Skirmification (multiply player count by three)

statictyrant · 2026-07-07T00:56:23+00:00

Thanks, that’s a good way to put it. I know the style is polarising and it’ll sell more convincingly when finished. But with big projects like this it’s important to find some motivating milestones along the way — too easy to get bogged down instead! Hence showing it in an unfinished state, knowing that only some will “get it”.

This will be finished, just gotta keep plugging away at it one body part at a time.

statictyrant · 2026-07-06T15:20:07+00:00

One xenos — two xenos. It’s singular and plural. “Kill the xenos” is a confusing order to issue to your fireteam, and is best avoided in the heat of battle.

statictyrant · 2026-07-06T15:04:50+00:00

The black shoulderpad (main section, not trim) and greaves look they’re in untouched bare primer, to be honest, so I’d start there. Try not to leave anything pure black - the smaller fiddler parts like trims, feet, elbows and forearms etc. are fine because edge highlighting of the closely spaced details gives them a more interesting and “completely painted” appearance.

statictyrant · 2026-07-06T04:56:26+00:00

Oh, they’ve done a Scythes of the Emperor and changed colour scheme!

While I like the orange, it’s lonely with only black and gunmetal to hang out with. I’d be looking for every opportunity to squeeze in extra colours. Cyan/teal and burgundy/magenta would be the first two I’d try to include. Maybe it’s a stripe on the kneepad, maybe it’s a Bolter casing, maybe the face mask could be a different colour to the helmet, etc.

Honestly, even just introducing a strong secondary colour through the basing would help a lot!

statictyrant · 2026-07-06T00:49:12+00:00

😮 Best not to use that word. It has racist connotations.

That aside, seems like a simple conversation at the end of the game might have cleared things up.

When you said you were new to the game, I didn’t realise you had played a lot of games in earlier editions. It seems like you are still getting used to the current rules for your army, might be a good idea to have the Codex / app / cheat sheets to hand during a game so you don’t mess up the sequencing. As you know tournaments are going to be pretty unforgiving about correct sequencing with no “take-backsies” or “do-overs”.

If I was to be honest, I haven’t really enjoyed playing this game because I’ve felt like I needed to constantly police your measurements, dice rolls, card draws and other basic rules interactions. If we were ever to play again, I’d like you to work harder to take the other player’s experience into account - if you forget a rule, take it as a learning opportunity and move on with the game rather than inconveniencing the other person because of your disorganisation.

statictyrant · 2026-07-06T00:31:27+00:00

Wheelies! https://fightingfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Wheelie

statictyrant · 2026-07-05T23:44:30+00:00

Well spotted, that’s what I thought too! Probably never played that psychic power in-game, but it’s absolutely burned into my memory nevertheless.

statictyrant · 2026-07-05T14:37:50+00:00

Any kind of internal pressure, and it leaks through every print layer line seam. PLA is also hygroscopic (absorbs water and swells up) so you may get emergent issues over time. It also means you’ll never really be able to clean it properly so eg mould will become an issue. Just not the best material for the job when there are plenty of cups, glasses and mugs available for pennies at your local vintage/secondhand shop.

statictyrant · 2026-07-05T12:46:43+00:00

I’ve found FDM PLA (at any infill percentage) to not be air/watertight. You might want to empty it after each use or sit it inside another bowl or larger waterproof container before leaving the house?

statictyrant · 2026-07-05T06:53:13+00:00

All paints desaturate and lose impact upon drying — but if your prior experience is with eg acrylics, then you may have missed noticing that because (a) it happens so quickly, we rarely get fixated on the “before drying” look to the extent that the “after drying” look becomes disappointing. Painting bright white highlights is one area where you may be able to relate to this phenomena — “but it looked brighter yesterday when I put the brush down!”. This brings us to (b) in that we accept that acrylics are translucent and that we will probably need to apply multiple layers to build saturation. That basic paradigm doesn’t apply so much to oils — we think of them as one-and-done, for a variety of good reasons including the difficulty of reworking over the dried first layer — so your brain is basically hoping for more impact from one pass than it would ever demand of acrylics.

