Workshop Wednesday: Khador Bombardiers Unboxing and WIP

If I’ve been slow in my unboxing posts and pictures, that’s only because I’ve been busy making sure I could get my bombardiers done for our local Wrath Tourney this weekend. And having only received the bombardiers from Gencon only 2-3 weeks ago, it’s been pretty rough trying to get a full unit of heavy infantry done with my own slow-poke painting rate.

But enough about that, you wanna see some bombardiers, don’t you?

Several people have already raved about these, and I’m going to be joining them in my effusive praise for these new Man-o-War sculpts. As you can see here, each Bombardier comes in mainly six parts: legs, left and right arm, body and both shoulder plates. There’re also a few more small bits like the front and back crotch guard, the bombardier missiles strapped to the shoulderpads, as well as some medals and alternate head swaps you can use for your MoW captain.

The legs come in 3 (slightly different) poses; legs apart, as well as walking (leading with either the left or right foot). The arms also technically have 3 different poses (some with the cannon held closer to the body and some further apart), but they’re similar enough that you might get mixed up after assembly. You won’t get confused fitting the arms together though; PP has continued coding the different connecting plugs such that a specific male extension will only fit in the corresponding female slot. Useful!

What’s really nice is the ball and socket joints for the arms and waist. This gives modellers an opportunity to pose the MoW however they want. Not going to be as apparent in the two-handed poses (Demo Corp and Bombardiers), but I think it will be very useful for the Shocktroopers. Even then, just being able to turn at the waist is a great opportunity for lending some fluidity and individuality to what used to be more or less stock poses. I think PP is really learning how to throw together some really good plastic minis. Even if I still prefer GW’s plastic medium to PP’s plastic (it’s REALLY hard to get rid of that flash… good thing the mold lines really aren’t ALL OVER THE MINIS).

The front and back crotch guards also have to be fit in tightly, and this is where I think I made a slight mistake in assembly. I left them off so I could prime and spray easily (getting all spots), but I didn’t realise how hard it would be to try to fit them in later… especially when I had to take care not to scratch off the paintjob. For people anal about getting all spots painted, I would recommend fitting both front and back armor plates to the crotch first, spray/prime/paint, and then stick the model to its base (and do subsequent basing). As it is, I had to settle for loosely supergluing some of the armor plates to the MoW models. Meh.

I’ve been practicing my airbrushing in order to speed up painting, and it’s really come in handy; especially for large pieces of armor like now. I don’t have one of my basecoated or highlighted WIP shots (sometimes I get too caught up in the painting to handle a camera), but hope you can imagine these more than just primed. Airbrushing does help with getting a nice gradient sometimes.

Sadly, now the bottleneck in my painting steps is getting in the secondary colours blocked down. The metallics took a long time, especially with all the niggly places the MoW had exposed metals.

Similarly, blocking down non metallics, like the khaki drab I used for the missiles (technically that’s trollblood highlight).

Washing and shading the non-red colours also took a heckuva long time…

But it’s starting to come together…

And those final highlights really helped the bombardiers pop.

I loved painting my Bombardiers (well except for blocking the metals), and am glad I got them done in a relatively short time. Well, for me anyway. 🙂 Can’t wait to get my hands on the plastic shocktroopers.

Hope you guys like em!