Guerrilla Gaming

First of all, I took these pictures just with my iPhone 4s, using the camera + app, then whacked them over onto the laptop and into the post. No screwing around with white balance on my s95! OK< so the quality has suffered a little, but today is guerrilla gaming day.. No frills and straight up!

Squad 1: "I think there's something over there..."

Squad 2: "I don't care what you smell, move it!"

While getting through the Harook from my last post, I also got paint on some of the original Crusties from Ground Zero Games. This is something of a landmark, as these same sculpts were the very first minis I painted for this blog back in 2010!
Those particular models were bought by the Gruntz team to use in demo games all around the UK. Ah, memories.

This batch was done in a similar style, but with the benefit of 3 years of experience.
The bases were smeared with a fine sand/pva mixture I made to try to emulate pumice gel. I then glued on some bits of grating I got in a dollar store, and some broken wooden coffee stirrer pieces. Lastly I added some very fine wire that fell out of a snipped ethernet cable at work. The bases will get some silfor tufts when my stuff arrives (It's going through customs on Tuesday!) to finish them off. I wanted to add some junkyard elements to the bases in a small homage to the brilliant film these models echo... District 9.

They were each basecoated with either a buff color or a light grey. I then washed them with Agrax Earthshade, a bit of Nuln Oil and a bit of reikland fleshshade (all new and not very good citadel washes) to get at the detail in the cracks. A bit of a drybrush with the base color and a single fairly careless highlight was applied before picking out the weapons in a dark metallic, then washing the guns with agrax earthshade (I wanted them to look a bit grimy) and some splats of nuln oil into the deeper crevices.
(When I use washes, I no longer try to use one wash over the whole figure at once, as I did the very first time I painted Crusties.)

Lastly, I painted the bandoliers in bright orange and then washed them with Agrax earthshade a couple of times before highlighting a little bit.

I thought I was done until I saw this post where Monty did them with uniforms painted on.
They looked so good I wanted to give it a try myself, so I went back and painted the uniformed areas I wanted done black. This gave me a good base to highlight up with Knarloc green.
Not all of the crusties got full uniforms, I wanted them to look a little bit disorganised.

The second piece of guerrilla hobby I did today was riding over to Bunnings and finding a square of vinyl tile to use as a skirmish board. It cost me the princely sum of $4.00, bargain! It has a glossy finish I would like to dull down but otherwise works very well indeed. (Pics in the photostream on the right.)

I'm enthused to play some games now!

Harook wave 2

A couple of weeks ago, a package arrived from mad Robot miniatures. It was the second wave of Harook releases! After much wrestling with improvised base texture, poor lighting and new paint, I finally got these guys finished and photographed with my iPhone. 

Plasma Gunners

SAW Gunners

Drone and Snipers

I really had to improvise the photo setup... Check it out on the Workbench (instagram) stream on the right of the page.

These are biggish figures, standing around 20mm tall. The detail is excellent, although to be honest there is so much that it takes a little longer to paint one of these guys than a standard 15mm sci fi figure (whatever that is) but the results are well worth it.

I used the same color scheme as the initial pack I did for Mad Robot, but with white feathers instead of yellow to indicate special weapon trooper status. I've done 2-tone bases on these as well, which will further pick them out.

When I do some more of these for myself I think I will go with a very dark armor suit and go nuts with some OSL on all the little lights. I chose a light color for the demo models so that the customer could easily see the detail.

I have switched to using artist's pumice gel for my basing due to some advice from Robin Fitton at Gruntz. Sadly I don't have any right now so I made my own paste out of fine sand and PVA. I think it works pretty well and did a decent enough job of gap filling. I plan to cover the slight imperfections with my (also absent) silfor tufts or maybe small rocks.

(These figures were painted with the new citadel paint range I ranted about last post. I got the result I was after but it was a lot more difficult than it should have been. I really missed my "old style" washes... The new ones are really awful and took about 4 coats to achieve similar effects. I'm not buying any more of that product.)

My beloved desk and other gear is still not here yet, but I am anxiously waiting for it to arrive so I can get started on some incredible new Khurasan beasties Jon sent me.