MAC ATTACK 1 - Amanda Lee Franck

An Interview with the artist of MAC ATTACK

i have seen MAC ATTACK

yes i am INNER CIRCLE

for a hot minute

sometimes and purely by chance

"Chris, this title is terrible" I said

and it is,

but I need not say it more than once surely (I probably will)

I have tried kitbashing a force for this and have played it once, (incorrectly), so this will be the first of a series of small posts about MAC ATTACK, probably far too late to do anything useful for its crowdfunding, which is happening HERE

This first post is an interview with the artist for MAC ATTACK - Amanda Lee Franck, (click for socials), who you may know from such works as ‘Vampire Cruise’, ‘Crush Depth Apparition’ and ‘You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge’.

The subject is of particular interest to me as it involves miniature wargaming, world creation, the involvement of art and design in differentiating and embodying factions and the interplay between painting, building, playing and pretending.

Here is the Interview!

Cover Sketch (see below for final)

GENERAL HISTORY

Patrick - How did you become involved with the project?

Amanda - Chris sent me a note cause he saw some spaceships I posted on I think instagram.

Patrick - How long has it taken from beginning to end?

Amanda - The art took from June of 2024 to late December (I did a little work on other projects at the same time but mostly it was Mac Attack). I am slow but also there were a lot of pieces! Also there are two entirely painted illustrations where I made a literal analog painting for them and that takes so long (paint has to dry). (all the others are analog ink drawings with digital color).

Cover Final

FACTION DESIGN

Patrick - We have ten factions;

• Elder Circle

• Grand Forge

• First Regiment

• Arksworn Order

• Torchbearer Archive

• Dynapolis Foresight

• Vox Stellari

• New Genesis

• Monolith Conclave

• Skyless Cartel

Patrick - Ten factions is a LOT for a starting Wargame. Three or four is more usual. In the book, factions are defined by a small clutch of rules and options, some example MAC stats, a single sentence modelling guide and your images. More; each is, or was, human, and each has some kind of shared history with the 'Humanity Fleet' they all descend from.

How did you start thinking about the factions - what was the exchange of ideas between you and Chris like?

Amanda - I have pages & pages of notes I took while I was trying to figure out the designs (Also Chris sent an art brief with notes about the factions). It is true that ten is a lot, and I figured my job in the pictures was to give each of the factions a visual shorthand: pick out whatever it is that makes each faction most distinguishable from the rest, and make a design that emphasizes that particular thing. So I took a bunch of notes & expanded on all the ideas and then went around & collected some visual references for each faction (mining equipment, home-made church banners, bug parts & so on) and then I tried to condense everything back down again and made each faction a sketch page with a drawing of a mech & a portrait of their leader & their capital, which I sent to Chris & then he gave me notes on the designs.

DIFFERENTIATING FACTIONS

Patrick - How did you differentiate the factions visually?

Visual Profile - Are the factions intended to have strong individual profiles? (In particular, some are 'nearly humanoid', while others are 'Crystally', 'Flowing' and Big Lump Things of various shapes.)

Substance - were you thinking about how people would build these, and of what? while you were drawing them?

PAINTING - were you thinking about people actually painting these things and did you consider colour schemes during the design process? To the individual factions have their own 'palettes'?

Amanda - I am answering these all at once:

When I started working on this I had not ever played a miniatures game or painted a miniature so I found a friend who had & asked him a bunch of questions about it & learned most importantly that picking out the colors of your guys was very important & that meant that I should not use color as key way of distinguishing the factions from each other.

Instead I tried to give each faction a super simple motif that was obviously different from the others (and not size or color based: something like: pyramids or drills or banners or the MACS have human faces attached. There are still color schemes that crept in as I was working, but they are vague: one faction being shiny and and brightly colored vs another faction being rusty & broken down vs another faction having painted on details as though the MACS have been decorated by their own pilots.

Patrick - Future Faction Definitions - Would you, either yourself or in combination with others, (Chris has an active Discord I think) be down for producing a 'Design, Colour and Heraldry' type book or file showing the world examples of how they could produce examples of the various factions?

Amanda - If I saw a model someone else made of one of the guys I drew I think I would feel the most famous a person has ever felt (I do not know very much about making models and could not be very helpful).

SMALL SCALE

Patrick - 6mm - this is an insanely small scale for a wargame. At this level the MACS (which are roughly the size of buildings) would be about the size on the table of a 40k Space Marine, or smaller.) Was this a deliberate choice to help/aid with Kitbashing and construction?

The scale influenced by other things (you can carry a small wargame around easily and its hopefully cheap to get into.)

6mm Vehicles and Infantry*. Did you put any thought into what the infantry and vehicles might look like?

Amanda - I don't know! I do not know the answers to these questions you will have to ask Chris!

KITBASHING

Patrick - Was thought given to Kitbashing, modelling and self-creation of MACs by the players?

