Dark skin tones- down the rabbit hole...

So, above you can see my recent paint job on the old 'Warrior Woman' model from Schaefer's Last Chancers, which I did to go with the rest of a Rapier battery crew that you can see over on my Deviantart. Whilst doing the write-up for those models, or in fact whilst I was thinking about that write up whilst painting them, I hit a bit of a problem.

You see, especially compared to the Raging Heroes models who form the rest of the battery crew, the Warrior Woman model's face is pretty hideous. GW have always been a bit hit-and-miss with female faces and this one was a very palpable miss. Here's the official GW pic so you can see what I mean:

I hope you'll agree that whilst I'm no 'Eavy Metal painter, mine looks a little nicer than that. Now it's when we come to the reason why that I started to run into trouble. To get the boil well-and-truly lanced, here's what I'm trying NOT to say:

"Because the model had an overly large, unattractive face, I painted her with very dark skin."

Now that's not what I'm saying, but I can see how someone might reduce it down to that. It's very noticeable that dark skin tones are rare on 40k miniatures and indeed, on miniatures in general, at least in my experience, leaving aside obvious things like Salamanders or African armies for historical games. To an outsider, that looks really odd- I mean really, really strange. For example, the default flesh tone Citadel paint is called 'Cadian Flesh Tone'. Cadia, let's remember is (or was, spoiler alert) a planet, and yet GW are fine with the implication that everyone on it is the same shade of Caucasian pink. I've tried to avoid that particular pitfall, if pitfall it indeed is- for example, a typical squad of my renegade Guard looks like this:

  

As you can see, I use a variety of tones to suggest an army drawn from a fairly modern society. In practice the models are put in squads fairly randomly so you don't get quite the quota system that's going on here. I think this squad only used three base colours- Kislev Flesh, Mournfang Brown and Zamesi Desert- whereas later squads also use Rhinox Hide and Cadian as starting points. Now here we begin to see one of the problems with the darker tones, which is that when used on a miniature they tend to hide the detail. This was the whole reason why I used the Rhinox Hide base colour on Warrior Woman, since it allowed me to dictate the shape of her features with the highlights. In general, the only way to deal with this issue is to go with more extreme highlighting than you usually would, which you can sometimes see on the rare occasions people do bare-headed Salamanders.

There are a few other related things to look at. One of these is the interesting phenomenon of armies like Marines where only a very few models have bare heads. Take a look at this image from the original Warhammer 40k Compendium:

 You might need to view that at full-size to get the effect. The thing is, when I saw that picture in my impressionable teens, I immediately assumed that all Marines of the Howling Griffons chapter were black, because the one Howling Griffon I'd seen with his helmet off was. There's probably some psychological name for that and it makes no sense if considered logically for even a few seconds, but it stuck in my head. It's very rare to see non-white Marines (yes except the Salamanders again) even though many, like the Dark Angels, recruit from several different planets- and anyway, the idea that everyone on a planet would be the same colour is pretty silly.

The other thing that's... interesting.. is the names of GW paints that are used for skin. As I mentioned earlier, the base colours I use for dark skin are either Rhinox Hide for the very darkest African black skin, or Mournfang Brown for a more Afro-Caribbean look. If you look on the GW website for 'flesh' paints, neither of them is there, and in fact all 13 paints are for white/ pink skin- though in fairness there's one called Bestigor Flesh so it's not like it's only the really dark colours that are named after monsters. Still, it does bother me a little effectively saying "I painted the light-skinned guys in the skin tone of the brave defenders of Cadia and the dark-skinned guys in the skin-tone of a big, angry beast".

Of course, while we're at it we could think about some of the Xenos races. We all know Tyranids come in all colours, and with Necrons it's basically a case of going for a re-spray, whilst Orks just get progressively darker green as they get 'arder, but for races like Eldar and Tau things are pretty vague. There certainly seem to be different mixes of blue and grey for Tau, but as for Eldar- have you ever seen a black Eldar? (Remember, if you're old enough, the shock of Tuvok, a black Vulcan, to some people) It makes some sense (ironically) for the Dark Eldar to be pale due to lack of sunlight, so should we expect Exodites to be darker?

I'm not going anywhere too profound with this, and certainly not suggesting anyone get cross about it all, but there's some interesting stuff there. It certainly seems the paint range could do with some paints named to suggest Asian (Cathyan Goldflesh?) or dark (Lustran Ebony?) skin tones (though of course Age of Sigmar killed both those names stone dead) which might help make people feel a little more included, but it's very much a first world problem. Still, something to think about next time you paint a squad of Guardsmen or Cultists, eh? 

