Space 2021 - A Star Saga

Lock?  What lock?

Kur Keela is Teraton, who are sort of teenage mutant ninja terapins.  He’s a criminal and an outcast among his own kind and is being blackmailed by Blaine into working as a Mercenary.  In the game he’s a sort of combat engineer armed with a rather meaty pistol and a data pad for hacking.  If he needs to get in somewhere, he gets in either by hacking the security system or by, ahem, “brute forcing” it.

Unfortunately, this model was a “salvage job” following another Army Painter Colour Primer incident.  I have pretty much switched to Army Painter paints now, for the most part but I have 100% dropped their primers.  I have had so many issues with them, including but not limited to the nozzle snapping off or just blocking up, losing pressure completely and not spraying (despite the can being almost full) and most commonly generally low flow rate which leaves a grainy, textured finish.  They are absolutely awful which is a real shame because I like the fact that they are well matched to the corresponding warpaint.  I’m now using colour forge primers which are, IMO, the best on the market.  Their quality and finish is comparable to the citadel primers, which are generally quite good, but the tin is 25% bigger.  The range is also almost as big as the Army Painter range (compared to GW who only seem to maintain a small selection of their colour range as primer sprays).

In this instance, the spray had basically gone on and left an absolutely awful finish, very corase and gritty.  This also happened with Ector Zanchez but at that time I wasn’t really sure what I could do about it so I just soldiered on.  However I decided to see whether Dettol could solve the problem and the answer was “sort of”.  It was bathed in neat dettol for 12 hours and then I tried to clean it up with a toothbrush.  The paint itself wasn’t exactly peeling off as I would have expected however it had softened up enough for the toothbrush to start lifting some of it off.  Ultimately I couldn’t strip the primer off the model (which could be the chemical composition of the primer or it could be the PVC plastic it was sprayed on, I don’t really know), however it was soft enough that the brushing acually removed the gritty texture and smoothed out the finish.  It wasn’t perfect, some detail was lost but it was miles better than it was.

The model itself was really good fun to paint.  I loved the blocky details on the gun and the datapad (it’s not a gun in his right hand) and the texture on the skin was also really easy to paint.  I am also starting to get to grips with the different tones and shades available in the army painter range, which while extensive I don’t think it’s quite as well organised as the citadel range which generally has natural paint groups (base tone and two different layer tones).  The jumpsuit was made using a beige mixed with a little bit of turqoise, the same tone I used for the knee pads.