Grand Forge and First Regiment both seem to have general humanoid forms, Grand Forge with spikes and First Regiment with those wild horns and crotch faces. Were these intentionally designed as factions it should be easy to Kitbash just by adding bits and pieces to humanoid mech models?

Amanda - Yeah, I was trying my best to do things that could be made with stuff you might have around (like if I was going to try making skyless cartel I would go get lots of screws or old drill bits & glue them together into a huge earth tunneling looking thing). I suppose Torchbearer Archive is for if you want a challenge cause I don't know how you would make them. You'd have to model the whole thing from scratch.

Patrick - You yourself have kitbashed some of the Arksworn Order. Can you tell us a little about how you did that and what your thought process was?

Amanda - As I have never done this before I would describe my thought process as trying things out, failing messily, trying a related thing out (this is also how I draw). Luckily I had help with glueing and attaching techniques and access to a marvelous parts horde. I managed to make ship's prow shapes out of some plastic card & a mysterious paste and I found a marble in a stream and used that to weigh down the back end so the whole fellow doesn't tip over on his face. (The marble collects and stores energy from lightning collected by the many spires up top). I tried to copy the colors I used in the 2d art (but I am not really satisfied, it turns out this is completely different from painting the way I am used to and I feel like I could spend weeks painting one of these little guys. and then smearing mud on them & then making them such as a light up diorama with explosions effects to live in oh no)

BOOK DESIGN

Patrick - What was the process of book design? Who did what when?

Amanda - Chris did all of it! He did the logos for the factions as well. He wanted a border to go around the edges of each page & I designed that to suggest a light-up instrument panel, with green-yellow-red going up to indicate your MAC is overheating.

Patrick - Spot Images - the book is full of pictures, small and large, from the world of MAC ATTACK. What where you thinking of when making these? Were you imagining particular moments between factions, images from real life? From your own imagination? Did you begin with the image and then place it in the world or something else.

Amanda - I actually made a complicated chart to make sure that I was drawing equal amounts of each faction and I used the inspiration tables in the book to help come up with ideas of dramatic things which might happen. The spot images are related specifically to the page they are on- the text was complete when I started working so I was able to do that which is always nice.

WORLD DESIGN

Patrick - The reality of MAC ATTACK is massively inferred from this element and that. How fully did you model this reality in your head? What kinds of things were you thinking of when representing it?

Amanda - I think I almost invent a new way of working for almost every project I do in the hope that doing so plus reading the text really closely produces a coherent place in my mind & then later in the art. The way the setting of this game is big: multiple planets: any kind you can think of! All kinds of guys! made me want to do things very splendid and colorful: big, weird, colors. And I wanted to use a bunch of the same oversaturated red (because of the overheating rule, which I suppose is an obvious choice but it ties all the images together)

When I was composing images I was thinking about trying to get at those moments when you are playing a game & you get a really good roll & your guy gets to do something so dramatic that it kinda hangs out in your head like a real memory of something you did afterwords.

Patrick - Future Works - will you ever be diving back into the world of MAC ATTACK in the future with any art, minis or anything else?

Amanda - I do not know but I have learned that I like making small things, which ought to have been obvious as I still think fondly of childhood school projects where I had to make a diorama in a shoebox of a book I read.

ANYTHING ELSE?

Patrick - Is there anything you really wanted to talk about or be asked about that I didn't bring up?

Amanda - I don't know if anyone cares about artist materials? But I could go into more process detail if thats at all of interest.

Patrick - So for those curious types; what tools, inks, papers, pens etc did you use? What was your method of working from first sketch to final copy?

How do you know when an image is 'finished'?

Amanda - I use sumi ink (cheap! comes in big bottle) and dip pen or tiny tiny brushes on some cheap printer cardstock (not as nice as bristol board, but close). Then I scan the drawings & clean them up digitally if I have made any huge mistakes and add color using Clip Studio Paint (a japanese digital drawing program which is better & cheaper than photoshop).

For the cover & the interior painted pieces I did actual paintings, photographed them, and then added some of the really really small details digitally. I have copied this process from someone I cannot remember who does magic card art, to be able to make an oil painting quickly enough: you can get in the big forms and color & texture pretty quickly in actual paint, and then work on top of the photograph of the painting for the little bits & highlights that would take forever if you had to wait for layers to dry.

I like to work with analog media because I think I make more interesting decisions when I know I can't delete anything. I started doing looser & looser sketches because it forced me to think harder & be more attentive- If you get something wrong you have to try to make it work anyway and I think that struggle is what makes the most interesting work (or you have to toss the whole thing).

I know when something is done cause it makes a kind of almost audible click in my brain.

-

---

*(Tanks, if they were actual size, would be about the size of peanuts I think while actual-size infantry would be like grains. Effectively this means Tanks and infantry on the table will effectively be represented by 'out of scale' models. Which isn't unusual for a small scale