The Infinity group at my store is currently running a mini-campaign that I’m greatly enjoying. Each of the eight participants has created a Spec Ops character for their army, including a bit of backstory to explain where they came from and why they’re awesome. Each week we’re paired against an opponent; the organizer writes some fluff about why we’re fighting, and assigns us an objective-heavy scenario to resolve the conflict. We play it out, and any Spec Ops who survive accrue experience to pick up new abilities and gear. After the game, both players write up a short fluff piece about the battle from their Spec Ops’ point of view; some players write a play-by-play of the coolest parts of the battle, while I’ve focused more on the grisly aftermaths of my relentless series of crushing defeats.

It’s been a hoot. 🙂

My Spec Ops character for the event is named Chinenye Ojokwu, and I painted a picture of her on my work-issued iPad a few months ago:

Chinenye started out as a hacker working for space pirates. She accompanied them on an ill-fated raid on a civilian transport that turned out to be carrying a contingent of Knight of Santiago escorts. After the Knights thoroughly trashed the pirates, they surprised Chinenye by taking their weapons and letting them go. Chinenye was so moved by that act of mercy that she elected to stay on with them, dedicating her skills from then on to a slightly more scrupulous cause.

Because the league only lasts a few months, most other people didn’t bother making specific minis for their characters. However, because I am Spud and Spud makes terrible decisions, I opted to spend an inordinate amount of time constructing a mini to represent Chinenye in my games.

Chinenye’s costume is modeled on a troop type called a Crusader Brethren, who are the drop troops of the Military Orders. They jump out of orbiting spacecraft and then use their jetpacks to land safely behind enemy lines, where they can begin sharing the good news of Space Jesus (and also, some bullets) with all they encounter there.

The Infinity range contains two different Crusader Brethren; I already own both and didn’t want to repeat any models, so I dug through the PanOceania model range to find another mini I could base Chinenye on, eventually settling on this tall drink of awesome:

Kirpal Singh is a veteran Akali, which are a different type of drop troop available to PanOceania. Their outfits differ quite a bit, but one thing I like about the Infinity range is that most troops in the army share quite a bit of their equipment– every machine gun and shotgun looks the same, and nearly every PanOceanian troop is wearing identical, standard-issue boots. Because of this consistency, I could leave the majority of the detail on Kirpal’s model intact.

Here are the pieces he comes with. I would be using the majority of his components, only swapping his left arm out for one I scrounged from PanOceania’s hideous mechanic model.

I left the legs completely intact, but used hobby clippers to decapitate him and gut most of the metal from his abdomen and chest.

And then came the putty. The flat body armor went on in one layer, but the tabard would take a few passes– this here is the first layer of understructure which will hold up the final smooth cloth.

Here I’ve added the beginning of Chinenye’s collar with a few scraps of putty.

I feature this photo only because it made me realize how much unsmoothed putty looks like Calvin’s mom’s cooking.

…

…just me? No?

Alrighty, moving on.

I added a bit more understructure to the tabard, widening it out, and then cleaned up the collar. I’m not adhering to a strict reproduction of the Crusader armor; rather, I’m creating a fusion of the Crusader and Knight of Santiago armors to reflect Chinenye’s elevated rank within the brethren. Thus, instead of the “jagged v-neck” of the Crusader armor, I’ve given her the “vaguely triangular gorget” of the Santiagos, and will also be giving her the full plated pauldrons of the higher-ranked knights.

A bit more putty and the torso is done. Definitely some of my better cloth. 🙂

Next it was time to add the head, which was being sculpted from scratch out of Fimo. Heads are still pretty challenging for me, but I’ve at least got a pretty reliable workflow I can follow that seems to get me decent results.

I start by burying a wire inside a cork for stability, then twist the end of the wire into a tight loop. This loop then gets a very small glob of green stuff wrapped around it as a base for the Fimo, which has a very difficult time gripping onto wire on its own.

Next, I add a mixture of 50% Fimo/50% Fimo MixQuick, which is a softening and smoothing agent that makes the Fimo much easier to work with.

Oh, and I’ve switched from orange to blue Fimo, because after two years I was about ready to throw my orange block at the wall.

I seriously cannot stress enough the importance of “non-eye-burning colours” when making your Fimo selection. >_<

Once the Fimo is attached, I start shaping it. Here I’ve used metal tools to identify my landmarks– eyes, eyebrows, and mouth. Identifying these at the start gives me reference points to ensure that everything else is proportioned and positioned correctly.

Next, I add two Fimo snakes– one long and skinny, the other shorter and fatter– around her mouth and press them into the surrounding clay to form her lips.

