My wife was marginally willing to give OPR a shot if I made her a skirmish/army that was cute. Because OPR is model agnostic I tracked down the cutest models I could, and found the Cat Folks of Merrowcove by Philip’s Sin Miniatures. Ironically, she’s going to try out the Alien Hives and Jackals lists, analagous to 40K’s Tyranids and Kroot. Anyway, these sculpts are really, really adorable. The poses and expressions are really fun and emotive, and there’s some great little details if you get in close and look it over; cat-face emblems, bee-stung eyes, etc. The artist put skill, time, and passion into the set and it shows. I highly recommend. Except that they’re sculpted with 2mm ankles most of the time and they will snap off their bases if you breathe at them hard. After I superglued the 10th snapped-off piece (this one on a fully painted mini) I gave up, drilled holes in their butts, and pinned them with black-primed paperclips. With the colour and the basing it’s hard to notice, so I’m pretty okay with the solution. But that’s really the only complaint I have. Alas, there were several other details (extended slings, swords, bee wings) that also snapped off during the process, which tarnish my view of the final work somewhat, but I have to admit once they’re secure on a base and not being bashed around and dropped by a clumsy motherfucker, they’re pretty great.
Primed them white, then discussed colour selection at length with my wife. We settled on “brown kitties, blue and green clothes.” She was taken by some grimdark terrain painted in lovely silvery-blue and coppery true metallics, and wanted them as the main colours. Since I was dealing mostly with fur and cloth, it was something of a challenge, but getting colours out of metals works okay and she’s happy with them. Took this as an opportunity to buy and try out some speedpaints. I’m not a huge fan of speedpaints in general, mostly because I like painting models one at a time rather than doing armies. I like playing with skirmish groups, but my fun is in applying layers and details and getting marginally better as a painter, which speedpaints don’t contribute to. However, they do contribute to getting a dozen kitty cats painted in a week instead of two months of after-work painting sessions. And more importantly, Ninjon pointed out in Trapped Under Plastic recently that he uses speedpaints for “boots and belts.” After painting 20+ ork boyz… yeah. So now I have a half dozen speedpaints for boots and belts and they’ll make my regular painting more fun- and I can always add scratches to leather after anyway, if I want to bump up my game.
I tried several things to get a fur pattern on dark brown and nothing really worked for me. Yellow and black stripes would work in the future, I think, if I wanted that much detail. I found mixing some white in for eyebrows and muzzles and edges of ears and toes worked good for my purposes (that being adequate looks in minimum time). I freehanded some plaid and was kind of impressed with what I got unassisted. It’s not great, but for a saddle that’s being obscured and mostly needed “this is plaid” visual hints it works great. Then it was time to base! That went terribly. So the problem is that baking soda does great things for superglue. But it fucks white glue up real bad. Even if you’ve got a completed superglue-and-baking soda textured surface, dried and cured, and you add white glue on top, you get a fucked up chemical reaction that ruins everything and turns it white and grody. A brown wash thick enough to cover the white also fucks up the static grass. And then you have to chip all your ankle-snapping models off at the feet, then re-glue all their feet back on, then- fuck baking soda anywhere near white glue is my point. So then I got some pretty nice static grass and flowers for I think my second basing attempt ever, and it looked pretty good. Then it all peeled off the plastic base and I had to superglue (without baking soda) the dried glue disks back onto the bases. But they looked pretty when I was done!
Behold, the Cat Folks of Merrowcove, featuring eyes painted with my brand new 00 Kolinsky brush! Best eyes I’ve ever painted, not that it’s saying much, but also the first time I got sets of eyes that, from photography distance, look convincingly like nice eyes. I’m very happy.
