Fly My Pretties

Here's the next job for the Vampire Counts army - a unit of fell bats and a female vampire.

The bats are the Riesenfledarmaus set from masq-mini. As I mentioned in my last post, I reckon these are the best models for fell bats currently available. They are pretty accurate to life sculpts of real vampire bats, they even have the little fingers on the wings to help them cling to their prey. The poses are superb, one soaring through the sky, one coming in to land and one crawling along the ground, covering the last few yards to it's prey.

The quality of the casting was very good, there was a slight miscast on the wing of the left model, which I scraped away and then repaired with a little green stuff. There was no flash at all and almost zero mold lines, something pretty unusual on metal models. The fit of the components was very good too, there was a small gap to fill on the join between wing and body on the landing pose. All other joins were good, I have given them a coat of liquid green stuff just to be on the safe side.

The female vampire model is by Mad Puppet miniatures. Again, it's a lovely sculpt with accurate anatomical details. The quality of the casting was not quite as good as the bats - there was a good amount of flash on the sword and hand. Luckily, this is a fairly old school metal cast, in that it was quite soft and easy to scrape away with my craft knife. Mold lines were visible but very fine and easy to remove. I decided to add the flying bats at this stage, this might make painting a little more difficult but I cannot imagine how I would have painted such small bits separately. Again, it was not really necessary but I gave a few areas a wash of liquid green stuff to cover any joins and flaws.