Building the Backlog…

As part of the new baby-centric regime in our house, Tuesday is now 'model night'. It gives me a couple of hours in the week (almost guaranteed) to spend time building and painting my way through the backlog of metal and plastic.

As you can see from the image above, last night saw a random selection of miniatures from different gaming systems, and it was great to finally get things put together.

First on the list was Guildball. I had started these during last week's model night, but ran out of glue! I have to say I was rather disappointed with these models, for a number of reasons – primarily, they were hard work. Don't get me wrong the models are beautiful, however there are some very delicate parts and all 3 have staff/spear weapons that nearly snapped on several occasions and bend very, very easily. Secondly, my batch were covered in flash and exaggerated mould lines – took a long time to get them looking reasonable.

In addition a couple of the arms didn't fit well in their respective sockets so, whilst I expected some pinning, I will have to go back in and do some filling, which hasn't been the case in a long time. Finally on my list of gripes, the tabs. On all three models, the tab that slots into the base sits higher than the top of the base, so will need cutting away. Maybe I've just got used to clipping off tabs and pinning to resin bases. This time I thought I would be quick and simply stick them into their slotta bases – turned out to be more hard work!

As a consequence I'm not feeling terribly enthusiastic about Guildball right now, but hopefully a Tuesday evening painting these models will cure all that!

After that I decided to pamper myself with some plastic. I still had two Malifaux crew boxes sitting on the shelf, so jumped in head first. I started with the Sonnia Criid crew and three of the easiest models ever – one-piece Witchlings! The detail is great on these and not having arms/legs/weapons to stick on was a bonus.

The new Malifaux plastic resculpts are a lot thinner than the metals were and it was only when I started on Sonnia that I realised how thin – thank god this wasn't metal! The plastic glue made things very easy, despite the fiddly bits and the whole crew took no time at all. I didn't like Sonnia's separate face!

Desperate to build something a little more chunky I started on the Kirai crew – Seishin. These guys are much bigger than the old metal Seishin but similar in looks. Went together very easily.

Not satisfied with that I moved onto the new-look Ikiryo – one of the chunkiest plastic models I've seen. Much bigger than the metal version – in fact, more like the avatar – but great looking model which will be fun to paint.

Let's see what happens next Tuesday on model night!