King’s Man
| Assembly: 30 minutes | Painting: 6 hours |
White Lion Survivors
| Assembly: 1.5 hours each | Magnetizing: 30 minutes each | Painting: 3.5 hours each |
Why don’t my survivors have pupils? First off, is the matter of scale. On 30mm models, those dots can be smaller than the point of a needle, and this usually leads to poor results (slightly cross-eyed, wall-eyed, etc). However, even when it is done well, it somehow feels less realistic. To me, anyway. With pupils, the miniatures are suddenly forever looking in one direction. Compare that to the look of stone statues, and the way they sometimes seem to be looking right at you, no matter where you are. Your imagination fills in the blank. I gave the pupils a try, at first, but regretted the loss of that ‘statue’ look. So I decided to keep blank white eyes with black outlines a regular thing.
In my mind, the King’s Man is much more ‘refined’ than the Butcher. So instead of doing more rust, I wanted his armor to look much cleaner. I wanted to avoid, however, making it too shiny, like your typical, medieval knight. This is Kingdom Death, so it had to be dark.
For the cape, I shied away from the usual base-coat, wash, and dry-brush, and went with blending instead. This allowed the bottom of the cloak to emphasize the ‘darker’ look, without losing the bright red from the upper highlights. I expected it to take more time, but it really didn’t. So I’m sure I’ll start blending more often.
I love how this game continues to surprise our group with the new mechanics it introduces with each fight. In the case of the King’s Man, we almost overlooked the ‘King’s Step’ story event (thinking the battle pressure cards referred to a fighting art we didn’t have yet, instead of a page we needed to turn to in the rulebook). If you’re familiar with the fight, you would know how badly that would have turned out…