Bot War Painting Challenge 2021 – Atlanticans Rising

Welcome to the start of my 2021 Bot War painting challenge project blog.

This is a painting challenge for the Bot War tabletop miniatures game by Traders Galaxy

As with last year’s project this challenge is being run over on the Bot War Miniatures Game Facebook group by Anthony and his mod team (shout to Aidan for all the bookkeeping!) as a way to get the community together and help promote the game in the run up to the release of the new Bot War 2 Turbo Edition starter set (which looks fantastic).

This year its a little different as its only running for 20 days instead of 30 but this makes sure it is nicely timed to end with the preorder for the new edition and also some lucky folks will be receiving their preorder copies of the recent Trashers faction, me being in the UK though I sadly won’t get mine in time, but they will be a fun reward to receive at the end of this.

With the forthcoming release of the new starter set, I figured it was about time I tackled some of the my unpainted factions from the 2nd edition starter set, The Atlanticans.

This also presents for me a great opportunity to also face a hobby nemesis – painting yellow!

The target for the challenge is to complete a minimum of 5 models, and as there are 6 Atlanticans in the starter set I knew I would safely achieve that, but to push it a bit more I decided to grab a few extra bots from my backlog and a UK stockist to make sure I had enough for a decent force to take to the table.

And, just like with painting challenge 2020 I just had to include one of the Bot War combiners as a centrepiece and capstone for the project, Leviathan!

PLEASE NOTE

I am in no way sponsored or affiliated with Bot War or Traders Galaxy, I am just a fan of the game, the miniatures, and universe Anthony has created, its the miniatures range I have always wanted so I’m happy to share my enjoyment of them where I can and hopefully see this game grow and grow.

For me understanding the background of a faction really helps to garner inspiration and work out how to approach a painting project.

This is a little introduction to the Atlantican faction, the original antagonists in the Bot War, there’s a huge amount of background being produced for the game’s alternative universe that can be found on the Trader’s Galaxy website including short stories and a comic series, as well as regular content drops on the Facebook group:

“Atlantica is a secret city submerged deep in the Atlantic Ocean. It is not a human city but a city of Mer people. Atlantica is essentially a feudal society ruled by a royal class. At the top of this system is King Gills. King Gills is a technological genius having an understanding of technology bordering on the supernatural. Only two things rival King Gills’ intelligence – his ambition and insatiable lust for power.

Far beneath the ocean, King Gills’ and his mermen legions laboured to bring forth warmachines and armies with which to conqueror the surface or the earth. However combined Valiant and Democracy forces forced him back to the depths. Unable to match the versatility and brute force in close quarters of the allied forces King Gills’ bided his time. Then a meteor fell from space and landed right in the Atlantic. This meteor was a ship containing a sentient being much more technologically advanced than King Gills’ could even have imagined. It was like nothing on planet earth and King Gills’ moved quickly to study this creature and learn all he could. It wasn’t long before the Kings’ intellect fully understood all there was to know about this new technology. He rebuilt the sentient being, a bot called Omen, who in turned pledged service to the Kings’ conquest as repayment for his new life and body. The King then created from scratch a lieutenant, to support his warriors in battle. He named this new bot Stingray. In addition, by studying Omen, the King was able to create a new deadly weapon called the magnetic disruption gun.

Now with bots by his side and new technologically advanced weaponry King Gills is ready to challenge the surface once again……”

There is a longer piece of background narrative on the website which delves into the factions motivations and intent.

And we’re off, this is the start and I’ll be honest, it already took me longer than planned. The models are lovely and crisply detailed, and everything went together really easily.  The resin kits come in a lot fewer parts than the original metal designs, so these were a doddle to get assembled compared to the Builders from my project last year (only the big boy here got pinned).

I’ve left the bases off for now as I’m still not sure how I want to do them, and I find it easier using corks or hobby crocodile clips to hold the feet so you can twist the model in all directions whilst priming to get into all the nooks and crannies.

