Right, I’ve just spent a material percentage of my life painting three SCE (you can find them here) for Nightvault to practice NMM. I finished them earlier than I expected to and now have a couple of weeks before I want to start my next big project (an online painting comp, I’ll post about that soon). I really want to bag a whole new game system relatively quickly just to change the pace and Kill Team looks like just the thing. I’ve written a bit more about why that is here.
This post is about the actual building of the GK’s. I’ll do a step by step on the painting too (when I get to it). I’ll caveat this bit by saying that cutting bits off of the sprue, trimming them, gluing them together and finishing / filling them is literally the least enjoyable part of the hobby for me. For me, there’s nothing further removed from the fun interaction of playing or the satisfaction of a really smooth blend than scraping off mould lines.
I’m changing the mind set a bit over time though and I’m trying to view this bit as the part of the process that enables a good paint job. If I get this bit right, the good (but quick) paint job I want will follow. That’s the theory. If I don’t enjoy building I can at least enjoy doing a job well.
Step 1. Everyone has a bath. Image redacted to protect GK modesty. I always wash new plastic sprues as follows:
- Soak in hot, soapy (dishwashing soap is fine) water for about 15 minutes (the water can be much hotter for plastic than for resin as the plastic doesn’t warp).
- When the 15 minutes are up, scrub each sprue hard with an old toothbrush (or a new toothbrush or your actual toothbrush, I don’t care)
- Rinse the sprues thoroughly in clean running water, shake hard to get rid of the excess and leave somewhere flat (ie. don’t stack because they take longer to dry) to dry out
For resin models I repeat the wash and repeat process three times and keep the water cooler. The reason for this is that resin models seem to have more release agent on them than plastic and whilst warmer water is better for getting rid of that it also warps the resin so cooler water more often for that.
Plastic models (the GW ones at least) don’t seem to have any release agent on them so lots of people don’t do the washing step but I swear by it because:
- You never know if there’s any release agent (or any other grease that might stop paint sticking to the model) so washing can’t hurt
- I don’t know how true this is but it feels as though the scrubbing with the toothbrush gives the plastic a slight tooth or key (it takes some of the shine off the plastic) and that, in turn, should be helping the paint stick to the plastic.
YMMV but I’m a washer.
Step 2. Legs on bases
I’m sure everyone has their own way of doing this but my way is to start with the legs and makes sure they’re glued tight to the base. Now, anyone who has built Space Marines knows that there are some really gnarly mould lines on the legs. The way I deal with mine is to scrape them back and then sandpaper (Tamiya fine grain) over the scrape to smooth any small gouges. I end up with something like this:
Step 2. Bodies.
Again, this is a step that can be quite ganky. The way SM bodies are joined to the sprue is via the armpit area. If you don’t trim that cut right back after you’ve made it it means that the two halves of the body don’t sit flush and also that the arms don’t fit on nicely. There’s also the risk that as you put pressure on the two halves they can slip slightly and the belt and neck lines don’t line up.
Even once this has all been sorted and everything is seated straight, you’re left with a gap between the front and back of the body. If you want a really decent paint job, that needs to be filled. My preferred method id liquid green stuff.
When I first used liquid green stuff I thought it was terrible. You put it over the gap you want to fill and wait ten minutes. When you come back what you have is your original gap but coloured green. It shrinks a lot.
Having done some research I’ve got my method down, it’s not hard but does introduce a lot of time to the overall process.
- Paint some liquid green stuff over the gap you need to fill. Don’t be cheap with it because that will mean more layers but similarly don’t go bananas because that will mean more sanding
- When it’s dry (this is actually fairly quick, 5 – 10 minutes) take some modelling sandpaper and sand over the gap to remove the excess green stuff.
- Scrub all over the area with a toothbrush / cleaning brush to get the sanding detritus out of the way so that you end up with a smooth finish
- Repeat.
Now, for my SCE’s I did this 4-5 times to get the gaps super smooth. I didn’t do that for these, I just did it twice but the result will be fine when it’s painted:
That’s an absolute potato picture but its the areas above and below the arm socket.
Step 3. Heads, ornaments and backpacks
Pretty simple stuff this. As this is a quick project I want to paint the minis in as fewer pieces as possible (this will also help keep the light direction as consistent as possible). So the heads, ornaments (GK’s have lot of these) and backpacks go on next. I can absolutely see the value in leaving the backpacks off and I know I may get some fitting issues with the shoulder pads now but if there will be issues, there would have been issues whichever way I did it. So what I’m left with at this stage is ten dudes that look like this:
The only real keys to this step are:
- I like to make sure the heads are dynamic. I stick one pointing the the left, one pointing to the right and one pointing ahead and just keep going until I run out of models.
- Make sure the backpacks are on straight. GKs have an extended hood behind the head with a line down it which makes centring the backpack really easy. Putting these on straight will mean fewer fit issues with shoulder pads etc.
- Make sure the ornaments hang off of something. In the case of the GKs there are little loops on the top of some of the ornaments. Make sure these line up with the belt so they don’t look like they’re floating. Same with the tool belt things.
So that’s building step one. This took me all of my Sunday hobby time, the next steps are:
- Sand over any obvious flaws (the spheres on the backpacks for example)
- Dry fit the arms (these are specific to the weapons choices
- Glue some of the arms
- put everything else on cork
It will take some concentration to get the arms for the two handed weapons into shape but I’m sure it will come together.