Epicast Stompa revisited

While unpacking the workshop I rediscovered an old friend from 40K 2nd Edition... Its from Epicast back in the bad old days when GW licensed a few outside companies Like Epicast, and, later, Armorcast to produce stuff that occurred in the fluff but GW itself was not producing.  Eventually all of those licenses were withdrawn and consolidated back into what we now know as Forge World.

These early models came with rules in the form of Data Sheets so they could be played, with the consent of your opponent, without any new rule books being required.

Second edition was the high water mark of the cartoon style for 40k and my Orks were as cartoon-y as they come. These first couple of pictures are of the Stompa appear (with the addition of the beginnings of some lining that I started before remembering to snap a photo) as I played it for decades.  Bright primary colors and almost zero weathering, highlighting, or shading.  The roof tiles over the rear assualt doors were perhaps the only attempt at weathering.  

This was not entirely a sacrifice on the altar of speed.  The cartoon style really relied on mass color coding with a very small number of spot details as focal points... much like Anime does even now. I wanted to update this old can a bit so it didn"t look super incongruous with my current Orks but retained its 2 ed. roots.

Below is the result.

As you can see I chose not to start over from scratch and just continued on over the old paint.

I started with a lot of Brown Rust (Secret Weapon(SW)) to move the nearly monochrome green into a two color scheme, jazz up the freehand chevrons, and to make the iron jaws of the skull a bit more fearsome. This was all large brush stippling.

Following the Brown Rust I did a full model Drybrush with Silver (Vallejo(V)) followed by a full model wash with Armor Wash (SW) and then wiped away the excess wash with a paper towel.  

Orange Rust (SW) was stippled in the central areas of any Brown Rust areas, Phoenix Red (V) stippled over red areas. 

Brass Casing (SW) was used to touch up and shade gold areas and Engine Metal (SW) touched up and highlighted all metal areas. The battlecannon barrel mouth got some thin coats of Orange Heat (SW) fading into Purple Heat (SW) fading into the base green.  The entire model then was lined with Rust Shadow (SW) with extra effort directed at establishing a more detailed impression of a blade track for the chainsword.

The model has always been unsteady on its feet and prone to falling over so in a final omage to 2nd ed., and to play with my newly rediscovered static grass applicator, I  grabbed a big oval bass and loaded it up with 2mm static grass.  In 2nd. ed almost all the armies I encountered, including my own, were straight up flocked unlike the more significant efforts expended on modern bases.

Here is the completed model with some Ork Burna Boyz making their wicked way into the Undertown... gonna be a bad day for someone!

 Back to the desk!

Cheers

Joan of Arc core set terrain and some accidental Night Goblins

 One of the things that really got me hooked on the Joan of Arc (JoA) Kickstarter from Mythic Games was the amazing visuals they created with the terrain elements of the game.  My 15mm terrain collection is a bit dated and I thought, if the game was awful, I'd still be able to use a lot of the components in other 15mm games.  Fortunately the game is actually pretty good... maybe even very good... maybe even awesome! 

 The core set comes with a church, a large farmhouse, two small farmhouses, a ruined church, a well, 5 low walls and 7 defensive stake lines, 5 bushes, 4 rocks, 10 trees, and a small shrine.

I've managed to knock out: Church, houses, walls, trees, bushes, stakes, and rocks. 

 All of this was painted directly onto the plastic models without trimming, cleaning, or primer. I wanted to paint these fast and leverage the pre-colored plastic where possible.

Paint adhesion was excellent and I think they'll hold up well to use.  They were sealead with Krylon Satin Clear Coat but I'll probably zap them with a final light coat of Dead Flat.

 To get the variegated roof tiles I used three basic colors and rolled some dice to decide where they went!  A fun little exercise that turned in a good result.

The trees were pre-colored green and brown So they got some highlights and some Secret Weapon Washes.  I wanted to mix some green highlights and blew my color theory check and made a large batch of a totally wrong green....

... which resulted in a frantic look round for something to use it on... I located a box of "Battle for Skull Pass" which I think is something like 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles and set to painting up the horde of Night Goblins it contained.  The sculpts are actually very entertaining and really marked the beginning of GW's shift in hard plastics from were awful to very good.  Now, of course hard plastics are amazing and the sculpting takes full advantage of the material's properties to give us things very dynamic posing and flying/levitating models.






