“Akarr Bilk? Stranger’s on the Painting Table” (week 38)

Time to roll the die” again, and the coins of fate have decreed, with a double tails result that this week’s figures come from “Galahad’s” list. Then the old D30 came up fourteen and this meant that this week’s figurers are…  

Box 14 (15mm sci-fi alien unit hydra miniatures)

These rather nice 15mm alien figures are by Hydra miniatures, and are called the ”Akarr”(hence the terrible title to this post, it was the only Akarr related “pun” I could come up with). I received them in trade with Matt Beuchamp for a few miniatures from my own WSD Miniatures line (nice when you can do that). Now I have to admit to giving a bit of a groan when I saw these little chaps number come up, now don’t get me wrong these are lovely little figures and the theatrical style of them falls right into my wheel house as it were, but the high level of detail, the dynamic poses and the very fact that I had to batch paint (again) twelve of the blighters along with the memory of the “fun” I had painting them last time was what ,”dropped my shoulders”. Now it was way back in January 2015* that I painted the first batch of these so I suppose it was about time they gained some reinforcements. So after cleaning up the surprisingly “flashy” sculpts they were based op on pennies (they are too small for tuppences after all), and then it was out for a spraying with some matt black.

Once dry I touched up the black with a brush, then, as all the metallic parts would be golden, they were given a liberal dry-brushing with copper and this was then re-coated with another dry-brush of bright gold, next aquamarine was painted over all the flesh areas, I wanted to keep the painting pretty simple so no highlights were added to this, I did this last time and it turned out OK. Next I turned to the long loin cloths they are all wearing and after a bit of consideration in the bath (I do all my best thinking there you know), I decided that I would go for a different colour on each unit so as to differentiate between them. So rather than the purple I used last time these chaps would have royal blue loin cloths, so a base coat of royal blue was painted over these areas and then this was highlighted with bright blue. Next I went round all the all the joints and did some “lining in” in black and then touched all the gold and aquamarine edges back up to these lines (not a fun job but it looked better once it was done) that just left some metallic blue “jewels” to be added to their armour and some dark grey with light grey highlights on the long hair that the leader figure has and they were ready for a coat of Quickshade.

When it came to painting the bases chocolate brown with terracotta and coffee highlights was the order of the day, I then added a couple of patches of red sand I picked up from a floristry supply wholesalers. A final coat of matt varnish finished them off. Wow three weeks without a twenty eight millimetre figure in sight! I hope I get some next week, I’m beginning to get the shakes going cold turkey like this!

Till next week, cheers Roger.

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