Space 2021 - A Star Saga

I haven’t had chance to start on the final two boss characters yet and that’s because I have been doing a bit of planning and I thought I would share a bit of insight instead.

Whilst it is true that my brother has been the chief batch painter and has mostly been batch painting all of the minions, in most cases I have provided an example painted miniature that he could copy (and I have done a little touching up at the end).  So I spent the last couple of evenings working on some test paints for the Rebs in The Devil’s betrayal.

In this case I am deviating away from the stock colour schemes in the artwork slightly because of what they are.  I already have a decent sized Rebs force for Deadzone, likely enough to play firefight with (should Mantic choose to provide an army list for them) and I would like the Star Saga miniatures to stand beside them to expand the army further.  Although my Deadzone Rebs aren’t currently painted, I do know what they will need to look like and the reason for that goes back to my Deadzone GCPS models.  I will explain shortly.  However first, here is the test paints for each of the minion types.  I have tried to maintain a consistent theme across the 4 different types – mostly black and dark grey with black/red armour and spot colours in blue.  These were all finished off using a black glaze, rather than the more common aggrax earth glaze, to maintain the cool look but also to cover up any gaps that always seem to occur with contrast paints.

The reason behind this colour scheme is because last year I took part in a  Deadzone painting challenge – paint a Deadzone strike team in a month.  Rather than going the normal route and picking 6-10 miniatures and painting them to a high standard, I went the opposite way and challenged myself to paint ALL my GCPS – the faction starter and the faction booster.  To do that I decided to use contrast paints and brown wash which can get you a decent tabletop ready result very quickly.  To elevate that basic paint job to the next level I decided I would put a bit of extra effort in with the bases, but what to do?  Well the answer came from Steam and the release of the remastered Westwood Studios classic – Command & Conquer.  I loved that game back in the 1990s, I loved it just as much when they re-released it last year and I knew there and then, my GCPS were to become the GDI and the bases?  Well, Tiberium crystals of course!

Needless to say I was successful in my attempt to paint them up.  They’re not stunning, they won’t be winning any competitions any time soon but for anyone who was there in 1995 when C&C revolutionised the real time strategy genre with its FMV cut scenes and it’s rock music sound track, these are great fun.  I had so much fun with them that rather than do loads of gallery photos and all that stuff, I made a video instead

So what the hell has all this got to do with the price of Tiberium I hear you ask?  Well, the GCPS colour scheme has had a direct influence on my choice of colour scheme for the Rebs.  What would the GDI be without their erstwhile adversary, the Brotherhood of Nod!  The primary colours for most of the brotherhood of Nod is grey and black.  However I found that too boring so I used red to try and break up the otherwise monochrome look, which kind of works seeing as the badge of the brotherhood of Nod is a black scorpion on a red background