Cro Mag

Cro Mag smash!

Cro Mag kind of jumped my 'planned painting queue' for Pulp City, and I am glad he did and that I how have him finished! Cro Mag is big, have no doubt, roughly 3 inches to the top of his head piece from the bottom of his base (that base is 50 mm across!). It is always satisfying to be able to put a big guy Powerhouse on the table, and I needed more Villain Powerhouse options painted, so Cro Mag was a perfect option. More importantly, painting Cro Mag leaves me just 1 mini short of the target I set for my own Pulp City painting at the start of the year. The pictures have washed out the highlights a little, but I am happy with the overall outcome (although his left heel needs a touch up).

Cro Mag is prehistoric man come to superhuman life in contemporary Pulp City, a rampaging creature often working for Mysterious Man. Even by Powerhouse standards, he is far from bright, and is pretty much all in all a destructive force of nature.

Powerhouses are beasts in combat, they just take a bit of getting used to since they do not supply AP to the Pool, and because you want to get the best out of their Power Up dice. Two Powerhouses going toe-to-toe with plenty of Objects to Manipulate (either Throw or Smash with) is just great fun, and really evokes the spirit of over-the-top battles we wanted to create with these massive Supremes. Cro Mag is no exception to any of that!

The mini comes in just two parts and is cast in resin, making it very simple to prepare and assemble, and easy to game with. For his colour scheme I generally followed the brown fur/blue skin of the studio version.

It is nice to get another 'big mini' done, and I still have a number of Powerhouses to paint (eight in all right now, although I have started on TINY!). Now he is painted, I am hoping Cro Mag makes it to the table before too long, and it also reminds me I need to paint up 100 Voices as another Leader option for him!

Cro Mag
Villain, Powerhouse, Level 3, Mystery
50 mm

Amok

Amok is the 125th Pulp City mini I have painted for my collection, and it feels like something of a milestone to have done so - the 125th mini needed to be something big, and Amok certainly is big!

Painting Amok was mostly a nice switch of pace after painting some recent Grimm, contrasting in size especially. Amok is a member of The Way, and stands somewhere between 60-65 mm in height (he is mounted on a 50 mm base), so he is a big mini. Doing the flesh was nice and quick, but after that it felt slow to finish, even though I only started it last week; I forgot how hard work I find it to paint bigger models, even one with a simple scheme like Amok. In all, I have painted a fair number of models in the past couple of months over a few ranges, so it is nice to have a decent level of productivity.

One of the greatest benefits of last year's successful Kickstarter was being able to make Powerhouses for the main Factions that did not yet have them. Melvin de Voor did yet another brilliant job with the concept and James Van Schaik turned in a great sculpting job based on that IMHO. As soon as we all saw where Amok was heading we were very pleased!

Amok's massive form is due to his physical body being infested by a spirit of rage. The peaceful man that he was seeks to contain that mystical anger-fuelled power, but it remains ever-present.

In game terms Amok is one of the strongest Powerhouses there is. He also has Dice+ at the lowest end of Powerhouses. However that is mitigated by accumulating Power Up dice and spending them well - if he adds 3 Power Up dice to an attack, he can add 2 more for free! Basically he is designed to be used more aggressively than most other Powerhouses. This is really emphasised by his Power Takedown and Throw combo; Power Takedown can generate a Grab & Throw EFX to allow Amok to use the Target as a missile, adding another Damage 1 to the Target of the Power Takedown as well as whatever Damage is caused to the Target of the Throw!


Amok
Hero, Powerhouse, Level 3, Mystery
50 mm

Giant Hadron

Captain Hadron's transitions to giant-size required a lot of control and meant that he could not utilize other abilities when doing so, and even his transformations back to other sizes were time consuming when grown to his maximum height. 

Wow. Even with the deadline of last month's Challenge, I did not get this finished on time.

And having already dawdled for over two years, the first of my Giant Hadrons is finished (yes, I have another! That could be another terminally slow painting log in the making...).

It is done at last. Not my best painting by any stretch, but what surprised me is how difficult painting a big model is. I don't think I have completed painting on a model this size before now. I guess painters get habituated to working at a given scale and so stepping beyond that is going outside of your comfort zone, which may be part of why this has taken so long to complete; that and I am a notoriously slow painter of course!

Not my best work, but hopefully I have learned some lessons from tackling this big model; lessons that will inform other big models eventually.

In the new Supreme Edition rules Giant Hadron is a Powerhouse; what this means is that we hope he lives up to his stature, and unlike the previous edition he can stay giant-size for the whole game (he was limited to 1-2 Rounds previously).

