Bot War Painting Challenge 2020

For those that don’t know Bot War is an 8mm miniatures war game set in an alternative 1985 where there has been a global war and a subsequent invasion of bots from outer space…. If you’re a fan of 1980s Saturday morning cartoons then this game has all the tropes you love….. For me it’s giant robots that look like they may transform.

Anyway, there’s plenty of info on the Traders Galaxy website where this game can be found.  It’s run by a single guy in Australia who does all of the metal casting himself.  He is venturing into resin casting and will be using crowd-funding to release the 3rd edition of the Bot War game with resin miniatures.

This project is to chronical my participation in the Bot War Facebook groups 2020 painting challenge which involves painting for 31 minutes a day for 31 days with at least 7 models being finished (painted and fully based) by the end.

(I wanted to start this on day 0 but totally forgot, this is day 10 so have a few photos to add to catch up)

To prepare for the challenge I first needed to have models to paint.  Having already acquired a decent backlog of models I knew I had a squad of 5 and a combined form big bot that I wanted to get painted.  I just had to clean, prep, and build them ready for the first day of painting.  I would like to have done a project on prepping metal models but that would have to be another day.

Anyway, the challenge is to paint 7 models, so although the combiner is technically the 5 smaller bots in one, it still only counts as one, so I have a few extra bots in the WIP pile ready to make up numbers.

Day 1, where to start. Oh yeah, the same as every other model painting project, research!

I knew I wanted these bots to pay homage to the construction robots from the 1980s series of Hasbro’s Transformers cartoon, the bright green Decepticon Constructicons and their combined form Devastator!

I found a couple of photos of Devastator in toy form (not the original, these are the super detailed, mega-expensive 3rd party versions) and the bots themselves from the IDW comicbook.

So continuing my research I knew that to achieve the bright green I need I would need a white primer, I usually do a zenith prime from black with a white directional, but for this project I went with grey and white so I’d didnt have to worry too much about dealing with such a dark starting point.

I didn’t want to stare at the primed models for too long, so gave the first 2 a couple of washes of Secret Weapon Sewer Water.

This is a great acrylic “gunk” wash which went really nicely over the primer and settled well in the recesses.  This was going to give me a quick pre-shade for when I go over with the airbrush

Day 3’s goal was to get the rest of the bots pre-shaded, I had to drag this out into 2 days as I was waiting on a paint delivery for the greens I planned on using for the main colours.

Again this was just a Secret Weapon Sewer Water wash over the grey/white primer

Big day today, this was the day I actually started applying proper colour to my bots.

I wanted bright green, so having used the Paint Rack for Android app (highly recommended!) I used the colour picker tool on my research images to identify 2 greens I could use, these were Wurm Green & Noctite Green from P3 (typically i had to order these as I didn’t have any thing suitable besides having over 600 paints across multiple brands)

Once I knew this was working how I wanted it to, and as I had the airbrush out, I got the remaining bots greened-up. Whilst I knew this was taking me longer than 31 minutes (which is only a minimum) I wanted to give myself a good starting point to work from on the individual bots.

Starting on the individual bots now, 1st up is Loader

I refined up the green base and layer coats, blocked in my purples with MIG Ammo Violet, and the grey joint sections with vallejo Game colour extra opaque bluegrey.

The gun was also given a light coat of vallejo model colour black just to stop the eye from being drawn to a green gun.

Day 2 of focusing on Loader – details

Added a layer of Secret Weapon Tyre Black to the tyres, this is a great blue-black which as its name suggests is great for tyres.

I also used thinned down vallejo model colour black to start blackining panels and adding in extra grey details with the vallejo extra opaque bluegrey