Not being able to let the pile sit I finished up the spear, bow, and character models from the set all the while thinking about Night Goblins as the poster children for keeping serious religion and greenskins separated.  The Night Goblins have created a society that does not need orcs! They are successful in their own right and field armies that are a potent, and all too successful, adversary to the powerful Dwarf Kingdoms. 

Back to the brushes!

Joan of Arc terrain WiP

 For my first go at painting since the big move I decided to work on the Joan of Arc Board game.

This is a game that could only exist because of the great golden age of board-gaming that was brought about by the confluence of Kickstarter and the explosion of 3D miniature design and printing.  Its a very ambitious project that combines elements of RPGs/Tabletop Miniature  Wargames/Dungeon-crawlers.  Its already in a 1.5 Kickstarter to re-balance and expand the tabletop elements... I'm a bit obsessed.

 With the proliferation of board-games containing high quality "Designed for painters" components its no surprise that a few have ended up on my painting desk. Previously I've tackled the Dark Souls: The Board Game core set and The Order of Vampire Hunters Core set. Still in my queue are Fallout(The Board Game),  Chronicle X, Gloom Haven, and the inevitable... and seemingly endless, Kingdom Death: Monster.

 One of the things that interests me with these games, in addition to the really great sculpts, is the very well defined scope of each project.  Traditionally tabletop wargames and RPGs are essentially open ended endeavors so the sense of closure is pretty cool with the board games.

Many of the games like Joan of Arc (JoA) have made use of colored material and I've attempted to leverage that color base here basically shading, highlighting, and weathering using the existing color as a base. 

 Paint adhesion can be an issue but on hard plastics (as these are) its not a big problem and it occurred to me, somewhat belatedly, that I could spray with a clear primer... after all I've done it before... notably when mistaking the clear primer as a clear-coat sealer...  Let me tell ya its not the same! ... but it does let the original color show strongly and would work well for this sort of thing

JoA comes with a nice selection of 15mm buildings and the minis are very nice too... one of the fabulous things about 15mm is the ease of achieving the visual effect of mass troops, huddled villages, and massive monsters.  JoA does all of these superbly!

To the left you'll notice a pair of Japanese houses.  These are repairs that I snuck into the task list.  They are resin and were originally painted in the '70s in a sort of pygmy true 25mm scale. I've forgotten the manufacturer but they have the feel of the JR style about them.

While mixing up a green color I missed my mark in a big way so... base-coated the skin of a GW Ork and Goblin army from the Battle at Skull Pass... This chariot has a copyright date of 1993 on it so ... I guess its about time it got tinkered with!

Next time should have the JoA core set scenery wrapped up along with the surprise Night Gobbos and maybe some Forward Base underway.

Until then.

Arthenya VI the Archpapess and Bruegleburg a day at the fair

 Arthenya VI the Archpapess is another great model from Raging Heroes.  I have a couple of iterations of her because I want to use her in some dioramas as well as a plying piece.  This is the playing piece version.

She is escorted by some cherubs to protect her and hold some of her ceremonial gear. 

The model is resin and the details are very sharp making her a bit easier to paint than you might imagine.  Fuscha craft ink, Reaper Bone triad, Gory Red triad, and solid white, Secret Weapon washes (Storm Cloud, Armor, and Flesh) Secret weapon Engine metal, Vallejo mediums, GW Necron Compund and Shining Gold.

 Bruegleburg: A day at the Fair was a kickstarter by Lead Adventurers that featured a lot of colorful townsfolk for festive settings.  There were some options to add a more military flair to it but I was really drawn to the Slice of Life feel of the whole thing.

Here are a pair of looters in the colors of my Stirland Fantasy army. 

 This batch of models has more military or local officials in it than I've done so far so there is the recurring theme of the local livery in green and yellow on most of these.

 Country Nobles sporting their colors for the fair.

Greens were worked up from Vallejo Emerald, Secret Weapon Washes and Verdigris weathering, and Reaper solid White.

These are metal models and are sculpted traditionally so they sit really well with the older style citadel models that I used to build most of my Sylvanian army.  The scale is well suited to that era as well.


Yellows are Reaper Yellow triad.










I've based this batch on 25mm rounds for use with some of the newer skirmish games but I've also done a lot of the previous models on 20mm squares to better fit with my existing terrain sets.  I'm a bit torn on this but even old reliable Tabletop World is moving to a larger Heroic scale and the 25mm really does support these big metal models better...
A wandering mercenary and his henchman.  Since he's not a local and is a veteran of the Chaos Wars he is in red.










