2025 Painting Log

Moving on to a completely different technique. I painted these with Speedpaints over a black primer/white drybrush base coat, and then finishing up with a light drybrush of yellowed bone over the color to bring out the highlights. Doing all the different piecemeal armor colors in the triad method would have taken more time than I wanted to spend on these — as it is, I got them done in less than half the time that the Wisdom of the Council set took. I don’t think Speedpaints are a cure-all, but they’re great for some projects.

2025 models painted so far: 51, for 4 different games

Like the Mandalorians in my last post, these were done primarily in Speedpaints.

This time I primed them in grey rather than black, while still drybrushing in white, and I think it works a little better, at least for these models. The undercoat is lighter overall, which lets the Speedpaint add more of the shading like it’s supposed to do. I did find that lighter Speedpaint colors still aren’t great for this technique — the skin tones in particular looked pretty grey, so for many of the lighter skinned models I went over the faces, arms and legs with traditional paint.

I’m still pretty happy with the results, especially given the relatively short amount of time it took to get these 9 figures done — once again Speedpaint lives up to its name.

This is the last of the Gangs of Rome stuff I bought last year. With these models I have more than enough for the game (and then some), and the Feldherr boxes I’m using to store them are now exactly full. On the other hand, I believe I’m only six models away from having everything Footsore has made for the game, so why wouldn’t I go for a full set?

2025 models painted so far: 60, for 5 different games

I’m not really much of a video game guy so I’m not at all familiar with the characters from the Shatterpoint Today the Rebellion Dies squad pack. If you want to know the truth, I’m not sure why I bought this one — it certainly wasn’t for the opportunity to whip through some more black uniforms…

I’m told they’re particularly good in the game, so there’s that at least.

In order to jazz up what would otherwise be some pretty dull models, I added the red source lighting from the box and card artwork. It may not be obvious from the photos, but I also used two different varnishes. First I did a full coat with Army Painter brush-on matt varnish, which isn’t very consistent — most of the time it’s more of a semi-glossy satin finish. After that had dried, I went over the cloth of the uniforms and faces with AK Interactive Ultra Matte, leaving the semi-gloss finish to shine through on the boots, gloves, armored chest plates, and helmets. The Ultra Matte leaves a bit of a chalky finish that I’m not sure I’m sold on, but I’ll try to keep playing around with it.

2025 models painted so far: 65, for 5 different games

I hadn’t planned on getting the Real Quiet Like squad pack for Shatterpoint, but my wife talked me into getting both Ewok sets so I figured I may as well go Endor all the way.

Han’s pose is very silly, and he and Chewie are both inexplicably standing on droids from Jabba’s Palace. Chewie appears to have stomped an IG series droid into the ground, which could have happened. There is a terrific pre-Disney short story collection called Tales of the Bounty Hunters, in which we learn that (spoiler ahead) IG-88 had downloaded his consciousness into the second Death Star’s computer core, and was on the verge of taking it over when they blew it up. So I suppose it’s possible that one of his many copies was stomping around on the surface of Endor at the time and made the mistake of getting into Chewie’s way. We play games to tell new stories, I suppose…

Anyway, I used my usual mish-mash of different techniques on these. A lot of the usual base color – wash – drybrush highlights, but I’m finding that the Dallimore tri-color approach is great some things, especially faces and hands. And Grim Black Speedpaint is equally great for black areas, like Han’s boots and vest. I’m really starting to appreciate Speedpaints as a high-pigment wash, very useful for things like belts and straps.

These last two are from the Ewok sets, which I wish they would give proper names to. I’ve got a massive assembly line of Ewoks on the way…

I don’t really play any military games, so haven’t painted this much camouflage since the Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps board game. I found it to be weirdly relaxing, just painting random blobs.

I did a lot more with plants and shrubs than I usually do, adding some of the Gamers Grass shrubs and paper leafy plants to fill out a few of the bases. I don’t think I would use this much foliage on a regular basis, but I think it looks nice in this particular case.

