X-Com Miniatures, The Start Of A Lot Of Painting

I have started doing some painting of figures for X-Com. I am gong to need a few. I want to put some work into all the figures. In principle I want them to all be individuals but share a lot of common characteristics. To accomplish this I needed a fairly (or very) modular figure which is why I eventually settled the Imperial Guard. I don't much care for a lot of GW figures but the plastic Guard are what you make them. There are also plenty of third party parts you can buy that will fit in with what you want.

So it came time to do some tests paints and this is the work in progress. I have a plan for the game and it has worked well enough so far at least as far as the paint job goes. The plan calls for individual soldiers from different nations, each having national battledress or specific different uniforms for other roles such as pilots. This would all be under standard drab green equipment like body armour and webbing.

Speaking of equipment, the soldiers are heavily equipped so I needed extra webbing. This has given me the excuse to make some using green stuff and instant mold, I'll do something about that another time but do not, I repeat do not use FIMO instead of green stuff. The plan is to give all the soldiers a comms back pack. The one's I have done are perhaps a little too big but they are GW minis so nice and chunky any way. In my head, the uniform is actually an NBC suit. Big and padded.

I have taken away a lot of the aquila because they don't really fit the vibe. The guns, helmets and water bottles all have them one so the have had to be scrapped off. The one on the chest can stay because it looks like a set of jump wings. I am thinking I can take a mold of the wings and maybe make some green stuff copies to place elsewhere (like helmets and other head gear maybe).

The pilots are going to look a little different. They get a particular helmet with the face plate filled in to look like a visor. They have dark green uniforms which I guess are akin to some flight suits. I have played around with the boots a bit. They get a specific arm pad too with a few extra dongles on it. The pilot in the shot above still has a lot of work to do.

This is my first attempt at US Woodland camo, what do you think?

I said before that I wanted to make all the soldiers different. Part of the plan is to take some recognisable film characters and turn them into NPCs. So I have Ibanez from Straship Troopers in mind for one of the pilots (this is close enough) and maybe characters from Aliens Predator and the like. Mad Robot might be helping me out with that. In the last computer game they all had national flags on their backs. I thought it would look better on the shoulder pads. The flags have turned out okay I think. I may well go for a stylised Union Jack or maybe have Scotland and Northern Ireland get independance. The flags so far are not bad. The guy with the US flag is really just a test. The guy with the German flag was a bit easier and even though Flecktarn is a real pain, I am not sure I am going to use him as I had no real plans for Germans in the game but things may change.

Flecktarn is a pain in the butt to paint

I had thought about restrict the area of operations to the North Atlantic. If I go back to funding nations in the game, Brazil and Mexico would get a look in with Canada, USA, UK, Germany, France and Nigeria. Maybe that is a plan? That would mean doing the Brazilian flag as well. I was planning on having a south african character but that went out of the window when I remembered what the flag looked like.