2024 Painting Log

I wanted to make sure Thrawn looked as good as I could make him look, so I saved him for after Princess Leia and the boys, thinking they would be good additional practice. I went for a warmer white, starting with Reaper’s Wolf Grey, drybrushing lighter, and then using a warm off-white in thinned down layers. The black boots and blue skin were done using Speedpaint.

Agent Kallus and the two ISB Agents were very easy by comparison, just black primer and drybrushed gunmetal for the armor. After Kallus was done I looked at a picture of him from Star Wars: Rebels and noticed that his shoulder pads aren’t metallic armor, and his tunic has a wide lighter grey stripe down the front. It was easy enough to correct.

2024 models painted so far: 167, for 5 different games

I just have the main Rebels crew still to do, then I’ll be done with Shatterpoint for a while. Next up I’ve got some 7TV and Gangs of Rome stuff to do, and eventually I’ll get back to Mythic Battles: Ragnarök — I would really like to finish that up before the end of the year.

I’ve finally come to the end of my current backlog of Star Wars: Shatterpoint miniatures (at least until November when the next round comes out). These were a lot of fun to do — as they are characters from a cartoon show, they are more brightly colored than a lot of the Shatterpoint characters have been. I certainly got in a lot of practice painting yellow and orange, two notoriously difficult colors.

I tried a few different techniques on these. For Hera and Chopper I tried to step away from my usual over-reliance on drybrushing and washes, instead doing most of the work by layering from dark up to light shades. Kev Dallimore is one of my favorite painters, and I think I’m finally starting to understand what he is doing to get the effects he gets.

Sabine, Ezra and Kanan were done using the pretty standard basecoat-wash-drybrush technique. I did that mainly because all three of them have source lighting from lightsabers and explosions, and that’s pretty easy to do with a little drybrushing.

Zeb was done using the old black primer-drybrush-speedpaint technique. Speedpaint yellow is just as hard to work with as regular yellow (for different reasons) and I ended up painting over most of it with a few shades of regular yellow paint. I’m still not 100% sold on speedpaint, but I’m going to keep working with it for now.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with how they came out. Now if I can just make time to get a game in…

2024 models painted so far: 173, for 5 different games

I usually watch (well, mostly listen to) the Weekender and XLBS while painting. I had a full weekend so I didn’t get around to this week’s episodes until today. It’s always a huge thrill when I hear my name on the show!

I backed Crooked Dice’s 7TV ’80s Genre Guide Kickstarter, but none of the new miniatures in the campaign really interested me that much — they were all either characters I already had versions of, or couldn’t think of a way to use in a 7TV cast (but seriously, if “Neutron Nelson” had come with the rest of Prince’s ’80s band, I would have been all over it). So instead I decided to add on some of Crooked Dice’s older ’80s stalwarts, the Paranormal Exterminators, plus some adversaries to go with them.

I’ve been trying to move into more deliberate painting and less drybrushing and washes, and these are a bit of an interim step in that process. The four main guys were done with a brown base coat followed by layers of beige, but I did end up wiping out most of the shadowed areas so I tried to bring them back with a strong tone wash, then some highlights. The faces and equipment was done more or less the same way, but for those I managed to get the shading right (building up from dark to light) so no course correction was needed.

Same technique for the Harbingers — I actually painted the Gatekeeper first as a test piece, and the Keymaster last.

The Ectoplasmic Entity and the Demonic Dogs were done with my usual technique of black primer → drybrush base color → fill in details → wash and highlight as needed.

I believe I’ve got enough models now to do a Ghostbusters scenario for 7TV — I did some ghosts earlier in the year, and I found a Playmobil Marshmallow Man that is close to the right scale. I didn’t pick up Crooked Dice’s Ecto-1 car, thinking that it would really just be a terrain piece, but I’m kind of regretting that now. Maybe time to put another order together…

These two titans of ’80s cinema were also add-ons from the Kickstarter. The Coach was the early bird bonus for the campaign, and the Cyborg Enforcer is an earlier figure that seemed like a fun add-on, although I’m not sure what I’ll use them for, if anything. I do have some questions about the scale between these two though, the cyborg looks a little small…

2024 models painted so far: 184, for 5 different games

I’m starting to play around with different painting techniques, but I want these to all look fairly consistent so these were done the same as most of the others for this game: black primer, drybrush the main dominant color, then fill in details with speedpaints, regular paint, and/or washes as needed.

Goddess Sif and Heroes Egill and Sigmund

Dwarves, Light Elves, and the human form of Bodvar Bjarki, who apparently manifests a giant armored polar bear when he’s asleep (unfortunately I haven’t painted that one yet).

