Village Attacks: Horror of the Sands - Yunfakh Hunters
With the Gloomhaven miniatures done for the time being it was time to crack on with the remaining miniatures in Village Attacks. A prospect that I was a little apprehensive about as whatever plastic the models are cast from is wildly hydrophobic. Any paint I put on them, even after priming, would just bead together and run off. An effect that was exacerbated if you used high flow paints like Citadel’s Contrast range. Prior to starting this blog I had an absolute mare of a time painting the peasants in the base game. The best way to deal with this I found was to prime them then give them a coat of matt varnish.
Once I had the models prepped I could start applying some colours to them. Unfortunately there is only one piece of artwork for them that I could find. However, rather fortunately, the paint scheme is rather simplistic: a red undersuit with black leather armour. Good news as I need to paint nearly twenty of them! If I had been clever I would have used a red primer instead of a grey one to save myself some time, alas I am not and didn’t. Even so, I only needed five colours to get these guys basecoated.
The first and quickest part was to run a bit of Ungor Flesh into the eyes of each of the miniatures. Easy peasy and I could clean up any spillage around the hood later. For the undersuit, I painted it with Mephiston Red. It’s quite a bright red but I could darken it down later. For the black leather I painted them with Corvus Black, which is more of a very dark grey, that way the wash would show up better. The white cloth wraps and scarves I painted with Vallejo Pale Sand, which I felt was appropriate for some desert hunters. Even if it took a couple of thin coats. The last base colour that I needed to do was Leadbelcher on the weapons and the armour/mask around their faces.
To make things more manageable I worked in batches. There are three different sculpts for the Yunfakh hunters so it was easy enough to split them into three groups of six. From these groups I then painted one sculpt each to completion, partly to test the colour scheme and partly so that I would have a reference when painting the other models. Then it was just a case of picking up a paint brush whenever I had ten minutes or so spare for painting, for example, five lots of boots with Corvus Black is a lot less daunting that doing all the black leather on fifteen models all at once. And so I’ve been painting these on and off for the last few weeks whenever I have some free time, if I had sat down and forced myself to paint all of them at once then I think I probably would have burnt myself out.
With the basecoats done it was time to dunk these guys in a wash. Unfortunately, they don’t fit in my pot of Nuln Oil so I had to settle for washing them with it from head to toe. I did this in batches so I could more easily keep an eye on them in case of any pooling. If I did see any then I used a paint brush to wick away the excess Nuln Oil.
Like the rest of the model, I kept the bases simple. I put some Armageddon Dust texture paint and once that was fully dry I gave it a wash with Seraphim Sepia. Lastly I drybrushed the bases with Tyrant Skull and painted the rims black.
And there we go, eighteen boardgame miniatures complete! Now we’re cooking with the gas and making a decent dent in the numbers. Got to keep the momentum going and get as many miniatures painted this year. Last year I managed a paltry forty-five so I’m already two-thirds of the way to beating that number. I haven’t added the Massive Darkness 2 miniatures to the below numbers just yet, as it’s still in shrink wrap, but I’ll get round to it soon.
Boardgame miniatures left to paint: 735
Boardgame miniatures painted this year: 31