Bot War Infesters Project

So, the big thing about the Comic Book book type I still find terrifying is the black lining, I make mention of this in my Marvel Crisis Protocol project (that I need to return to, thankyou Ben for the reminder). The thing I found hard was trying to get the lines thin enough (for my eye) and so I had this idea a few weeks ago of.. Hmm I wonder if I could use a thin sharpy, I wonder if it would work?

Now truth be told Im not entirely happy, I need to do a lot of tidy up and I found some gaps were actually still too thin that the lack of flexibility in the sharpy meant they couldnt get in between where it needed to be, however theres more I have to report, honestly, the extra fine sharpies do NOT go over the acrylic paints as smoothly as I expected them to, honestly my advice would be NOT to do them this way its much harder than I thought it would be and I am just going to return to a small brush for the rest of them.
So we’re still moving along, progress this week however was much slower than I wanted it to be, I had a busy week.

I’m glad I tried this though because I learned something, firstly I get into my own head too easilly, rather than just doing things and trying things I put them off out of worry it wont work.  This didnt but hey you know what, its easilly corrected where I need to fix the lines and its not even that hard to fix them with this bold colour style.

– Jason “The Bruce”

Colour theory is an odd thing, truth be told I’ve never actually owned a wheel but I do know how it works (and honestly I can find them free online) But this truly was the first time I actually sat down and decided that I would use it instead of just my eyes to help make my mind up.

As inspiration hit me I knew one thing, a teal or green/blue or whatever other name you wish to use was definately where I wanted to start but it was a question of which tone, Id purchased enough of them, I still wanted light colours, not quite pastel anymore but I knew I wanted light to help compensate with the black lining that would follow when things were complete.

I turned to google to pull up a quick colour wheel and began to look, pinks? yellows? Well the wheel told me I was wrong, the wheel said it should be orange, Id used blue and orange before I knew it worked but it had to be the right shades and so I pulled out paint after paint until I found them

From the moment I started showing off the new versions of my Works in progress people were asking what the lovely blue was, honestly I’ve completely fallen in love with it, the main focus on the entire force it truly felt right but of course it was only half of the equasion.

Radium Red is such a weird colour, reminds me a lot of Wild Rider Red from Citadel but the opacity of these paints are just so much stronger across the entire range Ive toyed with so far. (Far from the entire range)
But truth be told in the case of my orange the highlight was the more important part. Light orange, something about the colour made me feel I could get the look I wanted, its a nice sharp contrast and it works for me nicely, so long as I don’t go overboard with the placement of my colours.

Its much lighter than it looks in the images, now I should point out a believe I have when it comes to paint brands very quickly.

AK Interactive 3rd Edition is just the paint range I am enjoying on these bots right now however I own a wifd range of paints, I am not here to sell you on them merely show you what I am choosing to use. If you are new to this hobby my genuine advice would be to try the brands available to you until you find the brand that suits YOUR STYLE of painting.

So this is what brings us to the current day right? Well yes. Largely blocked out colours and some strong highlights have begun but nowhere near finished yet.

I am not the most confident in the comic book style but this is something I am doing to push myself, it wasnt supposed to be easy.

So I hope that gives you a good indication of the progress so far, I still have a long way to go but thats why I am starting this now.

Choosing a paint scheme for any army can at times be an incredible frustrating thing to do, especially if you have a bad habit of over thinking everything. In the case of the Infesters I could have very easilly chosen something that reminded me of the original insecticons from the Transformers G1 cartoon but I’d seen it done already a number of times and so I wanted to do something else.

My second thought was to go into the area of chameleon paints, or colorshift paints as I actually own a huge set of them but one of our other members already had that idea then it hit me.

I’d been in the process of testing out the new (at the time) AK Interactive 3rd generation paint line and their pastel colours had been praised, using atleast one pastel colour really excited me and so I began testing a few idea’s onto the mini’s themselves.

In the end I settled for the pale glue and pale purple idea I really liked the idea, could see a couple of ways to tweak it but then February got busy and I had to come back to my project.. Thats when the heart break happened

Rum8le is a wonderful painter thats been painting Bot War as well and for the month of February was painting all of his Infestors up for a competition they were running. What neither of us knew is that we’d both stumbled on a similar idea and whilst I was busy during the month of February he was busy, completed his entire force. I saw the results of the idea that had been in my head for the better part of a month and my heart sank. I still don’t even really know why I’d just really settled on the idea of my scheme being very unique and for some reason him beating me to the punch made me feel defeated.