Figure review- Creature Caster Spider Daemon

As promised a while ago, here's a quick look at my Spider Daemon who eventually arrived from Canada in the last few weeks of 2016. This one's a bit spicy, hence the rather nondescript part breakdown above that hopefully won't get anyone in trouble if it ends up popping up as a thumbnail!

Speaking of breakdowns, I think the creator of Creature Caster, Jeremy Glen, had a couple on the way to fulfilling this project, which in the end came in a couple of years late. Nonetheless, I'm not here to go on about the risks and pitfalls of backing Kickstarter projects, I'm here to talk about whether my sexy spider daemon was a sufficiently sexy spider daemon. (Spoilers: Yes)

As you can see from the picture above, the model came with a few spare parts. There was an extra head and sword (the unused head is on the left, the unused sword is the higher up of the two) as well as a little mascot figure (bottom left) which I used as a tester to see how much cleaning prep work was needed to make the paint stick. In the end, two fairly thorough washes with warm water and Fairy did the deed. There's also the large rock that serves as a base but is technically optional- though the pose of the model really requires it you could certainly have her standing on a wrecked dreadnought or part of a Knight, for example, and re-posing her to stand without it would be challenging but not impossible. I ended up sticking the rock to a 50mm GW base for 40k compatibility and more stability, though the model is fairly well-balanced with just the rock.

There were a few casting issues, most notably wit the legs and the upper part of the larger claw arms:

Here you can see the arm parts, with a pretty nasty mould line down the middle that looks like it might be the result of a slip. I was able to get rid of most of it with a knife, but it did leave a slightly distorted shape. Here are the legs:

Now that's a pair of really nasty lines, which were very tricky to hide and involved a little filling as well as filing. It's not easy to see here- in fact I'm not sure I noticed when I took these pictures- but there was also a problem with the claws at the back of the feet, at least one of which was hollow due to an air bubble.

I also had a minor issue with the torso:

There was far less going on here in terms of mould lines, and the piece was good and solid, but I felt some of the detail was a little soft. The nipples, in particular, were in some danger of vanishing when painted (which I think we can all agree would have been a disaster) since they really didn't stand out all that much from the breasts.

I had a spot of bother getting the model on to the rock- the attachment pegs didn't really both want to go into the receiving holes at the same time, and even when they did, they then prevented the claws from fitting into the small recesses in the rock provided for them. In the end, I cut the pegs off and used a little Green Stuff to add some more rock under the feet, which were quite happy to fit to the recesses but then stood a little clear of the rock itself for my tastes. I'm not sure how such a thing could have happened- nothing seemed bent or warped- but it was fairly simple to fix.

The rest of the model went together largely fine. There were no instructions, but the various pegs and fittings were well enough designed that it was easy to work out what went where by looking at the Kickstarter pictures. A little filling was required, especially on the leg joins, but overall the fit was decent. The various vents and sprue attachments were sensibly placed and avoided too much damage to detail when removed for the most part. Overall, the material was quite similar to the resin that Privateer call 'plastic', but possibly a little softer and more flexible, and it took superglue very nicely, meaning that with the good joins no pins were required.

Here's the final result, after painting in my Slaanesh scheme:

Click for larger view

I go into detail about the painting on my Deviantart page, but keeping with the review side of things it's worth mentioning here that the detail, whilst mostly good, does tend to flow rather than having clear areas to block in, which posed a few problems to me, an old-school brush painter. I think this model was probably designed with an airbrush in mind. There's also one hard line at the right hip (visible in the far right panel above) which I'm not at all sure should have been there. I thought it was detail during assembly, but it looked pretty odd during painting and I had to fudge it a bit.

Finally, lets have a size comparison shot, co-starring an unsuspecting pre-Heresy Dark Angel:

In his personal case, about two seconds before more Heresy than he can handle.

As you can see, she's a big one, and could probably pass for Zarakynel or an Exalted Keeper of Secrets in a pinch, though what's Monstrous and what's Gargantuan is a bit of a fuzzy area at the moment. 

To conclude then, this is a really exciting model (make of that what you will) that does present a few modelling challenges. I would hesitate to recommend it to a beginner, but it's certainly no harder to work with than most Forge World models. I have no idea if Creature Caster plans to actually sell this model as a production figure at some point, but I'm certainly glad I got her when I had the chance.

Would I back another Kickstarter from Creature Caster? Yes, if I liked one of the model concepts as much as I did this one. Hopefully with the contacts and experience gained through the course of this project the next would run closer to schedule, but all the same I certainly wouldn't want to back one with a particular date in mind. Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment, as the saying goes.