I did a bit more layering than usual on the Light Elves in an attempt to give them a glow. Same for the Dwarves, as I was trying to match the source artwork which is of course very dark and has them lit in blueish light.

With these done I’ve only got 40 more to do in order to get the core box done, then another 16 to cover the Asgard and Destroyer expansions. I’d love to at least finish all of the core box miniatures by the end of the year, but I’m not sure if I can manage that and a Terrainfest project, especially since I’ve just started prepping another batch of Gangs of Rome models…

2024 models painted so far: 195, for 5 different games

Shatterpoint seems to be doing a mix between well known characters and deep cuts, so hopefully they’ll get to Baylan Skoll and his apprentice eventually. Technically Ray Stevenson is already in the game as Gar Saxon, but one could argue that the relationship between a tiny plastic miniature and the actor who voiced the character in an animated TV series is tenuous at best.

In the mean time, we do have Mr. Stevenson represented in what is arguably the best role of his career, that of Titus Pullo, the weirdly lucky Roman legionnaire from the TV series Rome, along with his co-star Lucius Vorenus.

The models are from Warlord’s Hail Caesar range. If I use them for anything it will be Gangs of Rome, but I decided against the usual cobblestone bases just to keep my options open. These were painted using the triad method, starting with black primer and working up through three different successively lighter shades of each color. I’m still playing around with the technique — so far I think it looks pretty good at tabletop distance (the only thing that really matters) but less so under the camera’s much closer scrutiny. It also takes a good deal longer than my usual base coat → wash (or speedpaint) → drybrush method, and while I appreciate the increased control over where the paint goes, I’m not sure the end results look any better.

2024 models painted so far: 197, for 5 different games

I seem to be jumping around randomly between games and projects as I work on clearing my shelf of opportunity. The challenge with this approach is in making the models from the different games and ranges look consistent, as I’m often finding myself using different painting styles depending on the game.

For Gangs of Rome I’ve been fairly consistently using slap chop (are we really okay with that name now?). I thought the last batch I did were a little too dark (although Ben seemed to like them), so this time I started with grey primer rather than black, and drybrushed up from there for the base coat. I finished them off primarily with Speedpaints, but I had some issues making the skin look right so I went back over the faces, arms and feet with a more traditional base coat then wash approach. The final step was a drybrush with Reaper Yellowed Bone to bring up the highlights just a bit.

The Speedpaints definitely lived up to their name — I was able to get this entire batch of 14 models done in about 10 hours (from bare metal to finished and varnished), spread out over three sessions. Not bad considering all the different colors involved.

These Roman civilians are from Warlord’s Hail Caesar range. They don’t have any rules or stats for Gangs of Rome, so they’ll most likely just be for table decoration. Maybe I should count them as a TerrainFest project? I may do up some gang fighter stats for a few of them — the Celtic bodyguard certainly looks like he could start some trouble, and who knows what that merchant has hidden in his treasure chest?

2024 models painted so far: 211, for 5 different games

It’s unsettling, just how susceptible I am to Gerry’s unboxing videos. Star Schlock is at least the third game I wasn’t going to get into, but changed my mind after seeing Gerry talk about it.

In this case, I did look at the Kickstarter but decided against it, for reasons that elude me at the moment. It was probably due to the overwhelming nature of most Kickstarter campaigns — “here’s a whole ton of stuff, you need to commit to buying all of it right now or you’ll never see any of it again.” It’s also possible that I was in the midst of another project, or had too many crowdfunders going at the time.

Just buying the boxed game direct from Wunkay was a very satisfying experience compared to Kickstarter. I decided I wanted the game on a Monday, ordered it on a Tuesday, and had it in my hands by the weekend. A far cry from the usual two year wait…

Anyway, enough about crowdfunding. The models in the boxed game are a lot of fun, very characterful with a reasonable amount of detail. I decided to paint the gorilla soldiers in classic Planet of the Apes livery rather than the gold outfits shown in the game’s artwork.

I used a mix of techniques for these, starting with a base coat of purple and brown (or black for the lead gorilla), with a middle grey for the hands and faces. I then used Army Painter purple, strong tone, and dark tone washes. The strong and dark tones worked okay, although I had to do two coats to darken down the grey I used for the heads and hands, but the purple left their arms and legs too dark, so I painted in some purple highlights before a final yellowed bone drybrush.

I’m very much looking forward to painting the Explorer Corps landing party, but I’m having a hard time deciding on the color scheme. I like what’s shown on the box art, but at the same time I’m a huge fan of the ’80s Star Trek movies (well, most of them), so I’m tempted to do them all with maroon jackets…

2024 models painted so far: 219, for 6 different games