People really need to think harder about when they decide to be born.

Gdaybloke, for example, was born right after New Year’s. This was a terrible decision, because it means that when his birthday rolls around, I’m just winding down from my holiday gift model production and in the last desperate weeks of Templecon model production. This leaves little to no time for any additional projects to be added to my docket, and as a result, Gday’s best-case scenario is an IOU; worst case, it’s a “Sorry, maybe next time you should try to hold out a little longer in the womb.”

He wouldn’t even need to wait that long in there– four months would do it. See, Templecon is in early February, and then I usually collapse in exhaustion for a month or so afterward. March is largely spent planning the next year’s project list and attending to various small projects I’ve had to put off for the sake of the November-Through-February meat grinder.

But April? April just works. I’m relaxed from my post-TCon break and not yet buried in brand-new projects, which I generally save for warmer months. If I have a random whim to knock a model together in April, I can generally pull it off with little to no collateral damage to my schedule.

And that is why I must dole out rare praise to my perpetual cab passenger, Tom. By nearly any rational accounting, Tom has proven to be an utter waste of the biological, financial, and nutritional resources his parents deigned to invest in him. To call his long-term and day-to-day decision-making “questionable” would be an act of abject charity. Yet in spite of all that, when it came time to make the one decision that mattered, Tom chose wisely.

Displaying a level of clarity that he would utterly abandon in all the years that would follow, Tom burst forth into the world on a day that would, decades later, place him in the ideal position for collecting Spudgiftery year after year after year. When April rolls around, Spud is feeling renewed and ready to commit unrepentant acts of creation. And Tom, most generously, is always standing there, palm upturned, waiting to receive them.

This year, Tom’s present was selected on a day when I was stuck hanging around the store during an Infinity tournament. I’ve been admiring the incredible minis in this game since the game first popped up at my store a year or two ago, but I was never able to find the time to knock any of them together myself, so I’ve been relegated to admiring the game from afar.

However, watching Tom play his Haqqislam army (“ARAAAAABS… IIIIIIIN… SPAAAAACE!”) inspired me to pick him up something shiny from the wall, and after inspecting the options, I settled on some of the game’s little robot helper guys:

They’re called “Kameel Remotes”, and they’re adorable. “Kameel”, out of interest, is the word white people bludgeoned and tortured (as we do) until we could comfortably pronounce it as “Camel”, and that’s why England is awful.

You get two of them in the kit to reflect different types of support drones; one with a pair of machine guns, and the other with a Wifi hotspot on its back that acts as an arcnode of sorts for Tom’s hackers.

The legs attach to the base in a really bizarre manner: they’re too wide to sit cleanly on top of the provided 40mm base, so the spindly legs instead terminate on “shoes” that are, in essence, “more base” that hugs the outside of the circle.

While this is a fairly clever solution (and one that doesn’t adversely affect gameplay, as I’m told Infinity measures center-to-center instead of edge-to-edge like Warmachine, making the size and shape of a model’s base largely irrelevant), I must unfortunately report that I had a hell of a time trying to get the shoes to sit flush against the base edge. There were some gaps behind each one, and only about half of them sit flat to the ground. I’m sure it’s possible to do correctly, but I was starting to worry about snapping pieces off after all the bending I had done, so I resigned to leave it  “as good as I could manage” and fill in the gaps with putty.

Here’s the rest of the model assembled– this is the shooty camel.

Based on my assembly of my very first Infinity models, I’m happy to note that while the models come with a lot of excess flash, there are few to no actual mould lines to clean off. One of the legs had one (seen here), but it was on the easily-accessible top side; and the flash was all extremely easy to snap off, since it all attaches to the model by a tiny thread of contact. So, yeah– not only are the models beautiful, but that beauty isn’t ruined by excess metal all over the place. It was a nice surprise. 🙂

(And for the record, that isn’t a slam against PP specifically– I’ve had the same problems with nearly every other metal mini producer up to now)

I did absolutely no conversion work on these models, so the entire rest of the this article is going to be a short-form paint log.

For example, here’s some white spray!

My years of warjack painting have taught me to start with the messiest and hardest-to-reach areas first, so I basecoated the underside of the models with GW Codex Grey.

