Commissioned, tabletop quality.

Still to do: metallics, bases.

I'm currently working on this bunch of Alkémy figures. The sculpts themselves are pretty good, but the casting quality is pretty horrible. The original line was launched by Kraken, after they went bankrupt Studio38 continued to cast the figures, and the game's rules are now available for download.

A lot of surfaces look rough and chunky, air bubbles here and there, and while preparing one figure a leg snapped off because there was a giant air bubble inside :( The figures also come with sculpted resin bases, which is a nice detail, but it's very hard to fix the figures on them properly.

Another thing that was pretty horrible was the shipping time. It took nearly 14 days for the figures to ship out after ordering. It's a bit sad to see a great figure line like Alkémy go down a route like this...

But back to painting: this is going to be a gaming quality project. Accent color will be Emerald.

Lot's of stuff going on at the moment: The Hobbit figures, Tau Cadre Fireblade and then an Alkémy commission that is about to start... Let the pictures speak for themselves:

Finished these figures two weeks ago... finally had some time to take pictures. I'm really happy about the final result.

Work is continued on the warband. The only things that need to be done are the metallics the bases and some details.

For those of you who don't know: the game Alkemy is produced by a French company called Kraken Editions. It's a fairly new game, right now there are four starter sets available (one for each race in the game) and the third expansion wave has just been released. The company is made up out of a number of very talented French people, including some ex-Rackham employees. I've seen the official studio miniatures last year at Painting Crusade V in Brussels and I was very impressed with the overal quality of the product.

I never painted these figures before, but recently a customer asked me to paint the Jade Triad start box. The studio paintjob looks like this (click to enlarge):



I was asked to paint the warband in a similar fashion to the studio paintjob, but to mix in some jade color where appropriate. In my opinion the 'official' color scheme looked a bit to monotonous with all the beige, light brown and skin tones. So I decided to break everything up by painting the cloth around their waists in jade.

Here's what I have done so far (click to enlarge):



I just started working on the dark brown areas, the beige and jade, together is basically done, together with the skintones. You might notice the monkey-like figure on the far right: this model wasn't included in the starter set, but it was some kind of limited edition figure which the customer also wanted to have painted.

I'm not a real fan of the figures themselves, but I love painting them. The only point of critique towards Kraken Editions is the type of resin they used for the figures. This is so soft that blades and poles easily bend when touched, not really acceptable for gaming figures in my opinion. There were also quite a lot of mold lines in difficult places.