These two are still WiPs but I'm out of time to finish them until I locate them again after the big move.  I'll do some patterning on his red coat which will reduce the Santa effect a but and the shield devices are just roughed in at present... more to come on these two.







That wraps it up until after the move.  See you again in Late August or Early September!

Reaper Bones II Cargo Container and Star Saga Techies

 The Bones Kickstarters have been getting steadily better.  They have always been good value for money but the quality of the first Bones KS was very low.  The sculpts were good but the Bones Material itself was poor.  It was floppy, hydrophobic, and barely usable.

Bones II saw a large upgrade in quality.  The hydrophobic properties of the material were well understood by this time and there seems to have been some change in the formula that both gave stiffness to the models and improve paint adhesion. Also structurally important sections of models, especially larger ones, were further stiffened with a type of hard plastic.


This shipping container is from the Bones II Kickstarter and in made of a hard plastic.  Unlike the softer materials found in the furniture of products like Mantic's Star Saga this had zero warping and holds its shape.  It required no clean up other than a wash.

 I used blue masking tape to create some white spaces and sprayed the unprimed model with Krylon Camoflage Green. The Green area was then washed with Sewer Water (Secret Weapon).

Tape was removed and the White areas were painted directly with Graveyard Bone (Reaper) and the whole thing sealed with Krylon Clear  Satin finish.

I then used some extra decals from Atenociti's Workshop's Fast Panda to create a supply chain for my favorite Undertown Fast Food Franchise!
 

 After the decals were applied and solvaset into the textures I weathered the container with areas of Brown Rust (Secret Weapon), Engine Metal (Secret Weapon) and some targeted washes of  Seraphim Sepia (GW).  A few details were hand painted in and the thing sealed with Krylon Clear Satin.

 The Techies from Star Saga wrapped up at the same time.  The Star Saga miniatures have been surprisingly fun to paint.  I think I like the classic sci-fi look of them... as contrasted with the Grimdark stuff I so frequently paint.  Don't get me wrong! I loves me some Grimdark... but its really been fun stepping outside of it and still being firmly in sci-fi territory.  I think Undertown will be seeing a lot of traffic from the miniatures of this range in future!

 Some size comparisons.  The container is pretty large so it can give full cover to some monsters and vehicles.  As you can see this container has been vandalized by the Free Bruxx Network!

The Bruxx are a complex race of Uplifted Rats from the Serene Dawn RPG setting that I work on sporadically.  I'll have to source some sci-fi Ratmen soon.  I *may* have some here somewhere... but I'm always on the lookout for more great sculpts!

 The container can fit a 5 model squad inside.  I love models that have usable interior spaces.  Too bad this one is full of Plague victims! 

Here is the container flipped onto its side... ya never know right?  So I weathered it a bit further to simulate forklift incidental damage, wear and tear from dragging etc...

Hopefully tomorrow will see the completion of some more Dark Souls minis and construction started on some ADMech, a peddlar to fleece the Jailbirds, and some Twisted Dickensians.

Build it!
Paint it!
Play it!

Cheers,

Swelter

Its Life Jim! Forward Base KS terrain

 This was a fun project and might not be completed!

the "Its Life Jim" add on to the Forward Base Kickstarter from Antenocitis Workshop is cast in clear resin.

The colors are intended to underscore the Science Fiction feel of the models so are in an unusual spectrum.

 Where possible I wanted to leverage the material to create effects so there would be a lot of translucency to the models.

To get this effect I relied on a lot of washes. heavily pigmented washes from Secret Weapon and The Army Painter for the bases coats and mid washes while turning to Games Workshop for less pigmented washes.

 Highlights and hard details were painted using the usual suspects, mostly Reaper and Vallejo.

I dropped in a Mantis Warrior Standard/Icon bearer from Raging Heroes for scale.  She's actually a little tall in retrospect because she's mounted on a base that is more elevated than most of my models are on... but you should get the idea.

 One of the goals was to make the fan structures and berry-like bulbs, the blister-like masses, and the cylindrical rolled flowers to be very translucent... almost clear.  In the case of the smaller berries and all of the flowers I gave them a light wash to tint them and later removed the wash from large areas of them with an eraser.  The larger berries and the fans retained the tints.  the berries have an orange glaze and are then detailed with a Reaper orange triad.