We’ve all heard how bad of an idea this is but lets be frank here, we all do it, we’re all our own worst critics and often quite unfair to ourselves, an old store manager used to literally tell me off for insulting my own work so frequently. Now I don’t know if its because I saw him pull off my idea so perfectly exactly but for whatever reason him beating me to the punch defeated me for a good week or so, theres a little more to it than that (a snarky remark from someone unrelated to this conversation played a part).

But what I am trying to tell you right now is that it really shouldn’t matter if you and another player come up with similar or even the same idea’s. Make them your own and dont allow the skills of others or the doubts in your own head to limit your own idea’s or forbid you from trying to push your own painting limits.

Thankfully this actually turned out to be a great thing because the second paint scheme I found really excited me and that is where I hope you will begin to get excited about my project.

FYI – These wings are yet to be glued on.

– Jason “The Bruce”

A slight diversion now because as boring as undercoating can be I do use a product that feel is a complete game changer as far as zenethial highlights are concerned. I stopped using white primers a good 2.5 years after watching a “how-to” video from Epic Duck Studios. As I mentioned in my previous entry I had decided fairly early on that I wanted to do an animation or cell shaded comic book art style and one of the important parts of this is starting with a nice bright primer, so why not just use a white primer?

I’ve always found white primers extremely unreliable at the best of times always something I had to use rather than I wanted to but when Mike from Epic Duck Studios displayed how the white ink’s can perform I had to try it for myself.

I recorded me using it for the very first time in one of our earliest youtube videos, the quality is poor (the phone is bluetacked into a light stand behind me) but if you can have the patience to look past that, what you’re about to see is a white ink over the top of a black primer and its incredible.

With this product I can get a bright contasting look of a miniature at a much easier and more reliable consistency and this was how all of my mini’s were pressed prior to me beginning to paint any of them.

In my next entry I will finally begin my initial colour scheme plans, and the heart breaking moment one of our own members shattered my hopes and dreams.

I’m someone who’s always been a fan of the transformers franchise, not the biggest fan of how most of the ‘live action’ movies were done, the original was okay but the following all fell short for me until the Bumblebee movie but that’s neither here not there but I mention this because as I began to grab the occational item to add to that small collection of mine I found myself attracted more towards Megatron and his Decepticon crew over the Autobots.

Anthony was in the middle of relaunching a few of his factions at the time and the most recent release was going to be “The Queen” for the Infesters (which in turn had recently been re-released in a purple resin). The Infesters starter box was the first to arrive.

Please note, the following unboxing is 7 months old, the quality & editing of my content has improved greatly deal since this was published.

And so there I was, I’d picked my faction, it was just something about the models themselves, that old Insecticon feel but still feeling like a thing of their own, and having seen The Queen that would follow in 2 months time I was excited to play them.

With everything having arrived I was excited to get a game on, but Melbourne was thrown back into the last it’s lockdowns, and I hadn’t actually decided how I wanted to paint them yet, or more accurately I was changing my mind that frequently that it was hard to commit.

But one thing was clear to me however it was I painted these, I wanted to do it in an animation style, a cell shade design very similar to how Epic Duck Studio’s paint their mini’s, something I had been wanting to do on my Marvel Crisis stuff before it fell into the ever growing pile of shame.

What is Bot War?

For those of you who are yet to see any other Bot War content I figured the best place I could start and what attracted me to it to begin with.

If you were a child of the 80s you will know we grew up enjoying a lot of the franchises that have become extremely successful today, Bot War is a game that draws on that nostagia in a world of its own, it has giant robots that convert into things (totally no transformers), a good and an evil army (totally not GI Joe) and it draws from IPs such a M.A.S.K. as well. If you’ve been following Rum8le’s projects then you will already have seen some of this for yourself.

What drew me to Bot War?

Around 2 years ago before the pandemic we were having a conversation on my podcast (Getting Tabled) about franchise’s we grew up with and why I felt they were a natural fit for the tabletop, how I was confused as to why it hadn’t yet been done when so many of them seemed like such an easy conversion. I had used He-Man as example of an IP easilly converted into a skirmish battle, in my head picturing something similar to the Marvel Crisis Protocol game we now know of today.

It was roughly a month later when by pure chance I stumbled across the Bot War game by Traders Galaxy, I ordered the 2 player starter set tha was current at the time, had an interview with Anthony and then as the Pandemic hit it faded into the mists of projects long forgotten.

I make the joke about it being forgotten but that was not entirely true, its just it wasnt high on the priority list without people to play with (or the opportunity to do so). That however would change in 2021 when a listener reached out regarding another game Id mentioned wanting to play who was also beginnning to play Bot War, that was the only push I needed. An order was made soon after.