Quick post today to show off two things.

1. My 2 converted Croc Men models.
2. Bandua container scenery.

The Northern Open 3 event has really inspired the “Bolton Boardgamers: Infinity Division” into trying to up the appearance of their gaming tables. The INA crew have some amazing looking tables, and if we can get ours half way to looking like theirs I think we’ll be exceptionally pleased with ourselves (maybe we’ll be able to hold a “Bolton Open” at some point lol). We chipped in and bought a shed load of terrain in the Black Friday sales. Now it just needs assembling and painting. I have volunteered to assemble some of the terrain we got from Bandua Wargames. The container is the first of that batch of terrain, I also have some fences, and a set of Q-Buildings to assemble and paint too. It’s probably getting on for 20 years since I did any terrain, so this’ll be an experience. Keep your eyes peeled on this blog if you’re interested in seeing how my return to terrain building/painting turns out.

The container was dead easy to assemble, this is my first MDF terrain so wasn’t sure what to expect.

After a quick undercoat the container was airbrushed quickly with two contrasting colours, dark purple and light grey. Then each colour had a quick highlight of a lighter colour, a lighter shade of purple, and white respectively. I then spent a silly an amount of time painting in details. I think it would be about 30mins with the airbrush including masking, and about 2hrs with a paint brush afterwards.

• The lettering and the symbol on the side.
• Adding further white highlights.
• Added further shading to the white panels and details with a simple thinned black wash.
• Which was also used to add weathering in the form of water marks.
• A screen on the door lock.
• Black and yellow hazard stripes.
• Finally I added weathering with a sponge in two stages.
  1. A darkish brown sponged on to represent dirt and rust.
  2. A lighter application of a medium silver. This was to represent chipped paint.

The finished container; it looks pretty rough up close but its scenery and looks pretty decent at the usual gaming distance of a few feet.

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Corvus Belli released the resculpted Croc Men Sniper model this year (previewed in May). I really liked this model and wanted that sculpt in my collection.

Now towards the end of summer I started thinking about my first Infinity tournament, the Northern Open 3, and deciding what I’d want to take in those lists. However in the world of ITS scenarios it seems that Infiltrating TO Camo specialists are number 1 on the ITS army roster building shopping list. A vanilla Pano force has access to 3 such models:

1. Croc Men Hacker,
2. Croc Men Forward Observer,
3. Spec Order Sergeant Forward Observer.

The third is more of a Military Orders option because it gets a SWC discount within the sectorial list. More importantly that model is nowhere near as cool as the new sniper model. That left me with the Croc Men specialists to use in my Northern Open 3 lists, but that brought up the next problem: the new sniper model is not a specialist.

There is currently a Croc Men Hacker model, but it is an older model and in my opinion not as cool looking as the recently released Croc Men Sniper. There is no FO model at all. This was the start of a plan to convert two sniper models in to a hacker and a FO, and they were ordered about mid-September. I think every Infinity player and his dog wanted that sculpt in the NW England, as I had to wait a long time for them to come back in stock.

At the beginning of October the Mayacast podcast announced their last Masterglass painting comp of 2015: InfoWar. This was to paint up a hacker, and a hacker associated model. This was a stroke of luck for me, as I had the plan to convert the Croc Men Hacker and the Croc Men FO carries a deployable repeater. So I decided these two models would be my InfoWar team forming my entry. The beginning of November rocks up, still no models 😦 , and even worse lists had to be submitted by the 7th. So I hedged my bets and made one list without the Croc Men, and one list with them. Fortunately the models then arrived on the 4th and although this gave me about 2 weeks to convert and paint two models, I still had some models remaining from the other list that required finishing off for the Northern Open 3. In the end that was too big a task for me, so I sacked off the second list for that event.

After having a great time at the Northern Open 3 I was really motivated to get the Croc Men model’s converted and painted up for the Mayacast Masterglass competition. After taking the ‘final’ photos on the eve of the closing date I have spotted a number of mistakes/missed spots on the photos of the models. Unfortunate, but that’s what happens when I rush. Still the quality of the painters that enter mean that I’d be way down the finalists list any way. Most important for me is that I’ve had the motivation to get those models done!

If you are interested in the conversions themselves, keep an eye out over the Christmas holidays on my blog. I intend to post articles on how they were converted. There will also be another Infinity article, which is not related to my Pano force, stealthily sneaking its way onto my blog – probably Christmas eve.

EDIT: I have just spotted the InfoWar entries up on the Mayacast Facebook page. There are some serioous good entries, go check them out.