About a decade ago, I managed to buy me a near mint copy of Lost Patrol for just €10,-. It was a game I had wanted to own for quite some time, and then finally, I found a guy selling it, not 10 minutes away from where I lived!
It's a great little game, but a tad unbalanced and therefore pretty hard on the scouts. But a little houseruling solved that too.
However, the only letdown were the plastic scout miniatures in the box; they were the first plastic scouts, released when Rogue Trader was still the current edition of 40K, and these scouts could be found in just about every game GW published.
Mine were red plastic, monoposed (except for the top-heavy sergeant of course) and just fugly to my eye at the time.
Now, I had a perfectly fine painted scout squad, made with the then new metal scouts, but for some reason, this just didn't feel right.
But by this time , I had already amassed a huge lot of RT era scouts, both plastics and metals, for service in my late RT/early 2nd ed Imperial Fists army.
And with my favourite 40K novel being the original one; Space Marine by Ian Watson, it was clear what I had to do; paint up a squad of old metal scouts, and base them on the protagonists from the book, as for much of the story, the characters are together in a scout squad.
So, I cleaned up and based the appropriate minis, taking care to make sure they (sort of) had the feel of the characters in the book.
The idea was to have all 5 minis in the squad individually based, but then have a larger display base for them, in the shape of 2 or 3 large hexes, just like the tiles of Lost Patrol, all covered in huge amounts of (deadly?) vegetation. This, because I also intended to enter them in next year's Golden Daemons (just like the other scout squad, which made it to the finals).
As a heavy weapon was also required, and there is no metal miniature of a scout with a heavy bolter and the plastic one was naff, I went with a scout carrying a bolter instead. It was different enough from the boltpistol and knife of the others, and it was an original mini.
However, after a short while, when I had already started painting them, the bolter scout just didn't quite do it, and I converted an already damaged metal scout to carry the (plastic) heavy bolter. And since his face had been mauled before I acquired him, I also sculpted a rebreather mask on him. This further differentiated him from his original form (great, since the original mini also features in the squad. Can you spot him?).
I undercoated him, and with the rest of the squad having just their faces painted, and some added colour to some trousers and slashes in sleeves, the entire project basically stalled there.
This was 10 years ago...
So, a couple of months ago, I read that GW will be re-releasing Lost Patrol, and this news got me all excited. I suddenly remembered my forgotten scouts and I dug them up out of a dark, forgotten corner of my display cabinet.
And there they were, facing me from across my painting desk, whilst I happily painted and converted away on my X-Wing ships.
But yesterday, they finally got their well deserved comeback. I painted the face on the heavy bolter scout, trying my best to make it fit in with the rest of the faces. Luckily, my (caucasian) skintone recipy has not changed for over a decade, so I think I nailed it.
However, since back then, I've (rightfully so) changed my undercoating for yellow coats from black to white. My current Imperial Fists are a simple wash or two of the old Citadel Yellow Wash over a white undercoat, which gives the same result as 6 layers over black of Vomit Brown, Golden Yellow etc...
But since these guys were undercoated black, I painted a single layer of VMC Sky Grey over the black (it covers really well), as a step up to the desired white basecoat, before the yellow washes.
And that's where I'm at right now.
So, let me introduce to you, from left to right, Some unnamed bolter scout, Sergeant Zed Juron, Lexandro D'Arquebus, Yeremi Valence, Biff Tundrish and Omar Akbar:
I really hope I can keep the momentum up on these guys, so they will be ready in about a month or so, right in time for the release of Lost Patrol v2...
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April 29, 2024, 03:16:48 PM
October 16, 2007, 10:33:55 PM
