You have no idea how much restraint it took for me to not title this "Painting to Infinity and Beyond". However, after my last post brow-beating the overuse of the Spanish Inquisition jokes, I felt it best not to. I do try and not be hypocritical, after all.
I've been fairly enamored with Infinity as a game for quite some time now. My favorite GW game has always been Necromunda, and with the release of Infinity a couple years back, I got all giddy with excitement for a highly detailed skirmish game.
I recently was given the opportunity to paint one of the newer Tohaa figures, the Hatail Spec Ops, and jumped at the chance.
To be honest, I haven't taken the plunge to really invest in the game until very recently, for two main reasons: TIme, and frankly, Intimidation. The sheer detail I loved in the figs was a touch intimidating to me, and on a scale that I'm not quite used to. I've been painting 35mm GW figures for so long, 28mm figures is a hefty switch. the Hatail Spec Ops figure was a great entry into this smaller, more detailed world though.
Assembly was pretty straightforward. There was hardly any flash on the model to clean, which was my first fear. A model this detailed with a ton of flash would have been a pain. I also thought I would have to pin the model together, and was a little worried about that because of the scale, but the mold was very well thought out, with grooves and pegs. No pinning was required. While this might not be the case with all Infinity figures, it certainly was with this one, and I was happy for it. Some Loctite Ultra Gel, and a thin wire to clean excess glue away from the figure was all that was needed. I did put a pin into the foot so that I could mount him to an old Champagne cork for painting.
The first night of painting, after I primed of course, was very productive. The first thing I did was apply a thinned black wash to the whole model, so I could more easily pick out all the detail. After that, I applied a thin coat to the organic armor using a combination of Flayed One Flesh, and Secret Weapon Baby Poop Wash. I then gave it a thinned wash of black to give me some shadows to work with.
I then took THAT combination, and added some GW Biel-Tan Green to it to thin it out further, and glazed the hood and coat. See, I wanted the colors here to all tie into each other as much as possible, so I built off the same palette of colors as much as possible.
Finally, I worked with the GW/SW combo, and then just straight Flayed One Flesh to blend up armor, giving it definition, I also thinned out some P3 Khador Red Base with some Secret Weapon Parchment Wash, and laid down a nice base for the reds. Finally, I laid down two more thin layers to darken up the bodysuit.
So far, I'm loving working with this figure. The scale and detail is both challenging and refreshing. I thought the converter in me would have an issue with set poses that so often comes in this range, but I actually didn't care a bit. The sculpt was so nice and the subject matter so new, that I had a blast with it.
I'll detail out al the paints and methods I used with the figure once I'm all done.
- Tim