2025 models painted so far: 71, for 5 different games

I made short work (sorry) of these little guys, thanks in no small part to all the fur and wood texture — it made them very easy to do in the standard (but quick) base coat – wash – drybrush technique. The hardest part was coming up with unique color schemes for all of them.

The four individuals are specific characters from the movie, so that was easy enough, but the multi-figure bases are duplicates (I think this is the first time Shatterpoint has done that) so I wanted to make sure I painted them differently. There are only so many variations on brown and grey — I even found myself looking at images from the ’80s Ewoks cartoon show (which I’ve never actually seen) for ideas.

As with the Rebel Commandos in my last post, I did a lot more with foliage than I usually would for Shatterpoint. The Gamers Grass paper plants were great for filling in what would otherwise be pretty bare bases, and I think the tufts of grass here and there make the larger bases look a little more foresty.

2025 models painted so far: 79, for 5 different games

EDIT: The original photos for this post were a little blurry, and while it did demonstrate dynamic motion, I’ve opted to replace them with something a little sharper.

I’ve been working on a couple of projects for the UKGE painting contest. This is the first — I’ll be narrowing these down to an away team of six for the unit category. I’ve covered the process in more detail in a separate project entry. There are 16 here, and I’ve got 8 more that I may or may not get done before the expo.

Apart from the contest, I will hopefully be using these with Red Alert, a free set of rules from Modiphius that takes the combat system from their Star Trek Adventures role playing game and converts it into a head-to-head skirmish game. I went in with a friend of mine on an order from Lost Heresy — he’s working on a small army of faux-Romulans, and another even larger army of faux-Andorians. It should be fun if we actually get around to playing…

2025 models painted so far: 95, for 6 different games

Before I got heavily into way too many different skirmish games, I used to pick up the odd Reaper miniature that caught my eye and just paint it purely for the joy of it, without thinking about whether it was for a particular game. I’ve still got a fair collection of Reaper models from all across their various ranges.

My regular, long-running roleplaying game group has decided to play a short Dungeons and Dragons campaign (normally we play anything but), so I thought it would be fun to get miniatures for the group. If nothing else it was a good excuse to get some more Reaper figures, which are just a lot of fun to paint.

Here we have our adventuring party: a Tiefling warlock, a human paladin, my halfling ranger, and an Aasimar cleric who we suspect might secretly be a necromancer.

As far as I know, the Aasimar are new to D&D, and I may have gone a little off the rails when painting this one. They’re meant to be related to angels and/or demons, and the description in the player’s handbook says they can have silver or opalescent skin. My mind went straight to Archangel from the late ’80s X-Men comics, so I settled on light blue skin and blond hair, and gave the character a pink scarf as a callback to Archangel’s blue and pink costume. The ’80s were an interesting time…

2025 models painted so far: 99, for 7 different games

It’s a bit of an info-dump this week. I’ve been doing a LOT of painting, but not very much posting.

If you follow Shatterpoint on the social medias you are probably aware that there is an…issue with the Shatterpoint model for Director Krennic. He’s HUGE. I mean, the scale is really off. I read that if you compare the Krennic model to the Cassian Andor one, and do the math based on the relative height of the actors who play them, Krennic comes out to be something like 7 foot 5 inches tall. It’s pretty ridiculous.

But, rather than just complain about it, I thought a fun solution would be to paint the model up as a hologram. Krennic doesn’t really seem like the type to lead from the front, and he definitely seems like the type to fudge the height settings on his hologram projector.

I wrote a detailed “how to” article about the painting process over on goonhammer.com. It was basically a lot of different shades of blue, and good practice for monochrome painting, a skill I would shortly use on another project.

The rest of the models in this squad pack were pretty fun to do. There’s not much challenge in the Death Troopers, but the Shoretroopers have a fairly complicated system for their livery which took a bit of research. It was certainly nice to get away from painting white armor though.

2025 models painted so far: 105, for 7 different games

So far, out of 105 models, 45 of them are for Shatterpoint. It does seem like a lot, although I do love the game and have been playing it a fair amount. AMG’s release schedule is pretty light for the next 12 months though, so I should be getting some better variety to my painting table soon.