The priming was done with a black Stynelrez base, and a lateral spray with Vallejo Mecha Ivory. I went with ivory instead of white as I wanted a slightly warmer starting point as I know I’ll be hitting these with yellow imminently.  In fact I had a quick go seeing how Citadel’s Iyanden Yellow Contrast paint looked over the ivory through the airbrush. I’m not sure if I will do the rest in it yet, I’ll let it all dry and check back tomorrow.

Day 1 done.

Day 2 started much earlier than I started painting.  Working from home sharing my hobby desk with my office desk at many points throughout the day I found myself looking at the Iyanden Yellow coast I gave one of the bots (Moray) yesterday, not quite sure if it’s the direction I wanted to go in or not.  I wanted to give Contrast paints a go to see how yellow would turn out. This was very much an experiment as my previous uses of contrast have been to tint metals, or help to glaze alien skin tones, rather than create a solid basecoat to then build on from.

I also had Nazdreg Yellow Contrast paint to try, so the next bot up, Stingray, got a brush painted coat.  Neither of these two coats may make it past the weekend, and could well get a dunk in some good ol Biostrip 20, but I wanted to see how both the colours and applications compare.

So I will see how these compare in the morning and make my decision from there.

I do know that the yellow will be glazed up to a desaturated highlight to add contrast and value definition, but it’s fun to experiment at this stage.

So day 3 has fallen on a weekend, nice, I get a decent amount of painting time, don’t have to rush about or do a full day’s work, I can just plan and attack.

Today I wanted to get some more foundations layed to build upon for the week ahead. After playing about with yellows yesterday and still not happy I decided to do something different. In a way I feel I have wasted 2 days on the yellow, in reality it’s only a small step and one I can easily rectify in the coming week.  Instead of pushing on with them, I put Moray and Stingray to one side and picked up Neptune.

One of the other techniques I wanted to use during this challenge was applying filters over metals. This was a technique I had attempted previously on 54mm Goblin, and I have been enjoying watching a streamer friend JanuineVision use the technique again recently on the GW Crimson Court Vampires.  He has done a great little video on the technique as well on his YouTube channel, which I re-watched during the week.

To start this process I needed a TMM base, so grabbed a Vallejo Metal Air triad and set to work, starting with a thin base layer of 71.073 Black Metal

With the black metal base dry I started to layer up using Gun Metal, leaving Black Metal in the recesses and making sure all of the primer had been coated (it was a thin Black Metal basecoat after all).

Once the Gun Metal had dried I hit all of the high points with Chrome to really get that shiny finish. I then went back with more Gun Metal and Black Metal to reinforce the contrast between the high middle shadow points.

My final bit of work on this model today was to mix some Liquitex Carbon Black ink into some Black Metal, and then using a very fine brush painted in some of the line details on the thighs and greaves, and push the shadow points underneath or separating armour points.

This will be left to cure, and I will consider which colour filter I want to apply over the top tomorrow.

Corrupted

Unfortunately my experience with the yellow contrast paints didn’t work out as planned, so they took a little bath in some Biostrip 20.  The 2 different shades of yellow didn’t sit well with me, so instead of spending too much longer trying to work out a better way to balance them out I stripped them back. I do have a plan for them, but for now it’s back to unprimed resin for those 2.

It’s worth noting that Biostrip 20 is great for metal models, but it can have different effects on other resins. I have tried it before on citadel plastic and on Kingdom death plastic, but on these original grey resin bots I found they started to become a bit soft, so I was cautious to not leave them soaking too long (20 minutes), and washed them off using a stiff brush before resoaking for a further time. It’s better to repeat the process than to ruin a model by leaving it too long in the bio-bath.

After a good wash with clean water these will be ready for a new primer coat.

But at least I could progress Neptune today. Over the metal basecoat I applied with my airbrush a coat of dark angel green contrast paint from below, 5hrn a mix of Dark Angel green and a little Akhelian Green to make a nice teal green. That went over the mid and from above.

A final highlight from directly above was applied using a lovely mix of Vallejo Metallic Air chrome with Akhelian green mixed into it.  One of the issues I found from my initial coats were that the top highlights were light enough, so this lustred metallic teal made everything shine in the right way, it’s just a right pain to photograph.