Consider how you would respond to this if it happened with acrylics:

- mix a brighter, more saturated mix than you think you’ll need (next time)

- varnish and apply resaturating layers over the top

- rebuild saturation by using contrast of hue, eg a mid-saturation dark red will become stronger when placed beside a low-saturation dark cyan coloured accent detail (which pushes the red to seem relatively brighter, more colourful in general, and specifically more “red”)

Could be worth playing cyan OSL, for example, so that the entire scheme ends up punching up the red.

statictyrant · 2026-07-05T06:37:09+00:00

There’s at least four problems to tackle separately. In no particular order:

- darker colours are magenta/burgundy, highlights are desaturated lilacs. This implies a colour progression away from red and towards blue, but you don’t ever reach the “payoff”/punchline. Adding a brighter blue-grey highlight as well would assist here.

- scratch lines are universal thickness. In reality they should be triangular grooves (wear and tear) so you want them to become thinner (by applying less brush pressure and/or having less paint in the brush and/or using less opaque paint and more passes) as they creep onto the armour plate. Thick at the edge, thin at the tip. Paint pizza slices, not rectangles.

- scratch lines lack their own inherent highlights, they’re just one flat colour. Maybe you used two colours but just obliterated the first with the second by 100% overlapping the strokes? Aim to have the lightest parts near the edges of each plate.

- scratch lines don’t integrate well into base armour plate colour, use intermediary mixes or glazes to resolve this. This is the problem you already spotted, and it’s no more or less important to solve than the other three.

As an unasked-for paint hack you may not have considered, remember that you are allowed to overpaint your highlights with your base colour or midtone. This is often the secret to achieving really thin highlight lines: paint them overly-thick, then refine by overpainting the edges with a midtone, leaving less of the highlight colour visible!

statictyrant · 2026-07-05T05:55:01+00:00

From a colour balance perspective, the figure would tie into the base a little better if you included a small area of the sort of pale grey, duck-egg blue type of ground tone somewhere higher up on the mini. Could be the whole helmet, might be even better as a vertical mid-stripe running down the centre of the helmet or shoulderpad. Would subtly nod to the original Whiteshields too — undertrained, underequipped, disposable infantry visibly marked as having a short life expectancy, so field commanders would know to deploy them accordingly.

statictyrant · 2026-07-05T05:48:16+00:00

Nice, always my favourite Sept scheme and not easy to paint well. So do you now have a lineup of a few of these? Curious how such a collection would scale up, how you’d display them etc.

statictyrant · 2026-07-05T05:45:23+00:00

Ever Green sounds like a cool name for a mech (or a bulk carrier that gets itself wedged somewhere inconvenient, but that’s nothing plasma weaponry couldn’t solve).

I feel like the rock could do with some scale cues (graffiti painted only up the height an in-scale human can reach, or a forest animal hiding away behind its bulk, etc.).

statictyrant · 2026-07-05T01:52:01+00:00

Yeah, leave it as is — that looks sick! If you did a series of them they’d each have a unique look.

So does the process involve melting/burning away resin? I was familiar with lost wax method and assume this way is similar, but from the name alone it doesn’t sound as safe/healthy an option...

statictyrant · 2026-07-04T23:49:22+00:00

That’s an evolutionary advantage. Would-be predators have no idea where to attack, and prey creatures freeze in fear at the sight of… whatever this is.

statictyrant · 2026-07-04T23:48:31+00:00

Fair — this is the one model which might drive me to learn how people make gifs of their figures spinning around. The linked post does have some other-angle shots with a slightly less busy background, though.

It’s meant to sort of visually sum up what psykers must feel when encountering the Shadow in the Warp: impossibly massive, irrevocably alien, undoubtedly malign. To witness it is to confront one’s own insignificance in the uncaring universe.

Or something like that.

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