September 04, 2012

Pulp City Invades!

I little while back I stumbled onto a post on LAF; a user there was looking to get rid of his entire collection of Pulp City models for a very good price. I'd had Pulp City on my radar for a while, and eagerly jumped on the offer. We quickly struck a deal and I impatiently awaited the arrival of a huge box of new toys. A big thanks to Nate for hooking me up with all the awesome stuff below. The character cards and some assembled figures are that were also in the box are not shown.

I went through all the boxes and sorted out the cards, which were already sleeved. After going through this massive pile I realized with some disappointment that there were almost a dozen figures missing. However, Nate did a double-check and found them hiding away in a closet. They've been sent in the mail and I'm trying to be patient while I await their arrival as well. Once they get here I think there are less than 10 figures from the entire Pulp City line that I'm missing; some of which are exclusives that I'll probably not bother trying to obtain. I think it will really depend on whether I can get some of this huge pile of metal painted up and then convince some of my friends to try it out.

Nicely enough the figures from the two starter boxes had already been assembled and primed, so I thought I might as well take advantage of that and dive right in.  While painting up my 40k Dreadnaught I started working on a model from the villains starter, choosing Hellsmith as my first victim, er...I mean test subject! This one was a tri-fold test to: a) try out my new Army Painter WarPaints, b) test out my home-made wet palette, and c) paint a miniature that was white primed instead of black. Here's what I came up with.



The original skin tone turned out really nicely and is a simple 2:1 mix of Barbarian Flesh and Leather Brown. Although I had intended to try painting this figure entirely with my Army Painter WarPaints starter box I decided against it in the end. The flesh, silver and red are all WarPaints while the gold and brown are from the Citadel range. I also used a little Mithril Silver from GW to add a little final highlighting. I used the Army Painter dark tone ink which is really dark. I was unhappy with how dark it was, and the fact that I ended up with too much pooling and making a mess on his back leg. The flesh was really rough looking after applying the ink, so I ended up doing another dry brush coat of pure barbarian flesh, and then covering that with a wash of Citadel Gryphonne Sepia. It was worth trying the Army Painter ink, and led me to pick up the other two inks which I haven't yet tried, but the results aren't quite what I had hoped. I do wish I'd put a little more thought into his base...and it'll always bother me that he turned out so dark.

After holding my little "What Should I Paint Next?" survey on LAF it turned out that the Pulp City Heroes starter box won the day...so I've started on those as well. I may end up painting the villain and starter box in tandem, so that I can try out the rules as more of the figures get painted up. Here's Androida from the heroes box.



This one was a total experiment in colors. I mixed up a batch of white, blue and silver from the Army Painter starter box to use as a base coat. It took me a few tries before I got something I really liked. I continued adding white and silver into the mix until and did a few successive coats over top. Then I marked out her eyes in green and her lips in Citadel Liche Purple. Following suit with Hellsmith, I once again tried the Dark Tone ink, hoping for a better result this time. It did work out quite a bit better with this figure being mechanical in nature. I did another highlight coat after the ink to pick out some of the upper details and that's it.

For the base I tried to imply some high speed movement with the ground and grass sort of parting around her. I don't think I was entirely successful, but it was worth a shot. And if I had the chance to paint her over again, I'd probably have done the eyes a bright red, and picked out some of the mechanical details with some differing colors.

After painting two of these figures I've got a good idea of what to expect from my new paints, and the kind of details found in the sculpts. They really are great looking figures and I suggest folks check them out, even if you're not interested in the game itself.

4 comments:

styx said...

That was an amazing deal. If I could have spent the money I would have jumped on that also.

Great work on the figures!

I am trying to get the Hadron figure on the cheap (the big one) and little one.

Simon Quinton said...

Cracking mate. I always end up missing these sort of deals. They always turn up when i have no spare funds

Obsidian3D said...

Thanks folks. I'm pretty tapped out between this, the Reaper kickstarter and the new sixth edition 40k starter box. I need to catch my breath and try to paint some of the huge amount of toys I've accumulated in the past few months.

styx said...

Yea, I have some serious dirty looks from the wife when I wanted the Dark Vengence set after spending the $160 on the Kickstarter...

Oh she only has begun to see the tears...another Crossover Kickstarter in October from what I hear. Then Chaos Marines and Dark Angels. Plus I want to work on my boards for the City for the Supers and Old West games...gah! I have to sell more stuff...