We are still gathering feedback on the new rules, so let us know what you think of our biggest Powerhouse, who gets Size Matters against all other Supremes as things currently stand. With the importance of dice pooling to achieve SFX, that is a good advantage to have.

Hopefully this month's painting slump will not continue into next month, and I hope that I can start to overhaul the total painted minis I achieved in 2012, especially with so many new Pulp City minis on the horizon: Green Emperor and Terror Cotta Warrior; V.H. and Blacksmith; Red Bella and Primates of Power; Papa Zombie and Comte Vendredi; new Starter sets and much more besides.

Time to get those last few currently remaining minis done then: Doom Train; Night Fright and Leech; Green Serpent; Pulp Monster.

Apebot

The current Apebot programming is still faulty as the hulk freezes every time it fails to complete a pattern. As long as Virus is close behind Apebot, able to override the programming manually, the steel gorilla performs wonderfully. It is able to process more advanced commands and make simple tactical decisions.

What’s even more important and absolutely unexplainable through the basics of Pong programming, the bond between Apebot and Virus is much more than one would expect from 3 tons of steel and 15 pounds of a spider monkey.

Apebot took a long time in finishing, from application of base colour to varnishing - not from work and time invested, but simply that I started the mini and put it to one side. This was purely from setting out with this line to try some new techniques, the NMM (Non-Metallic Metallics) included. It is still a technique that I am working to learnt to execute better, but trying it out is the only way that will happen. What it meant was that Apebot probably turned out less successfully than hoped for, but it has been a learning experience trying this technique on relatively large surfaces. More depth of shading/washes across those large surfaces would probably help, but as I say, I am still very much learning.

I am not wholly dissatisfied with the results, but it wasn't the most enjoyment I have had in painting this line, which is not down to the model, but rather just down to myself. It is finished now, which I am happy about, even if not overly satisfied with the results - and I currently only have 11 more minis to paint in my Pulp City Painting Challenge.

I haven't gamed with Apebot and Virus yet, since I will really need to think carefully about their usage given the need to play both in conjunction.

Six Feet Under

Six Feet Under never steps back. His traumatic experience in Hellrock prison stripped the remnants of his sanity.

I finished and photographed Six Feet Under (also referred to as 6FU by some players) last week, however my camera appears to have 'died' as you may have noted from recent posts. Having photographed the mini, I was not going let that deter me. I ordered a USB SD memory card reader and voila, was able to access the pictures I had taken of Six Feet Under and Tangent.

I had started Six Feet Under at the same time as Hellsmith, planning to paint and finish both together. With both being over sized I found it slow, laborious and somewhat disheartening as I didn't seem to be progressing very fast. So I put both to one side and finished Tangent instead! Then while getting towards the end of Tangent I revisited Six Feet Under and finished him within a couple of days. Following that, I started (and quickly finished this time) a second Hellsmith with a completely different paint-scheme to the (as yet) unfinished first Hellsmith. Funny how these things work, isn't it? Anyhow, I am fairly pleased with the results for Six Feet Under. The model has had a little extra minor work since the photographs, but obviously I won't be rephotographing it imminently.

The sculpt is yet another by Jarek Smolka, who has sculpted most of my painted Pulp City minis thus far. As for gaming with Six Feet Under, well one tactic is to take him with Trail and Blood Rose and deliver 6FU as a 'melee bomb' to beat down a target. He will probably struggle to survive unsupported, but it should be brutally effective.

Father Oak

I really love this mini. I say 'mini', but that seems an incongruous description - the model is big! That said, it was harder to paint (and photograph) than I originally expected. The Father Oak sculpt is by Sergio Alonso Leon.

Father Oak is a quite literal force of nature, with no particular allegiance (he is a Hero/Villain in Pulp City terms). The model is excellent, and a superb take on a treeman. The concept was half of a winning entry into a contest run by Pulp Monsters (the people behind Pulp City).

Generally with big models that have large(er) surfaces that are not simply flat, I think they tend to be more manageable for painting. What I found with Father Oak was that I had to try to refine certain skills that I have relied on for years. I am not the world's greatest painter, but I like to think my technique is 'adequate bordering on effective' (ie you can 'tell what it is'), but I honestly found Father Oak to be more of a challenge than expected.

Not due to size, but instead due to the textures that are represented (bark, vines and robes), as well as the pallette to use. Trees are rarely just brown as such, even though we often think of them that way, which makes painting a tree or even treeman in a satisfying way something that is worth thinking about. I don't know if I am fully satisfied by the end result, but what I did was use grey as a highlight before using brown washes.