Stuck on mobile, but posting anyway! Today, I kept chipping away at the Amazons and managed to get my third and final Deckhand finished.

Later edit: Okay, rather than just letting this post stand as a monument to my effort when I’m not sitting at the ol’ posting station, I’m going to be adding onto this so that I maintain the level of ‘quality’ that this blog’s possibly existing readership expects. Rather than letting the Dead Internet continue to dominate search engines, I am writing this blog to align with my own principles and memories of a Net Gone By, where enthusiastic people create tiny little roadside shrines to their particular interest. Considering that there aren’t too many English-language blogs on Freebooter’s Fate, I’m confident that someone will read this and get excited about the game.

Matqueh

Okay, so now that I have a bit more time, I can work on explaining exactly what I’ve done on this model to paint this Amazon. She was definitely a model that could have used a bit more cleaning on my part – I think her left foot has a bit of a bloom where the mold has worn out some, so resculpting it would have been helpful.

I decided to go for a late-joining Amazon by trying to give her skin tone more of a pale Caucasian who has been really tanned and sunburnt over the years effect. My first base layer was, of course, a dark, slightly-desaturated red all over her skin. I also mixed in a bit of dark reddish-brown to line the material changes and help for cleaner transitions/deeper shadows, but it’s somewhat subtle in these photos and I’m not sure how much it actually helped. After establishing my base layer, I started highlighting up by mixing in a beige red, followed by further highlights using tan flesh to get the highest highlights. This is a relatively small selection of paints, but they span a pretty wide amount of values so it does a good job of giving some brightness to the model. You can especially see this in her face – the outline of her cheekbones, nose, and forehead were just done using the tanned skin paint, and they really stand out nicely.

Here’s where I also want to take a diversion to talk about painting eyes on miniatures. While I’m not especially great at it, I’ve settled on a particular technique: first, I’ll paint the entire eye area in a black or very dark brown color. After that, the whites of the eyes get painted around the pupil, which helps to avoid the wide-eyed appearance that you can get when attempting to paint pupils. I’ve included a poorly-painted diagram below to illustrate how I do it:

The pointier bit of the eye is the bit furthest from the nose, as an FYI. It’s much easier to do this than trying to dot the pupil with black after painting it white, and you can even take it further if you want to add some color, though I don’t tend to do so because my hands are a bit shakier than needed for that.

The leathers were painted using a greenish-brown base coat, followed by some of my typical leather colors – browns, tans, and a bit of ivory mixed in for the absolute highest highlights. After I finished up figuring out the highlights, I also did a few glazes to smooth things down a bit – it’s not meant to be shiny leather, but rather slightly dull, hard-wearing chaps and gloves.

You can probably tell guess how the golds, metals, and wood were painted on her, so I figure I should talk more about the overall effect. As with the rest of my Amazons, she was mostly painted in earth tones to help tie her in to the natural themes. This was mostly a broad approach – while the worked materials could break the rules a little bit, it was important to keep everything tied into that because it provides a thematic throughline with the models.

What’s A Matqueh, Anyway?

As near as I can figure it, their name may come from a misspelling of “matequi”, which means “to trim branches” or “to cut one’s hand”. Given that they mostly want to hide and fire darts from forest terrain, I’m pretty sure the former is probably the better description of what they’re capable of.

Matqueh are Deckhands for the Amazons, and similar to the Atl-atl, they’re meant to be skirmishers and harassment pieces. Much like yesterday’s Specialist, they’re aided in this role with the Jungle Warrior trait, but they trade the higher damage of a spear for somewhat more consistent damage with a blowpipe that has Poison (1).

Bit of a side note here: blowpipes are one of the strangest weapons in Freebooter’s Fate, because I believe they’re the only weapon that gets an extra effect that isn’t directly listed in any weapon traits, but which is nested inside another rule. Concealment – a trait that allows a model to hide in terrain – is normally broken when a model makes any attacks, but a model armed with a blowpipe does not lose Concealment. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get this ability on Matqueh, but it’s still a fun aside and I doubt I’ll be painting the only model capable of doing this any time soon.

Statline-wise, they’re functionally identical to the Atl-atl apart from the above changes. They also have an Honour Guard variant under the leadership of Pehua, giving them the Assault Shot trait, which allows a model to make a complex move and shoot action. This option really helps to reinforce what they’re for – put them in terrain, harass opponents, and move away when they attempt to chase. Assault Shot just makes that even easier, as they can easily reposition themselves while attacking each turn.

Hobby Progress

Painted, wrote some blog stuff, and got ready to start the final Amazon who needs painting. Plus, I no longer feel guilty about coming back to flesh out these daily posts on the weekends!