Wednesday 13 April 2016

USA! USA! USA!

Despite having purchased the box set almost a year ago, I've only recently started getting to work on my USAriadna force for Infinity. The motivation for me this time is getting a 5th demo faction ready in time for Salute on the 16th where a group of us will be running games throughout the day.

Apart from sheer laziness the main reason that I hadn't made progress on this army was that I couldn't decide on a scheme. After initially testing a couple of green/brown/khaki combinations I realised that I hated painting those colours and I was really bad at it. My test models quickly got dunked in Fairy Power Spray whilst I contemplated my failings.

Fortunately sometimes all you need is a single colour to act as your inspiration and for me this came in the form of P3's Trollblood Base. This is a wonderful teal colour and it applied well, had excellent saturation, was easy to highlight and looked just on the right side of military. I was sold on it and began painting in earnest.

My USAriadna Ranger Force so far.

The rest of my colour scheme involved Citadel Ultramarine Blue for the armour, Space Wolves Grey for trousers and Catachan Green for straps, belts and pockets. Vallejo Dark Grey was used for the weapons and various spot colours were used such as blue, red, yellow and brown as necessary.

The models were then given a wash of Agrax Earthshade and highlighted back up in two or three stages.

Maverick front view

The first model to come across my painting table was the lovely Maverick with shotgun. I started on her because her sculpt is relatively simple and uncluttered so would be relatively quick to do.

Her bike was very lazily done with only green, brown, metallic silver and a couple of spot colours to finish it off. It re-used the tertiary colours from the Maverick herself to tie the two together while still looking distinct from each other from a distance.

I took a bit of time to do something special with the base that I'd been wanting to try out for squite a while. I green-stuffed a 'crater' to act as a small pool or pond and placed reeds (from JTT trees) around the edges. After painting was complete this was filled with Realistic Water from Woodland Scenics. Unfortunately I think I filled it a little too deep as there are a couple of cracks on the surface, but nothing too noticeable.

The grasses/flowers come from a mixture of Gamer's Grass and Army Painter products.

Maverick back view

Next up came the Marauder which is one of the 'heavier' options - definitely a relative term in USAriadna - which continued the same scheme nicely. He'll likely be the Haris leader for a small fireteam and I'm looking forward to getting some friends with heavier weapons to join him.

I was pretty in love with Trollblood Base by this point!

Marauder

I had a spare Grunt from the goodie bags at the Interplanetary last year and rather than have a duplicate model I decided a bit of conversion work was in order.

His Rifle was cut off at the stock and replaced with a trimmed down HMG from the Ariadna weapon sprue. In hindsight I wish I'd gone with a sniper rifle though because I'm inevitably going to buy the SWC box eventually and two snipers is probably more useful than two HMGs in most games.

Two Cannon-Fodder... err... Grunts

There are two more Grunts to round out the fireteam that I really like the models for. I generally prefer non-shooting poses for a lot of the basic infantry models in Infinity as it better represents what they actually spend their time doing during the game. Just standing around and trying not to get shot at!

Two more Grunts

My favourite mini of all though is the Foxtrot. I wasn't sure how much I'd actually like it at first but once I got painting and detail on the shades and beard started to pop I was smitten.

The green hat, lack of armour and all the pockets sets this mini apart nicely from the rest and the open pose was very easy to paint.

Foxtrot

Lastly there is the Ohio. I always get this guy confused with the Marauder because the Ohio is meant to be heavy infantry but really doesn't look it!

I'd rather have had it armed with a rifle as I'm not sold on the two flamethrowers because they just seem like fantastically impractical weapons to wield in such a way. I know that's a strange criticism for a faction that has cowboys and werewolves though.

I'll be looking forward to alternative miniatures coming out though as the unit has lots of interesting weapon options.

Ohio

So there you have it, some actual Infinity painting progress. I've got a Hardcase currently on the painting table and my Devil Dog team and an Airborne Ranger waiting in the wings. All together it should make a decent 200 point army to build up from.

The only thing in question is whether I buy the rest of the minis I want now or whether I show restraint and wait until I can buy direct from CB at the Interplanetary. I have to admit that I'm not much good at the whole restraint thing though and Salute is just around the corner....

4 comments:

  1. Fabulous work. Look forward to seeing them in the flesh - so to speak - at Salute.

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    1. Thank you. :) Hopefully our table will be swamped again this year!

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  2. They all look extremely cool, lovely work there.

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    1. Cheers, now if only I could stop buying new minis I might actually be able to reduce the size of my painting pile... :)

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