A cute little putty bean is dropped in to be her nose.

My camera apparently decided that the cork was the far more interesting element in this composition.

Smaller clay blobs are added on either side to form her nostrils, and then everything gets blended together. I also add the smallest clay bits of all- four tiny shreds around her eyes to form her upper and lower eyelids.

With all of the major facial volumes added, I can start pulling all the forms into place– I take a bit of mass out of her cheeks and her jaw, and pull the face into a slightly more “GRR, SUPA SERIOUS” glare.

With the face nearing completion, I add her ears. Any time I add a symmetrical piece like this, I roll a putty ball and cut it cleanly in half on my worktable to ensure that both sides are the same size.

Next up, I add hair. Chinenye’s hair is fairly short, but I can’t just rely on black paint to delineate it– I still need to give it volume and texture.

Random aside: About a week before I sculpted Chinenye, I was flipping through documentaries on Netflix and found one called “Good Hair” starring, of all people, Chris Rock. The documentary is about the struggle that black people go through to alter their hair– apparently, the frizzy/curly hair that I figured was merely “common” is, in fact, “nearly universal”, and any time you see black people with straight hair (eg, Rihanna or Beyoncé), they’re either wearing a wig, or have gone through a painful chemical straightening process.

I guess most people knew that already, but for me it was very enlightening. HEY, GIMME A BREAK! WE DON’T HAVE A TON OF BLACK PEOPLE IN CANADA! WE ARE A VERY PALE NATION! IT HELPS US HIDE FROM POLAR BEARS!

@_@

…

…AAAAAAnyway. I mention it only because my new learnings were very helpful in guiding my decisions around Chinenye’s hair sculpt– my initial painting had sort of “anime black wavy hair”, but I decided that Chinenye wouldn’t have any patience for that level of hair care, so I gave her more natural close-cropped frizzies. So now in addition to being awesome, she’s also moderately grounded in science; and as we all know, science makes everything better.

The left side of Chinenye’s head was left smooth to show the temple she keeps shaved down. As a sci-fi hacker, Chinenye’s head is crammed full of routers, modems and sensors that she uses to access data systems around her. PanOceania, being the defacto “rich nation” of the Infinity universe, has very clean-looking hackers who just wear visors and type on the air, Johnny Mnemonic-style. However, Chinenye is a former pirate, and I wanted her implants to look a bit lower-tech, with access panels and wiring visible through her skin (to be added later with paint).

With that, the head was essentially done and ready for baking. I set the timer on my halogen oven, dropped Chinenye’s head inside, and walked away.

…and then had a heart attack when I returned five minutes later and realized I’d left the temperature dial on a Fimo-melting 400 degrees, which is a mistake that cost me six weeks of work eight months ago.

By a fortuitous fluke, however, I managed to avoid complete disaster this time. While the excess heat turned the putty clear (and started to develop an internal crack along her right cheek), the teensy-tiny size of the head meant that it only needed five minutes of cooking time to begin with, so it wasn’t in the oven long enough for the permanent burning/bubbling/melting consequences to really take hold.

So I dodged a bullet this time, but I’m not taking any more risks– the temperature dial of my halogen oven has been super-glued on Fimo Temperature. >_<

Once it was baked, the head was transplanted to Chinenye’s body.

The mini was nearing completion, but I still had some detail to add. First up was her left arm. The right arm was the original from Kirpal Singh, who is wearing medium armor and has a nice pattern of armor plates on his limbs. However, the left arm was taken from an unarmored mechanic, so I needed to add the plating myself.

After the forearm plating, all that remained to add was the heavy knightly pauldron that would bear the symbol of Chinenye’s order.

And with that, she was done. 🙂

All in all, I have to say that I’m pretty happy with how Chinenye turned out. Baking calamities aside, it’s one of my better heads, and while the arm plating came out a bit soft and lumpy, the neck plating is nice and crisp, and the cloth on the tabard is some of the best I’ve ever done. 🙂

Here she is with paint:

It’s a tabletop-quality paintjob, but the circuitry came out looking nice, and I’m also pretty happy to have finally remembered the African skin tone colour mixes that I figured out and then immediately forgot when I was doing my Siege army last year.

As long as I was painting Chinenye, I also knocked out her colleagues, a pair of generic Crusader Brethren:

Ehh… they’re fine, I guess.

*shrug*

Chinenye stands proudly with her fellow Messengers of Love, ready to carry the word throughout the galaxy.

“Have you heard the good news about Space Jesus, citizen?”

-Spud, who predicts this article will contain a lot more swearing if he has to re-write it a third time. >_<