Late last year TTCombat, the wargaming supplies branch of Troll Trader, the large and successful British miniatures shop on Ebay, held a kickstarter campaign called “Halflings and Fantasy Friends”.

This campaign featured… well, Halflings for the most part (duh!) and also a buch of monsters. All in a cartoony style, in resin and all at suspiciously low prices for a large quantity of minis. As in £60 for over 100 models! In resin! (even though they are halfling sized, that still is insane pricing.)

Since TTCombat is well known for making inexpensive but fair-to-good quality stuff (mostly MDF terrain and such up until now) and has Troll Trader behind it, I turned a blind eye to the waving red flag of Too Good To Be True prices and took the chance, going for the RPG pledge and a couple of packs of monsters. The RPG pledge consisted of 10 or 5 each of a number of hafling types and undead halfling types, plus a general and a necromancer mini.

And I am happy to say that not only did TTCombat deliver more or less on time (only a shortish delay on this one!), but also the minis are good quality in a resin with a slight flex to it (I suspect it is the same kind that Mantic uses) and that is both easy to work with and quite forgiving if you drop the model.

Here are the first ones I have finished, the 10 halfling ghosts:

There were three different versions, but the collation was not optimal. I got only 1 of the middle one, 4 and 5 of the other two types. I believe the collation is better in the other unit types I got.

No! Boogermen! Stay away from me!

I really had no issues with preparing the models for painting, apart from one of the three ghost types having a thick gate going up under the skirt, so to speak. Luckily they came off with a little snipping without damaging the models. I did not need to break out the saw. Lots of vents to snip off, but they did so without any problems. Very little mould lines or bubbles. The worst was actually getting the mould release agent (some kind of silicon) off the minis, a simple scrub-a-dub-dub was not enough for some of the models.

This lead to the undercoat being partly rejected on parts of a few of the models. A further coat on the affected areas did the trick though.

The minis came with square bases. I used my own 3D printed 20mm rounds instead.

The resin they were made of was white and light grey, so I painted these with a black undercoat, so I could see that everything was covered. They I gave them a heavy white zenithal, so they were mostly whiteish.

At last I could use that Nighthaunt technical paint ( I wonder if this actually is more or less the same as the new Contrast paints? I do not have any contrast paints so I can’t really check.)  I gave them all a goodly coat of that, drawing away the larger pooling with a damp brush.

When this was dry I thought they were too pale, so I drybrushed them carefully with Reaper Clear Yellow using a flat brush. This gave the much brighter, almost glowing effect I was after. I painted parts of the chains with a bit of Scalecolor Trash Metal to highlight them a bit as translucent metal.

Experimenting with different eye colours, I settled on blue-in-blue, as I thought it looked the best to carry across that these are mostly lost souls endlessly looking for their second breakfasts and not really all that evilly wrathful.

They are cute little tykes. Albeit in a cartoony style.

 

Halflings Spirits

TTCombat 2018/2019

Resin

20mm bases

Should become available from TTCombat in the future.

 

Painted so far this year:   (Miniatures:  302 /365 goal // scenery and terrain: 48)

January: 30

February: 44   //  10

March: 17

April: 45

May: 46

June: 4

July: 42  //  38

August: 70