One Shot - Pinup

One Shot - Pinup

So they released another relic knights miniature. This one is a 'pinup' version of a character for a game which is already pretty well hitting the absurd anime sex appeal thing. Hence the lack of trousers.

Funnily enough smooth expanses of skin are a difficult thing to paint well. I think I did a reasonable job. I'm also quite pleased with how the face came out, although frankly, anime faces are a bit cheaty because their eyes are supposed to be enormous.

I have to say, a bit of a palate cleanse from edge highlighting seemingly endless armour plates on an imperial knight.

I am aware this won't be to everyone's taste. Normal, space marine related service will resume shortly.

Alabaster Automata

Alabaster Automata

Relic Knights. Well. I blogged about this game before, back in 2017. You can read that blog post here. In case you haven't been keeping up, that Kickstarter still hasn't delivered. Due to spiraling costs. Nevertheless, Ninja Division has started to put out a small number of new sculpts, and are ploughing the profits from them back into fulfilling the original Kickstarter.

It's a long sad story, and not one I want to particularly retell here.

This model is for the 'void' faction, which is essentially the bad guy 'meta faction' which can be hired by any of the three main bad guy factions.

According to the Ninja Division website:

Chained to her duty and torn between two worlds—that of the chee and the "living"—the Alabaster Automata struggles to find the true meaning of self as she battles throughout the galaxy in the name of the Chee Collective.

I think they are going for the human-created robot gains self-awareness trope. Which I suppose explains why she (it?) is proportioned and dressed like a love object. I used to be really into Anime and had a definite fondness for this kind of content, then I grew a bit and discovered shame.

A bit of an indulgence then in terms of the subject matter.

I'm really pleased with how the skin turned out, given the name of the model it really had to be a very pale white skin tone. I actually followed a Games Workshop tutorial for painting raven guard faces. The 'clothing' is my standard black recipe; I did struggle a bit to differentiate the metal of the chains and the metal of the sword. Tried to do more of a dark gunmetal on the chains, and more of a polished iron on the sword. Not convinced I carried it off. 

Relic Knights

You may not have heard of Relic Knights. It launched via Kickstarter a few years ago and had a few teething problems. Happily it's second edition Kickstarter finished relatively recently and looks to have solved the main issues with the game.

Relic Knights is fairly unique in that it feels like a blend of table top wargaming and a card game. Now, being a Malifaux player the idea of using cards in a game is not new to me, however the way in which relic knights uses them is quite unique.

In Relic Knights you very rarely flip randomly off the top of your deck to see what happens, instead if you can pay for an action on a units card, it goes off. Your opponent can mitigate some of the damage dealt with defensive abilities; if they can afford to play them. Your models stats dictate how many cards you can pick up while performing an action, and the game is about sculpting your hand so you have the cards you need for your upcoming activations, which you have to declare in advance.

Anyway, the advent of the Relic Knights V2 Kickstarter inspired me to go back and paint up some of the models I got with the original Kickstarter.

One Shot and Fritz

This is One Shot, a Black Diamond Relic Knight. This was one of the models that got me interested in Relic Knights, slightly infuriatingly some of the V1 Relic Knights had scaling issues and One Shot and Fritz are quite a bit smaller then it seems like they should be.