Steam Powered Undead
I bought a portable photo-studio and as a test of its capabilities I decided to photograph my Cryx Warmachine army. These pictures are taken with the same camera as all the others on this blog – it’s a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ7 of about 4 years vintage. This is a reasonable quality camera falling somewhere far to the south of a DSLR but a couple of steps above a basic point-and-shoot. Mostly the problem I’ve had with photography is lighting the subject; ambient light is too dark while spotlights and the camera flash are far too harsh. Previously I’ve got around this problem by using the inbuilt camera flash with some thick paper held or taped over the bulb to diffuse the flash. This mostly works although the results can be pretty variable.
I’ve wanted to improve the quality of the photography and short of dropping a couple of thousand Euro or so on a decent DSLR and a macro lens, I figured that lighting would make the biggest difference to my set up. It turns out that I was right. I found a ‘Portable photo studio’ from an eBay reseller for £28 and I’m very happy with it. Basically it’s a folding lightbox with two separate 500w spotlights and a camera stand. The whole thing folds neatly away into a sturdy polyester case which includes pockets on the outside for the lights and other hardware. It couldn’t really be described as professional quality gear but for change out of thirty quid it seems like good value.
So anyway, having taken delivery of my new toy, I was eager to play with it! Here is a quick run through my Cryx army for Warmachine. I picked Cryx for the same reason that I ended up with most of my armies – I really liked the models. While I was working for WAR in Dublin we had a short office campaign that took place in the cellar beneath the company HQ, I did reasonably well there and found that I quite liked the way that the Cryx played on the tabletop as well. Since then I’ve taken them to a bunch of tournaments here in Germany with varying amounts of success, generally I find that I either get a caster kill fairly quickly or I lose.
These figures were mostly painted over the course of a couple of months approximately two years ago, they are definitely table-top standard rather than display standard and some of them are showing signs of battle damage. To begin with, our campaign only allowed units from the Prime (Mk.I) book and Escalation, since then I’ve only added the Nightmare to the army. Thus the army doesn’t include any epic Warcasters, nor any of the character or ally units such as Cephalyx. I will eventually add some of these (in fact Lich Lord Asphyxious is on my painting table at the moment) and I’ll write them up as separate projects as they are done.
All that out of the way then, let’s take a look at the figures.
These two are my most commonly used Warcasters. In particular I like to bring a stealth-heavy army with Deneghra leading it. I’ve tied the army together by using a fairly limited palette of dark grey and corroded bronze with green and pale grey accents. Silver metallics are used sparingly and mostly as contrast. The bronze colour is a custom mix of Tin Bitz, Chainmail and Shining Gold, this is then washed with a custom ink mix of Dark Green Ink, Chestnut Ink and Black Ink before being highlighted with Burnished Gold and glazed with Hawk Turquoise. The grey is mostly Shadow Grey highlighted up. For some figures such as the Skarlock Thrall the grey is applied over a dark brown basecoat to provide deep shading.
Green is used for the detailing in the steam engines for the necrotite glow. This starts as Goblin Green, washed with Dark Green Ink and is then highlighted with Scorpion Green and Skull White to produce a glowing effect. A similar pattern is used for the thrall runes on the Bane Thralls’ axes.
Of course the centre of any Warmachine force are the ‘Jacks and mine is no exception. My force includes a Reaper, Slayer, Nightmare, Stalker and five Bonejacks of various types based on the Defiler hull. These again use a mid-grey main colour with metallics for the exposed machinery and various spot colours. The Reaper that you see above left features runes in Scab Red on the hull and weapons, other ‘Jacks have patterns painted in with a slightly paler grey this breaks up some of the large, flat surfaces and also helps to identify them on the battlefield.
Finally then the army is rounded out by a selection of Thralls. I love the damage that Bane Thralls can inflict and I’m also a fan of the problems that Bile Thralls can cause the enemy, they are awesome suicide troops and 
no sane opponent will let them get close. I have a Machine Wraith which I love the figure for but which hasn’t really worked out for me on the table so far, my sole Pistol Wraith likewise has been a disappointment. I suspect that this is a case where adding a second one would make a huge difference in the effectiveness of both types. My favourite solo however is the Bloat Thrall, this thing is just horrible and attracts a lot of attention from the enemy. Painting it was a lot of fun too.
Check out the whole collection on the Cryx gallery page.
