Mei Fen's Rail Crew for Malifaux

Painting the box set plus some other bits and pieces

Being persuaded to try something different is failry easy when the stuff is nice, and the steampunk genre is always interesting too, mainly because of my admiration for the New Crobuzon novels of China Mieville. Therefore buying far too ambitious a set of models to simply dip my toe in the water was a no-brainer, and one short ebay frenzy later I am the proud possessor of a 50+ Soulstone Ten Thunders/Arcanists crew led by Mei Feng. Whatever that means...

This is Mei and her whole crew. Rail Golem at the back, 3 Metal Gamin, 3 Rail Workers, Kang and Mei Feng herself. The game is well supported by Wyrd Games, but there is a wiki (obviously an idea warmly welcomed by this site) at Pull My Finger which is well worth a read

Kang is a bit of an enforcer hard-man for the Rail Workers union, and here is he next to The Emerbling which is a sort of fire thing that Mei summons. It shambles about and it's proximity stops enemy figures from putting out themselves when they get set on fire. Which should happen a lot apparently. I gave Kang a red star on his apron, partly to be more world wide socialist revolution about the whole rail-worker thing, and partly as I had some spare from some FoW transfers.

Mei Feng, 10 Thunders martial artist with her Tiger Claw metal gloves. I wanted a paint scheme that would work well with The Emberling, and so she ended up with textbook workers blue jeans/dungarees (which are undone) which got built up with progressive shades of drybrushing on a GW Macgarre Blue base, and an orange top which is just Windsor & Newton orange ink on a white base, as I've never found much success with orange paint really. The Emberling is yellow, red and black with an overall orange ink wash and some final dark grey drybrushing to pick out the edges of the "embers" a bit more.

The three Metal Gamin. These are tiny models, and a little disappointing to get them out of the "more than a tenner" box and have to assemble them. They were all basecoated in Army Painter Army Green, then the lizard one had some drybrushed Humbrol metallics, and the middle one was inked in orange. The odd one on the left was left normal green.

The Rail Crew. Really pleased with how these guys have come out - although I may well have missed a trick in terms of how much more half-man half-construct they should be, with the chap on the left in particular being a model I have since seen elsewhere with a bare chest of flesh and all of the rest of his limbs being constructs - so the bits I painted white as a ripped vest could be th eonly flesh left on him. Anyway, these are "tanky" little models, which came with a couple of alternative arms on the sprue (which you will see later) and they can stand around and take a beating fairly well whilst the rest of the crew do bad things to people. The Army Painter Dark Tone has worked a real treat on these guys, making them look railway-grimey as well as picking out the castings really well - although it has also caught the mould/join lines in some places (see the guy with the hammer's right wrist).

Here they are again against a different background. I tried to create a sort of uniform look with the denim dungarees/jeans but to then make them all a bit more individual with other colours. The red stuff is probably cast as the dungarees being folded down, but by adding it in a different colour it brings more life and variety to the figure

The Rail Golem. A vast figure - much bigger than the others, and here it was painted in many different types of Humbrol metallic, with GW Graveyard Earth used as a drybruch on black for the wooden feet.

Here he is explaining to Kang what a "big stick" actually looks like. As you can see I added a "denim waistcoat" to key him into the overall colourscheme for the crew yet again - I really wasn't sure how this would look, but it's not too, erm, camp (I think..). In any case, the other bold decision was to go for white chimneys on the model - again I think this just about works, and I didn't want the whole thing to be a mass of bronze - my post-hoc justification being that the Golem has been put together from bits and pieces and so maybe the chimneys were taken from a train with a white and blue livery?

And again. The metal beam the Rail Golem is carrying is painted brown and then has its edges done in a drybrushed gunmetal. In the game I think he probably hits people quite hard with this.

Here is Mei Feng again. Not an easy model to assemble despite very few parts - my tip woudl be to stick her hair on before sticking her to the blasted-wood base, as then you can wrap the hair around the wood and anchor it with glue, giving the model a second anchor point as well as the (rather small) foot which glues onto the blasted-wood thing. This one also came on a slotta base, so I kept some of the sprue on the bottom of the blasted rails and anchored them in the slot.

And from the back - you can see where the hair is glued on. The vest top has come out nicely here - showing the ink on white effect well too

Kang and two Rail Workers. Loving the Army Painter effect generally, but not so much loving how it shows up how I didn't fill some of the joins near their wrists

The Emberling - this closeup shows the grey highlights quite well. It also shows the join where the model and his base are fixed together. I've seen this very obvious join on several other models online, but given how irregular The Emberling is cast, its pretty difficult to smooth out this join that runs around his base. I should maybe have tried harder though as it's very obvious.

Here are some bases I got online from Bases 4 War. On the right you can see the spare arm I mentioned earlier - everything else is cast on.

These are more of the bases, plus some supplies from Ainsty Castings. As usual, everything has been drybrushed on black, and then liberally doused in Army Painter Dark Tone - then finally matt varnished with Testors Dullcote

Here's the full crew again. Looking forward now to playing my first game in a week or so!

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