Monday 27 May 2013

In Her Majesty's Name: Scotland Yard Company

It has been a long time since I had anything worth posting. I finally got motivated to work on some minis again when my copy of In Her Majesty's Name, plus three teams: The Society of Thule (Prussian occultists), Lord Curr's Company (British adventurers) and the Scotland Yard Company (Scotland Yard and associates). I had a hard time deciding who to paint first, but the Scotland Yarders came out on top, so here they are:


Scotland Yard constables.

Scotland Yard constables.

Scotland Yard Special Branch.

Scotland Yard Special Branch.

The Consulting Detective and the Good Doctor.

The Consulting Detective and the Good Doctor.
The Sergeant and Chief Inspector.


The Sergeant and Chief Inspector.

The whole gang.

The whole gang.

The miniatures have lots of character and they were a lot of fun to paint. I feel like I'm still getting better at pinstripes and tartans.

The figures had fairly prominent mould lines, so they required quite a bit of filing before they were ready for the paint. After filing and gluing on the (very fragile) power cables for English All-Electric Truncheons, I epoxied them to washers and then evened the bases out with plaster. I think the cobbles might have looked better if I had carved the grout lines into the bases, but a) the pewter bases of the figures come right up to the top level of the bases, so I would have had to cut lines into the metal as well as plaster, and b) I already spent a lot of time on the bases as they are, and I would rather be painting figures than bases. I think they look all right as they are, and it's definitely possible I could have made them look a lot worse if I tried to carve out the bases.

One thing I did on these guys that I don't normally do is paint eyes and pupils. I think painting the eyes on miniatures looks goofy 99% of the time, but these turned out okay. I think eyes on miniatures look better the smaller they are, and I went back and overpainted the upper and lower lids with my flesh base colour so the eyes are narrow slits rather than big saucer googly-eyes.

Next up: The Society of Thule.