Finished Studio McVey Troopers

I finished some figures from Studio McVey's Battle For Alabaster box set recently. Pictures below.

I didn't bother with the Battle for Alabaster Kickstarter and, given some of the problems it had, I was quite glad. However, when I was looking for figures for my SF plans at the start of the year, the game worked out to about £1 per figure, so I picked up a copy.

I selected half the human troopers to paint. Cleaning was a pain, as the stuff is restic. Mold lines don't sand, but they do kind-of scrape. A bigger problem was that the arms didn't fit as well as they should have, and I ended up having to use green stuff on some of the gaps. There's also at least one of the guns which I should have straightened using boiling water. However, I didn't notice it until quite far on in the painting process, but having now seen it, I can't unsee it.

I decided to go for a whiteish armour, roughly following the colour scheme in the rule book. This meant I used a grey undercoat, rather than my usual black.

Given how few colours are actually involved on these figures, they took far too long to paint. Overall, I'm moderately happy with them. I never fully committed to the white armour, and I think it shows. As ever, these are tabletop quality, so in that respect, they're perfectly usable.

I am, however, happy with the way the bases turned out. These have a great deal of detail on them and washing and drybrushing really brings it out. Once I realised the bases were going to be fairly heavily weathered I realised that bright shiny troops would look out of place - part of the reason I dialled back the white armour a bit.

As to the blue hair - I reckon it could be a symbol of unit membership, e.g. they dye their hair a particular colour for each campaign and don't revert until it's over. Equally, I see these as part of a hi-tech human civilisation in my background, so it may be that they are clones, and this is part of the cloning process.

I have another eight or so of these to get to, but my approach at the moment is to produce a lot of small skirmish forces, rather than a few larger groups. Once I've completed this first pass I can bulk out the units at my leisure.