Space 2021 – A Star Saga

Arkoline is another one of those miniatures where I think Mantic’s universe starts to come into its own. Although she’s bipedal and humanoid, the crystalineife form is really cool. And maybe Crystaline life forms can choose to assume many different shapes and they chose bipedal humanoid, it’s a pretty versatile form to take. Anyway whatever, it’s these fringe species, many of which you can see in Dreadball – in this case the Crystallan – that give the universe its charm.

To paint it I basically used a white undercoat and then covered it with blue contrast paint. I then gave it a drybrush before popping a blue glaze on to finish. For the metal I used the Iron Warriors base colour, which is a very dark, gun metal colour with a black wash over the top. I then just did some edge highlights using Iron Breaker. After varnishing with a Satin Varnish I applied a coat of Ard Coat gloss to the blue areas to give the crystal sections a nice reflective finish.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

As well as all the miniatures, Star Saga comes with a wealth of scenic elements to turn that flat board into a more 3D environment and for me no Dungeon Crawler is complete without them. As kickstarter backers we got double the amount that the retail game gets because obviously everyone needs 30 plastic doors. Anyway, as I am painting the various sets I am trying to do a scenery pieces here and there. To date I have done 15 doors and 4 terminals.  I have only taken photos of the larger doors as it was hard to get a full set of 5 into each frame and honestly, there’s not a great deal of difference, they’re just smaller. The larger doors have the most interesting designs on them.  As I go through I will do each set of 5 doors in a different colour so on a board you can almost split it into coloured zones

The terminals were a lot of fun to paint and I think it will be a consistent theme throughout the whole set. Matrix code on the screens and somewhere there will be a red and a blue button for Hackers to press.

Ha, fools. I have more children than you have bullets and they’re all more than willing to die for me, for the cause.

The Crone Mother is the second villain of the set but the method and colour scheme is exactly the same as Progenitor Thorn. However as a Villain in her own right I felt she warranted an entry all of her own.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

You know why we’re here. Power. No, not political power. Real power. The power of the atom. No, I do not believe I will give your station up. 

Progenitor Thorne is the first of the villains in Retake the Blackstar Station. Much like his underlings he wears the fully enclosed metal suit and I decided that I liked the metallic effects on the minions so much that I would run with it throughout the whole set. However, to try and set the Villains apart, I didn’t leave it at the dirty, faded metal base. Colour. After the washes had dried I drybrushed them up using leadbelcher. This allows some of the highlights to show through the contrast paints and ultimately gives them slightly brighter finish than the grunts.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

Veer-myn. God damned varmints. Well, at least we know the station is relatively intact. Rats normally have good sense not to stick around on sinking ships. 

A new chapter and a complete change. This time the mercs are hired to recapture the Blackstar Station from an infestation of Veer Myn. Only, these aren’t like your normal, run of the mill Veer Myn, these are something new. They have embraced strange new technologies.

Honestly I wasn’t really keen on the Veer Myn.  They’re not bad miniatures, I just don’t really like the Veer-myn all that much. However they still presented me with an opportunity to do some experiments.  Sticking with the default colour scheme, they all seem to have all metal, fully enclosed suits, presumably they act as some kind of Faraday’s Cage to protect them from all the weird energy they’re using. That made priming an obvious choice – Leadbelcher. I then gave them a black wash and an aggrax wash to give them a really grimy finish and left it at that. Then, I picked out all the green and gold trims directly over the metal base using contrast paints. This keeps an overall metallic look, like they have dyed the metal. I think that really helps maintain a slightly lower tech theme that I think should go with the Veer-myn.

Lastly I picked out some of the little details by undercoating them in white and just popping some contrast paints over them. Things like vials of liquid or blades and the like.

Now, unlike the Eiras contract, I am going to do a single post for all of the minions because I used exactly the same colour scheme for them all. There isn’t really much variation between the different units other than the weapons they’re holding. As well as saving time on writing blog posts, it also made painting them all incredibly quick, just a couple of nights work.

People like you made me what I am.  I don’t know why or how, all I know is I have lost count of the number of people I have killed trying to find out.  What’s one more?

Wrath is a member of an alien species of pacifists, the Judwan, who was kidnapped at a young age and put through some secret corporate experiments.  The result is the only Judwan that exhibits any violent tendencies and he makes up for the rest of species

This was a fun model, I had a really good time doing the armour.  I painted the turqouise armour using a regular silver metallic colour scheme – Leadbelcher, nuln oil etc.  I then used Akhelian Green contrast paint over the top like a filter.  The gold I just painted using gold paints – putting yellow contrasts over silver is a little too yellow.

Wrath also marks the end of chapter 1 – The Eiras Contract.  Chapter 2 will detail the first of the expansions, Retake the Black Star Station

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

I ain’t got no time for your Jibber Jabber, fool

I love this model.  I love how he’s a gnarly, grizzled, old grease monkey, an engineer, like an older, greyer and shorter BA Baracus.  I also love the depoloyable equipment that he comes with, the turrets and the shield generators – although the latter are a little small and look like they will be really easy to lose.

I pretty much stuck to the artwork with this one and tried to carry that over into the turrets.  I also had a little play with the Cryptek Armourshade released last year by GW with the Necron release.  It’s a very interesting paint and is much closer to a contrast paint than a wash and it has a slightly sticky consitency when it’s drying.  But it creates a nice oily look which combines nicely with most silver bases.

This was also a really good chance to have a go with the dark skin tone paints from the Citadel range and I have to say I am really impressed. Painting black skin used to be a bit of a pain trying to mix the right shades of brown but now, using Catachan, Blood Reaver and Knight Questor flesh tones you can get a really good result

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

I’ll tell you who I am.  I am Alyse, professional merc and I’m here to kick your arse and steal your stuff.  Now ask me again who the fuck is Alyse.  I dare you.

Not really sure what to say about this miniature.  I wasn’t really looking forward to painting it before I started but actually it wasn’t so bad.  I was worried that there was quite a lot of details on the model and that they might be a little soft. But that turned out not to be the case for the most part and although I don’t particularly enjoy painting black, the bits of white and pink actually look really nice against the background. It’s not my favourite miniature nor my least favourite.  Erm. Yeah.  Here’s Alyse.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins