditional. Also, my decision to pluck him out of the half-painted queue might have been affected by wanting to be able to post this screen-cap on here:

A mighty foe for the Batman indeed, foiled only by fire escapes (and yes, I am amused enough by comics panels that are amusing out out context to have a Pinterest board solely dedicated to them)

But anyway, blathering aside, here's what I've painted:

One of the nicest heroclix sculpts I've come across, if I recall correctly after his long bath in fairy power spray (that removed approximately 0% of the original paint job) he was actually four seraparate pieces that go together so seamlessly you'd barely notice.

Quite a limited colour palette (all the better to paint you quickly with my dear!), but a nice finish overall; I had a play with mixing some purple and blue glazes to make the nozzle of his flamethrower look somewhat heat-damaged, but I think I may have taken it a bit too far...

The smoke was surprisingly fun to paint, gradually lightening and smooshing colours around on it! 

Finishing him brings the Tally to:

2 vs 0 = +2

Scarecrow

As great as the Arkham video games' take on Dr Jonathan Crane is, I still have a massive soft spot for this guy:

Such subtlety, such grace:

Heh.

I have a selection of resin bases from Fenris that I'd been planning to use on my Batman miniatures rather than my usual gravel and sand bases, but as this was a plastic Heroclix figure rather than a nice Knight Models sculpt I didn't want to risk wasting one of my limited supply in case he didn't take paint well! 

So, out came an offcut of cork sheet from making one of the zombie spawn points during Zomtober to make a basic broken brickwork base:

In hindsight, I should perhaps have made the cuts that separated bricks a little more pronounced, but hey, everything is a learning experience right?

A dab of glue, some sand, and a couple of pins later Arkham's 'Master of Fear' was based up and ready to go:

He was largely painted on lunch breaks when covering in other stores (as although I'm supposed to work 5 minutes from my house, where I can nip home at lunchtime to see my wife and daughter, it seems like recently I've spent a lot of days working in places like Ashford, despite having taken a substantial pay cut to not work there anymore, but that's a whole other story...)

He ended up using far less varieties of brown paint than I expected, which is a shame in a way, as I think I own at least a dozen different shades! Heh, and I complain about my wife having so many bits of similar looking material...

Finishing him brings the Tally to:

60 vs 155 = -95