On top of this, I applied a wash of 60% Codex Grey/20% Chaos Black/20% Regal Blue. I didn’t use my normal brown metal wash because one of the things I love about Infinity’s visuals is their cleanliness– this world (or at least, parts of it) are still new and shiny, and not every model is caked with weeks of grime and soot. And while I have nothing against grime and soot, it’s a nice change to paint a model in its factory paintjob for once. 🙂

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The grey metals would receive highlights later, but for now I turned to the main paneling. Tom’s Haqqislam aren’t painted in the stock lime green, but in a jaunty royal blue. I wasn’t sure of the exact colours he uses, but after some experimental mixing, I liked the look of 70% GW Enchanted Blue/30% GW Ice Blue as my starting midtone.

Once the basecoat was on cleanly (which took a few thin layers), I started highlighting. Here I’ve applied a barely-perceptible highlight of “a teensy bit more Ice Blue added to the basecoat puddle in my wet palette”.

MOAR ICE BLUE!

I think this is two more highlight layers. I doesn’t look like I got a shot of the last one (which applied some nearly-pure Ice Blue dots on various top corners), but you can see it in the next couple pictures..

With the highlights applied, I wet blended some straight Regal Blue onto the lower areas.

If I wanted it to look realistic, I would’ve added more blend layers into brown here, but given my longstanding bias toward cartoony colour finishes, I opted to leave it here. 🙂

With a better idea of how far I wanted to take the model’s highlights, I went back to the metald and added some. I don’t remember the exact mixes, but the top flat areas of metal were given a coat GW Fortress Grey with some Regal Blue mixed in as a slight tint, and then dot highlights were applied by adding more Regal Blue and some pure white.

That’s the catch-22 of painting with a wet palette: your colours always come out how you want them to, but it’s a hell of a lot harder to remember what you did afterward. 😛

The secondary colour of Tom’s colour scheme is a small variety of assorted browns; keeping with my clean look, I chose a bright Bestial Brown as my midtone as a pseudo-orange to complement the blue chassis.

To tie the backpacks into the rest of the scheme, I shaded them into a mix of dark brown and Regal Blue (for a sort of murky purple).

A second coat with even more blue gave me the shade I was after, and then some simple edge highlighting in GW Snakebite Leather finished them off. Easy-peasy. 🙂

The last main colour area, and the one that promised to be the most fun, was the model’s assortment of “technobits”– lights, the windshield, and the Wifi frisbee. I went back and forth on how to colour these, but eventually I settled on “sort of orange” to maintain some cohesion with the “also sort of orange” brown backpacks. However, rather than actually make them orange, I decided to use a very high-contrast blend from light yellow down into strong orange and then into bright fuchsia.

Why?

I dunno. My brain convinced me it would look good. 😛

After basecoating the various bits in 50% GW Sunburst Yellow/50% pure white, I then applied a wet blend of straight GW Sunburst Yellow to make the transition into the next stage’s strong orange more gradual.

I apparently forgot to take intermediary shots, but this is basically just two more wet blends: an orange I constructed myself out of 90% Sunburst Yellow/10% Blood Red (because I apparently don’t own an actual pot of orange paint anymore), and then a light wash of GW Warlock Purple at the very bottom.

I ended up coming back and doing more cleanup later, but for now let’s jump to the frisbee.

I completely forgot to paint this until the model was nearly finished.

Oops.

My basecoat yellow had dried up by this point, but it wasn’t hard to re-mix.

A more tragic casualty, however, were the washes; after an hour these were in an awkward intermediary stage of “sort of started drying, but still liquidy enough to fool Spud’s eyes into thinking they’re usable”. And unfortunately, they resulted in the really awful blends seen here, as the paint just refused to accept my usual coaxing toward a smooth gradient.

It didn’t really start bugging me until the next day, though, so for now I glued the frisbee to the Communicamel’s back.

My now-customary “forgot to take intermediary stage photos” habit strikes quite tragically here, but I’ll do my best to fill in with boring words. I re-blended most of the flat area with freshly mixed washes; aside from cleaning up the crappy gradient, I also decided to err more heavily toward the darker shades and away from the light yellow that dominated in my first pass, with a very clear ring of magenta around the bottom (which shows up as red here, but in person it looks more pink).

