Kara Black - Assembly

Next up is the leader of the Vanguard force on the Alabaster Station mission - Capt. Kara Black.

Kara comes in four pieces plus the base - Body, right arm with gun, left arm with sword, scabbard.

The assembly is extremely straight-forward - the gun is a very secure fit, contacting the model on the back (with a location lug) as well as the shoulder. The sword can be positioned in a few different ways, to give some variation from the studio version shown in the game. The scabbard is a simple plug-fit piece.

Here are the stage by stage photos  -

Cheers

mike

Akosha Nama - Assembly

The next miniature we are going to look at is another Vanguard character from bag 1 - Akosha Nama.

There are five for this miniature - Body, left leg, head, right arm and gun.

The process is just the same as outlined in the Morgan Vade article - clean the components first, then assemble them one at a time, being careful to let the glue dry before moving on to the next. The only difference with this miniature, is the leg needs to be attached to the body before the body can be glued to the base.

The leg, arm and head are all plug in pieces - so very easy to assemble. The gun is a little more tricky as there are no locating pegs (the pieces are too small) but the fit is accurate with the arms. It will help the gluing process if you carefully remove a little of the surfaces to be joined with a sharp blade or emery board - that gives a stronger join.

Stage by stage photos below.

cheers!

mike

Morgan Vade - Assembly

The first miniature we're going to look at is Morgan Vade - one of the Vanguard characters found in bag 1.

Morgan comes in five pieces, plus the base - body, head, arm with bag, arm with pistol, las carbine.

The first thing to do, as with any of the miniatures, is to clean the pieces. This means removing the mould lines (the lines on the miniatures where the two halves of the mould meet), and any injection marks (the place where the plastic is injected into the mould cavity). The best way to do this is to carefully cut them away with a sharp craft-knife blade. Because of the nature of the plastic used, it's hard to get a smooth finish with a file - the plastic has a tendency to 'tear'.

Once the pieces are clean, you can assemble them. We recommend you use 'super-glue' (Cyanoacrylate glue), plastic cement glues won't work correctly as they are designed for a different type of plastic. The first thing I did was to attach the body to the base - (mainly so it would be easier to photograph for this article) but you can do that once all the pieces are glued together if you like. To make sure the miniature has a strong bond with the base, I smoothed off the underside of the feet with a emery board (home made in this case, but the ones you can buy are just as good) - this tears the surface very slightly, but as it's where the miniature attaches to the base - that doesn't matter.

It's important to make sure the first bond is dry before moving onto the next - otherwise the pieces will have a tendency to come apart again. You can speed up the drying with an accelerator (usually a spray), or by either using a hair drier or simply breathing on them (don't get too close!).

After that, it simply a case of attaching one component after another until the miniature is complete.

That's it - the miniature is ready for priming and painting. In some cases (especially with the larger miniatures), there may be some gaps to fill between pieces, but we will look at that in another article.

mike

BfA - Bag 1 contents

Really quick post - here are the contents of bag one. All the parts are photographed so you can see which parts go with which miniatures.

Where the position of the fit is important we have tried to use a plug wherever possible, so that they will go together correctly. For example on the small right arm for Akosha, it's important that the position is just right or it's hard to position the gun. The plug join only allows you to assemble it in the correct position.

Here are the parts split for each of the miniatures in this bag -

A - Morgan Vade. Body, head, right arm with bag, left arm with pistol, las carbine
B - Hurley. Main hull, turret, aerial, post for attaching to base.
C - Akosha. Body, left leg (shown attached to body), head, right arm, gun
D - Kara Black. Body, right arm with gun, left arm with sword, scabbard
E - Barker Zosa. Body, right arm, power lifter unit, left knee pad, fusion lance, plasma thrower

Next article we will begin by assembling Morgan.

mike

Battle for Alabaster miniatures

As I mentioned over on the Studio McVey Forums, I am going to be posting a series of articles here about assembling the miniatures that come in Sedition Wars: Battle for Alabaster.

This first brief article just covers what you get in the box - and how they are organised. In the next one we'll start looking at specific examples, and then some hands-on assembly.

When you take all the printed material from the box - you will get to the miniatures in the bottom of the box (see the unboxing video here for a general over-view of what you get in the game box). They are bagged together as they come out of the production moulds. This means that some of the parts for miniature will be in separate bags - for example, the las carbines for the female Samaritans are in one bag and the bodies are in another. I will make all of that completely clear in these articles though, and take pictures of all the parts that go together.

For the time being - here are the relevant bags.

Bag 1 - Captain Kara Black, Corpsman Morgan Vade, Barker Zosa, Operator Akosha Nama, Hurley (all parts for all miniature are included in this bag)

Bag 2 - Scythe Witch x2, Brimstone x2, Samaritan Reaver x2 (complete), Weapons for female Samaritans, Grenadiers, Lancers

Bag 3 - Grendlr and Cthonian (complete)

Bag 4 - Male Samaritan x5 (complete), Female Samaritan with helmet x5 (no weapons), Female Samaritan without helmet x5 (no weapons), Phase one strain 1 (big arm) x5, Phase one Strain 2 (hunched over) x4, Phase 1 Strain 3 (claw hand) x5, Stalker x4, Quisimodo x4

Bag 5 - All bases.

That's it for now - next article soon where we'll be looking at the contents if Bag 1 in more detail.

mike

Back on line!

Well that's definitely the longest absence from the blog since I started writing it!

I last posted during the Kickstarted campaign, and while I failed in my bid to post every day, I did manage quite a lot of blog entries while it was running. Towards the end of the madness I just couldn't find the time to write anything here - and if I had written anything it wouldn't have made much sense due to severe lack of sleep! It was a wild and crazy month - and we're still reeling from it, but we're more grateful that I can possibly say to everyone who supported us. As soon as the campaign ended, we were caught up in house moving (and building!) madness, and we are still jot quite through that yet. I'm sitting in the new studio surrounded by boxes that need to be unpacked and desks that need to be assembled. We are back on-line though which is a huge relief - having no reliable internet connection for a couple of months tested us to the limit. Having nowhere to call home can be coped with, but take away the internet and everything pales into insignificance! We're in the new house now though (with internet there too!), so things should return to something close to normal soon.

Battle for Alabaster in 100% finished and waiting to be loaded onto boats in China - as soon as it touches down the Kickstarter orders will be shipped and dispatched, followed shortly afterwards by the regular retail release. I have the first complete copy sitting on my desk, and I have to say we're absolutely delighted with it. Check out the short unboxing video we posted on our Youtube channel.

We have also been hard at work creating all the new content generated by the Kickstarter campaign - with some really great sculpts being made and exciting scenarios written. I'll post some of the material here as soon as I get the chance.

In the mean time, we have just rolled out a great new miniature for the Limited Edition Resin series. Hathya is another great Allan Carrasco sculpt - with that natural brilliance for capturing anatomy and pose that I think makes his talents unique. Check out the pictures below.

Now things are more settled at Studio McVey HQ, I'll try and post more regularly again - there are lots of exciting things happening here, so there's no shortage of things to talk about.

cheers!

mike

Tile design - take 2

We just added an option to buy another set of tiles for Sedition Wars: Battle for Alabaster, so I thought I would share all the final versions of them. There are ten different locations - 


Cargo Bay
Engine control
Catwalks
Reactor Core
Personnel area
Living quarters
Control centre
Science Bay
Transit Station
Escape Pods

All of the above are large (35cm x 35cm) square tiles. The final art is all complete for these now - since we last showed some of the designs we did a final detail pass, and added a little blood and gore.


Here they all are - 

Hope you like them!


mike