A Brief History of Lord Ethan's Exiles

Lord Ethan's Exiles are a mercenary outfit that tread the fine line between respectable mercenary and outright piracy. This ambiguity has often served as a benefit to their potential employers. The prospect of letting a privateer mercenary company loose in your rival's frontier worlds is often a sound investment if destabilizing your opponent is the ultimate goal rather than taking territory. This deniability is one of the major selling points of the Exiles. Their refusal to standardize their livery and an iron clad guarantee of client confidentiality has carved them a decent niche as the perfect outfit to carry out any desired false flag operation. They are the most active on the Periphery, though they often frequent fronts where low intensity conflict between great houses has been going at a low burn for some time.

Battlemaster BLR-1G "Bakunin"
Owned by notorious pirate Vivian Black
confirmed operating with the Exiles.

A selection of Battlemechs that have been positively identified as serving with the Exiles.

Origins

The Exiles were founded by Lord Miles Ethan, a veteran Mechwarrior from minor Davion nobility. He underwent his trial by fire in a succession of special operations units where he acquitted himself well in the field and was well liked by his subordinates and superiors. His promising career was cut short after an investigation initiated by the Davion Privy Council uncovered a massive smuggling ring run by many high ranking Davion officers, of which Miles was one of the leading figures. Miles avoided arrest and used his black market connections to flee Davion space and set himself up on in the Periphery as a pirate adjacent mercenary. After working for a few relatively unknown groups for several years, relations with Mile's last employer turned sour over a botched raid that turned into an ambush. He resolved it by leading a mutiny against his employer, seizing their Dropship and significant number of Battlemechs with the majority of the crew behind him. After marooning his old boss on an airless moon, he found himself in a position to take command, which he did. Rather than take a top down approach, he created a command council, which had three members of noble birth and three members of common birth, with Miles acting as a seventh member to break ties, thus Lord Ethans Exiles were born. The Exiles now have a solid reputation as a reliable unit that doesn't ask questions and well always ensure that the confidentiality of their clients is protected. Due to this, they are regularly employed by almost every one of the great houses and their practice of deliberately non-standard livery makes it hard for forces on the receiving end of the Exiles to distinguish them from regular Periphery pirates. At the time of writing they are estimated to have at least three Dropships, a well equipped but small Aerotech squadron, and a large and eclectic mix of Battlemechs, enough to field two full companies at last estimate. They are also known for backing up their Battlemechs with ground vehicles and infantry elements, often to serve as the smash and grab element of their force while the Battlemechs provide cover.

Shadowhawk SHD-2H confirmed operating with the Exiles
Note the non-standard woodland camouflage that is commonly used
by planetary militas and the factory red right leg. This suggests that
this battlemech was salvaged and brought back to operational status
after an engagement with a planetary militia.

Examples of the Exile's ground and Aerotech assets. Note the lack of unified livery or markings.

Composition

The overwhelming majority of the Exiles are political exiles from across the whole spectrum of the Inner Sphere. Lowborn ex-revolutionaries and disgraced nobility from the highest echelons of the Inner Sphere fill out their ranks, with a large number of more traditional pirates and fringe elements to make up numbers. Leadership positions in the company are almost all elected and prize money from the completion of significant contracts and war booty is fairly evenly split among all members of the company. If someone is lucky enough to survive several years as a member they are usually able to cash out and start a comfortable new life almost anywhere in the Inner Sphere. Despite this, the Exiles often take difficult or legally and ethically compromised contracts that often don't make it through the Mercenary Review Board. Despite this, service in the Exiles is a high risk / high return opportunity and there are plenty of desperate mercenaries in the Periphery.

Unknown Awesome AWS-8Q "The Smiling Tiger"
Rumored to be Lord Ethan's command battlemech

Wolverine WVR-6R in battered house Draconis livery
Confirmed to be in the service of the Exiles.

Current Operations

It is unclear if Lord Ethan remains in command of the Exiles, but the company has still retained his name. There was a credible rumour circulating that Lord Ethan was killed in a Skirmish with a House Davion kill team. This is difficult to verify as the Exiles go to great lengths to conceal the identities of their members. Even if it were true, the company does not seem to have suffered or degraded in combat performance with his demise. Instead they have continued to expand their operations and client base, the specifics of which are difficult to verify due to the highly irregular nature of their business arrangements. Regardless, if one has the right underworld connections, contact with the Exiles can be established and missions arranged even now, assuming you are willing to pay the full fee upfront and have both questionable ethics and no regard for personal honour.

Unknown Catapult CPLT-C1 in services with the Exiles
livery suggests possible Star League salvage.
(Uniform standard drab for desert operations.)