Once that was done, I started patterning. From what I remember of my art history classed in university, Muslims aren’t allowed to draw figurative art (eg, a dude, or a dog, or a house, or whatever else) because… false idols? I think? However, people of that faith don’t have any less of the human race’s standard artistic drives, so instead of painting pictures, they instead channel those energies into absolutely breathtaking geometric tesselation. I wanted to borrow some of this for the wifi frisbee, so I spent a while digging through Google Images to find one that looked manageable (because, most of them weren’t. They tend to be made up of impossibly complex patterns and fine details that I wasn’t up to painting) and settled on a nice one that… I now can’t locate to show you.

Hrm.

I practiced the pattern on a piece of paper, and then set about VERY CAREFULLY applying it to the model. The dark lines between the various panels are thin washes; the lines on top of any part of my yellow-orange-magenta base blend are done with the next darkest colour, so…

• light yellow is shaded normal yellow
• normal yellow is shaded orange
• orange is shaded magenta

Needless to say, this took freaking forever and had very little margin for error, but I think I managed it in the end. With the linework done, I then added some faux “edge highlights” in light yellow to create an embossed panel look.

The final touch, which I’m not sure ultimately succeeded as much as I wanted it to, was to apply interference paint on top of the panels. For the uninitiated, interference paint is a type of metallic paint that only shows its colour from a certain angle; viewed from a different angle, it looks transparent. This effect is often used with multiple different colours to create a colour shift effect;  each shade of interference paint has different active visibility angles, so if you paint one on top of another (or, as is more often done, just mix two together), they’ll shift and blend as you turn the model.

I applied interference paint within the panels I had defined; I didn’t overlap multiple colours, but I did change which colour I used in different areas– interference red on the outside, then interference orange, and finally interference gold in the center. The effect is fairly nice in person, but it proved to be NIGHTMARISHLY DIFFICULT to photograph. Even my attempt to shoot a video of it was a pretty dismal failure (even if you ignore the horrific quality of my still camera’s video mode):

So, yeah. You’ll just need to trust me on this one– the frisbee appears to have matte paint when viewed head-on, but becomes metallic when tilted around. It’s only my first attempt at using interference paint and I’ve definitely learned a few things that I would do differently next time, but overall I’m calling it a marginal success for now.

With that, the models were essentially done, but the gift still had one required component left to sort out. Tom’s existing Infinity army fits exactly within the case he transports it in, with no room for a single additional model (which is quite intentional, as it stops him from buying more. :P). Thus, if I was going to add to his model burden, I needed to provide him a case to carry them around in*.

*The fact that I enjoy building cases far more than I enjoy making models had absolutely nothing to do with it, I assure you.

My custom model cases usually employ furniture foam as their cushioning agent, but this time, for reasons I can’t even begin to explain, I decided to try something different; instead of a soft foam wrap around the entire model, I would use a tightly-cut craft foam slot to immobilize the models’ bases inside a space too small for them to bounce around.

As it turns out, it’s pretty difficult to cut out five layers of completely identical silhouettes without any variation. So these ended up a bit… woogity.

But they fit!!

So it all worked out. 🙂

I originally sized the foam pad to fit the bottom of a transparent chocolate box I had lying around, but when I made my regular monthly trip to Homesense (not sure if you have that exact chain in the States… it’s a big box store that sells faux-weathered pretend antiques to people too lazy or too grossed out to buy actual antiques), I found a box that had the PRECISE interior dimensions to fit my camels, AND had a sort-of-arabic-ish woodcut pattern on the lid.

Seriously, it was a bit eerie how perfect it was. @_e

The original pad was too big, but after I cut the sides down, I was good to go.

And with that… Project Technocamel was ready to be given to its recipient a full week ahead of schedule.

I gave it to him anyway, because YOUR CALENDAR ISN’T THE BOSS OF ME.

And that, my attractive readers, is how Spud came to spend three weeks looking at Infinity models for painting reference.

Which might’ve…

…sort of…

…kind of…

…accidentally…

…maybe…

…had consequences.

…

;_;

-Spud