 A shot of the whole set!  It should provide plenty of alien life accents to whatever system I'm using... they'll make fine Chaos Flora, or Feywild stuffs... even Malifaux comes to mind... when not performing the usual Sci-Fi duties.

 A look at the orange berries and the purple fallen trees.  I had a hard time with the trees because I really wanted to leave the wood cores clear... like the trees were glowing in their decay... but... and I said I might not be done yet... I think I would have to put actual little lights under them to make the glows do what I was imagining. In the end I tinted the cores ... but I really should have done that first....

  I'm going to do a lot of Illuminated buildings for the Undertown Kickstarter, and for the rest of Forward Base, so I'll look at these again when I'm doing that and see if I really want glowing terrain!

  A look at the barrel blossoms.  These were tricksey little devils! Tinted inside and out edge layered and then outer tint erased... whew!

 This material is very flexible and really feels like rubber when so a lot of the smaller bits are moveable... like leaves etc... I've painted straight onto the surface after a good scrub and a couple of ultrasonic baths. the material takes paint reasonably well although it remains to be seen what the durability will be after they get a few games under their belts

Next up.. a push to finish up some GW legacy minis that are on the desk and hopefully the Space Pope from Raging Heroes.

JR Miniatures Reactor Building Ruins and Destroyed Robotics Lab and more...

A while back I picked up JR Miniatures' Reactor Building Ruins and Destroyed Robotics Lab.  I got a set as a gift for my nephew and a set for myself which languished in the box for the next couple of years while we moved around the world... twice! 

I recently unearthed my set from the big pile of boxes and decided to paint them up as I had turned up short on SF terrain for a game this week.

This first one is the Reactor Building Ruins.  I got started with a black spray paint than worked up the interior walls as plastered, tiled, and metal.  When thinking about ruins, especially modern or SF I tend to think gray.  Not because the building might have originally been gray but more that they were probably constructed primarily of concrete or something similar... this will be pulverized in the destruction of the building and coat everything with the gray dust.

You can see Mortaria for scale wandering through the ruins.


First came the plaster which is Menoth Base (P3) and a brush up of Splintered Bone (Reaper).

Grays were next using Dark Grey (Craft Smart) and a brush up of Misty White (Reaper)

After the grays I did metals using gun metal gray (Vallejo) then the GW technical paints Ryza Rust and Typhus Corrosion with top brush of Misty Gray (Reaper) and Rustungs Farbe (Old Gamecraft labelled Fantasy Forest... but yeah its just silver :))

The chest was done using my standard wood process described in detail here 



I kind of liked the textured walls that make the building look reinforced.

I'm not really sure how the building names were derived although the Destroyed Robotics Lab has a lot of regularly spaced holes in the walls like for power conduits or tubing of some sort. 




















 Here is a "before shot" , I find I often skip that because I just see the finished thing in my head.







 I liked the layout of these and they are really useful terrain pieces on the tabletop.  The spacing is very good and the models take paint very well.  The two buildings took were turned out in a couple of hours with almost zero prep.






As the games progress I'll add slogans and posters etc... evolving scenery!










 Next up A few shots of the WiP Raging Heroes 54mm Raven the Chainbreaker. 



There was some minor bubbling mostly in the top of the head and in the small of the back.  This bubbling was mild and the tiny pits were easily filled with liquid greenstuff. Bubbling of this type is common and not a cause for concern. 

Otherwise the casting was very clean with just a couple of vents in the small of the back to sort out.

I did manage to break the connecting chain between the to poles of her back banner while cleaning the model but I kind of liked the way it looked broken so just cleaned up around the chain link and left it swinging free.

 Here you can see the elements of the base being worked in.  The base is built up with white pumice (vallejo) some square brass tube (GW) and a resin scanner (GW).

 I got really excited about the incoming Toughest Girls of the Galaxy 2: Darkness and Light Kickstarter and began working on basing schemes for the various factions.

 I settled on this for the basic SF Sister's of the Chalice.  I then realized that the Sister's have no "Bike" equivalent so I'll redirect these bike bases to the Jailbirds... so I guess you'll be seeing those bikes in the near future!

... and finally... a glimpse at the main painting tray. I seem to have a dozen figures on the tray all in various states of WiP...

It has some really cool stuff on it... more on those next time!