Unknown Thunderbolt TDR-5S confirmed in
service by the Exiles in the livery of the
elite Draconis unit "The Snow Spiders"

Twitch Instincts

I have come to hate video production, it takes what joy I got out of painting and sucks it away with checking camera angles, fighting the auto focus and not being able to paint at a leisurely pace that unwinds the brain. I also can't do Twitch. I generally do fine until someone actually joins the stream and starts to talk to me. In an instant what was a pleasurable meditative state becomes remarkably stressful, and I am very much not here for it. So with all that said, I think I'm done with painting entire projects on video. It is not fun and if I am going to do any more videos they will be very small technique demonstrations, which when pre-planned, are much easier to shoot and edit.
Rant done, now on to what I've been doing with myself lately.

The recent plague situation has theoretically meant more time indoors and at home to paint. Despite this, the actual malaise caused by living in these times, combined with the fact that I am working just as hard at my day job from home, means that my mental capacity for such work is greatly diminished. Never the less, I primed a load of miniatures for this upcoming period of isolation. What is most remarkable about it is that I'm coming to the tail end of my last major army projects, meaning I can move on to a variety of eclectic and smaller projects, rather than endlessly batching out the same rank and file.

To start with, Shadowspear. This project was a slog, combined with a bunch of demons I got from a dual purchase. I'm genuinely glad to see the back of it and I hope never to paint another marine for several years. I bought the box mostly for the updated Chaos models and the Ultramarines were a nice bonus. With that done I think I have more than enough miniatures to throw down for a 40k game, I hope to move on to a variety of other publishers for more varied material in future.

As for the miniatures themselves, I really do like the updated Chaos models, they are scaled up nicely to match with the new Primaris and their poses are pretty good. I especially like the new Obliterators, which give them a chunky, more menacing look. This look better reflect how well they perform on the table.

On the Ultramarines side of things, I kinda dig the new tacticool infiltrator marines, Picatinny rails on the Boltguns and all. That being said, I am still very much over painting them. I also had quite a hard time with the camo cloaks. Trying to combine a disruptive pattern uniform with shading and highlighting is frequently the bane of my existence, and I'm not looking forward to attempting it on some more contemporary figure that I have coming down the project pipeline.

With the trad fare out of the way I've also taken some time to paint a variety of smaller projects, mostly from my regular opponent goblinpaladin. These were really fun, and great opportunities to try out a variety of different techniques.

The first two were some freebies that I got for picking up some old Pal Ratha minis for Goblin's fantasy army projects. In the end I wasn't to revolutionary with how I painted them, and they turned out as just another relaxing project between armies. That being said, I'm really happy with how the Elven maiden's cloak turned out. My usual deal of starting with a high highlight basecoat and glazing in the mid tones and the shades worked very well.

These minis were more of Goblin's spares from another order, and I gotta say, props to the smaller manufacturers for creativity when the major manufacturers aren't aiming for that. These are mostly figures of noble bearing from a sci-fi civilians range. I'm very happy how all of them turned out, though as usual the noblewoman's blue-gray ceremonial armour was an utter pain to get right.

These two are from Ex-Manus a local sculptor that comes around to Cancon every year.  I like supporting the local guys, so I usually pick up a couple every time I see him. I also have a 'Totally Not Kora Elemental Bender' figure currently sitting in simple green, so I'll get around to her later. I admit, the sculpts aren't the most crisp, but I certainly love the charm and imagination that goes into the characters.

I've also been working on my scale models and display painting. To start with a variety of small practice vehicles, mostly as an excuse to practice my enamal techniques. All of which have turned out pretty well, especially the use of oil paints for soft shades and highlights. I've also finished up the Huntress from Nocturna. She is going to be entered into ScaleACT assuming that it does not become another casualty of the 'Rona.

I've also had to do a couple of fairly substantial projects in the lead up to isolation, all because I was expecting to play in a tourney in Wintercon this year, thus I had to prepare a shitload of 15mm US GIs for Chain of Command. All of which showcase my low effort batch painting in its finest, complete with using enamels to shade. But now that Wintercon is dead for now, they have fallen off the priority stack, especially since the AT guns I need to finish will have to be an order away to the UK.

Also, more Battletech. Just some more 3D printed mechs and vehicles so I can fill out an Alpha Strike company. I wasn't aiming too high for paint quality, but they will do, and will certainly look decent when massed on the table top.

Also, another project wrapped up for good. I was finally able to source the paints I needed to finish my PanO, so I did. This is another project that I won't expand on for some time, especially since they will require some fairly intense airbrush work.

After looking back through Instagram, it occurs to me that I have knocked over plenty of projects which I haven't really written about. Perhaps I shall go back and write about some of them, especially since my desire to do video work has dropped to almost nothing and I would like to practice my writing.

I think that will do for now. Until next time.

Contrasting Opinions: A Review

Contrast has been on all my painting related feeds and the takes about it have been flying thick and fast. In aggregate they have been generally positive but measured, which is probably the most sensible of them overall, with a few outliers on the fringes of the discourse. The positives of it are that it generally does what the advertising hype says it does, though with all paint ranges some of the colours do a better job than others. The outliers on the against side claim that this product isn't a magic bullet for painting, which to a degree is true, and that it will teach people bad habits about how to professionally paint miniatures to a high standard, which I mostly disagree with.

Anyway, since I have enough disposable income I have picked up a swath of the paints to try out on a few Reaper Bones monsters that I picked up some time ago solely to use as demonstrator miniatures for A Song of Blades and Heroes.

Usage

Since I am mostly going to be painting monsters and animals, I reasoned that Wraith Bone, being a warm white would be an ideal starting point. I also picked up a pot of it as a base paint to re-layer the base in the event of colour spilling over. I also grabbed some Praxian White to act as a highlight for the wraith bone, the idea being a two stage priming coat. 

To start with I put down the priming layer right onto the models. Then gave the models a drybrush with the Praxian White to try and emphasize highlights for the contrast paint.

After all the preparatory work was done and dusted I gave my first attempt at applying the Contrast a go. It went on easily and worked as advertised. My main complaint with it is that it is a very thin and runny liquid, which means applying it thick has a tendency to overload the brush and result in spillage onto other areas. After the initial coat I did soak up some of the excess with a damp brush, which was a good idea as despite the promises of the paint, still performs like standard GW wash in many respects and excessive pooling remains a problem if you aren't careful. After I let the contrast paint dry I cleaned up the over spill with more Wraith Bone base paint in preparation for more applications of contrast.

I repeated the steps described above for every other non metallic colour on the model. For the metallic chain mail and spear tip I put down a basecoat of VGC Gun Metal, and once it is dry I put down a layer of Black Templar to darken down the metal, which has a finish similar to a wash of Nuln oil.

The only stage that didn't use contrast was the base, which I did using a three colour base, overbrush, then drybrush method to do quickly. After that all that remained were a few other details which, like the other colours got touched up Wraithbone and painted with small amounts of contrast. In this case the details were the teeth, bone, and eyes, the eyes got a saturated yellow colour while the bone and teeth got the standard contrast bone colour.

With the Orcs out of the way I went to town with a variety of other colours on a selection of Bones minis and tried to see what they could do. You can see the results below. I'm extremely happy with how the Owlbear turned out. He was an experiment as to how you'd go about blending contast paints together, you can see the result on the belly. It was an experiment that mostly worked, though some fairly careful paint control is required to prevent one colour from fully taking over. Even so, this effect did require some more re-layer and blending to get right. The one thing that didn't work well was the fire effect, which can be seen on the Kobold mage, as to make that look realistic you have to invert how you normally do highlighting and work from lightest to darkest. Due to the nature of the paint this effect obviously wouldn't work, and to be honest I was too lazy to attempt the effect properly. It also is good as a filter on eyes as a glowing effect, as you can see on the weird fish monster, my apologies as I don't know the name of it.

Conclusion

Contrast works, but only to a degree. I also believe that this style of painting works better with more organic looking creatures like monsters, undead and zombies. On miniatures that are meant to look cleaner I believe that more traditional painting achieves a crisper effect . But you still can't argue with the speed it brings a model up to the bare minimum standard for the table top, which is why this product was created in the first place.

I have heard reports that it tends to rub off with handling, and while I haven't experienced it, a simple coat of matt or satin varnish should provide enough protection if you intend to use miniatures painted with Contrast as gaming pieces. While Games Workshop marketed this product for a specific purpose, the reality is that this product can be used to achieve many more effects than simply tinting a warm or cold white base colour in order to paint a miniatures. Games Workshop have already talked about using this to tint metallics to create different shades of metal, while this is one of the uses, this consistency and finish of Contrast are extremely similar to an artists ink, and can be used for similar tasks. The first one that came to mind, and that I experimented with were some simple freehand tattoos. Just paint on your design directly onto some finished skin with a very sparsely loaded brush, and once your design is done glaze some of the flesh tone over the top to make it look like the design is under a layer of flesh. This could extend to other applications, from freehand banners, to text on scroll work, this product is also potentially useful as a weathering effect. A brown colour can be painted onto terrain and legs of troops, then combined with Agrax and Typhus Corrosion to look like the model has been immersed in dirty water. Another idea is to stain clear plastic windows and canopies to tint them. I'm going to try this later and I'll report back on the results.

Overall, it is a worthwhile product, in terms of its effect, it handles similar to the existing glaze paints, but a far more pronounced effect and greater pigment density. This effect that can be reduced with the use of medium. As magic bullet for painting, it does what is advertised, though the quality of the finished work is low to middle table top standard at best, and if you want to get clean lines with it, expect to go back and repaint the base colour to clean up over spill. But for achieving extremely high standards of painting, you are still going to have to employ every tool that you have in your painters toolbox. Contrast is an interesting new technique, but it isn't the only technique, and I suspect this is why the pro painters are fearful that it will teach new painters a lot of bad habits as they come into the hobby.