Quick catch up...

As I haven't been posted as often I thought I'd give a quick update as to what I've been up to.  Though I've been relatively quiet on here the same cannot be said for hobby time, which has seen the play through of The Devil In Iron campaign for Conan and we're now playing through Kingdom Death: Monster (I'll do a separate post for this as it deserves it's own spotlight but I have never gamed this much, such an addictive game) as well as squeezing in a game of Dark Crystal from River Horse Games and preparing the still boxed ships for Star Wars Armada which will be the next game we're going to run with.

Dark Crystal - a talisman style game but very thematic, I had the soundtrack blasting out while The Chamberlain became Emperor of Thra forever!

Other than sleeving lots of cards and PVA-ing cardboard there hasn't been much to show off for Star Wars: Armada however the recent Thrawn expansion did come with two Mandalorian Gauntlet Fighters so I gave them a quick lick of paint

I thought I'd also mention a couple of Kickstarters which I'm currently backing and may be of interest.  First up we have Pacific Rim from River Horse Games.

This is a game of Jaeger vs Kaiju based on the upcoming film plus the original film with 75-115mm pre-painted (not so)miniatures.  Personally I love a good giant monster movie and really enjoed the first Pacific Rim film so this was a must for me, especially as I've always been impressed with River Horse games.

The next game probably doesn't need and introduction as it's been quite heavily covered on various hobby sites, Batman: Gotham City Chronicles.  This is a Kickstarter exclusive game by Monolith and uses an updated version of the THS system which was used for Conan and on that alone we've gone all in, the game system is brilliant and will work fantastically for Batman.

Painting Star Wars Armada: Interdicter

Last night I finished of the last bit of brush work for Star Wars Armada (at least for now).  The Interdicter is a great looking ship but the art always shows red lighting down the central spine which gives it a sinister look but is missing from the model so a quick 15 minute job and this was corrected.  A quick black wash down the central spine to darken it off and the a couple of shades of red later and it looked much better.

Over the weekend I'll try and get some pictures of both completed fleets to properly end the project.

Painting Star Wars Armada: Corvette and Nebulon B

Now that the squadrons have been completed there's not much painting to be done now however two ships which have received a minor amount of work are another Corvette and Nebulon B.  As I have three of each these I have altered the colours on two of them so that there is some small difference between them.

Painting Star Wars Armada: Rogues and Villains Expansion

I managed to knuckle down this bank holiday Monday complete the Rogues and Villains expansion which comprises of various named characters and their iconic ships, which are represented by unique squadrons in Star Wars Armada.

It was quite tricky getting some of the paint schemes correct due to the scale of these ships so in most cases they are more a rough approximation to get the correct feel of the design however I think they have turned out quite well. 

 Rogues and Villains

Millenium Falcon

Outrider 

Havoc 

Moldy Crow 

Slave I 

Hound's Tooth 

Punishing One 

IG-2000

This actually marks the last of the full paint jobs I'll be doing for Armada though I still have a few of the actual capital ships which will get a very small amount of touching up (mainly a small colour change for the Rebels and perhaps a bit of extra work on the Imperial Interdictor).

Overall I have really enjoyed painted these as they have been something very different to what's normally in my painting queue and well... it helps being Star Wars ;)

Painting Star Wars Armada: Imperial Squadron Expansion 2

This morning saw the completion of the second Imperial squadron expansion, again I've really enjoyed painting these and they've been much quicker to finish than the Rebel expansions thanks to the lack of of the Rebel markings.

This just leaves me with the Rogues and Villains expansion to paint up and other than a few little touches here and there on some of the Rebel ships I'll be done.

 TIE Defenders

TIE Phantoms 

Lambda Class Shuttles 

VT-49 Decimators 

The completed expansion

Painting Star War Armada: TIE Interceptors and Bombers

Apologies for the dark photos however the weather has taken a turn for the worse and isn't the best for taking snaps.

With the Interceptors and Bombers done the first Imperial squadron expansion is complete and I'm moving on the the TIE Phantoms and Defenders.

Painting Star Wars Armada: TIE Fighters and TIE Advanced

Though not as interesting to look at or perhaps paint due to the lack of markings it does mean they paint up really quickly so I have finished up half of the first Imperial squadron expansion, the TIE fighters and TIE Advanced fighters.

Painting Star Wars Armada: Ghost and Shadow Caster

This morning I finished off the last of the miniatures from the Rebel squadron expansions except these ones are a bit different as the are irregular squadrons, single ships rather than three, and represent icon ships from the SW Universe.  In this case we have the Ghost and Shadow Caster from SW Rebels along with a generic version of each (VCX-100 freighter and Lancer Class Pursuit Craft).
It has nice to be able to paint up what are in effect character models for this game and put a bit more time into them.

Painting Star Wars Armada: Rebel Squadron Expansion

I put the finishing touches on the B Wing fighters this morning from the Rebel Fighters expansion which completes that set off.  I've really enjoyed painting these and though they're not painted to the highest quality they look really good on the table top (certainly better than the bare plastic).

Next up is the second squadron expansion which includes E Wings, Z95's and the Ghost from SW Rebels which I'm looking forward to working on.

Painting Star Wars Armada: A Wings and X Wings

I managed to finish off yet another batch of TIE fighters before the Easter break which brings me to an amount of fighters I'll not likely use in game but look great all together:

With those finished off the aim was to get started on the first expansion box of fighters for the rebels and I managed to complete the X Wings (painted up as Blue Squadron after watching Rogue One) and A Wings over Easter:

Next up on the table are the Y and B Wings which were undercoated this morning.

Painting Star Wars Armada: TIE Fighters

I finished up another batch of TIE fighters this morning and will be prepping another batch tomorrow which will be the last miniatures from the starter sets.

Painting Star Wars Armada: X Wings Batch 2

This morning I just finished up the marking on my second batch of markings which means that all the ones from the starter sets are now completed.

Next up I'll be finishing off the TIE Fighters from the second starter set before moving on to the expansion packs.

Painting Star War Armada: Flight of X Wings

I have just completed one starter sets worth of X Wings this morning, again they're only painted basically but I think do the job and I've enjoyed working on them.  Time for batch number two!

Painting Star Wars Armada: X Wing Update

Just a little update for today as I painted a test scheme on an X Wing fighter this morning.  I'll be varying the markings on these so I'll end up with four different 'wings' of squadrons from the two starter sets I have.

To paint these I gave them a watered down base coat of Off White that was followed by a watered down black wash before dry brushing them in Off White.  I then picked out the engines in Gun Metal, the droid in Silver then topped with either Mechrite Red, Mordian Blue or Knarlac Green (I need to go over these in a brighter colours as they not really showing at the moment), the intakes in Matt Black, the exhausts in Mechrite Red then a dab of Fiery Orange and then finally the markings in Blood red and the old foundation Yellow.
As I've never painted anything at this scale I'm not sure how detailed I should go (without driving myself insane) so any feedback would be very much appreciated, I've scaled the photo so when you click on it it should roughly be at it's actual size.

Painting Star Wars Armada

One project over a new one to begin and the start of this one came about quite out of the blue (milk?).  First came the excellent Star Wars project from Akula over on the Lead Adventure forum http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=94361.0 with his 1/2256 scale ships, which is an inspiring read, but the tipping point was Rogue One as I came out of that film with the need to play Star Wars space battles.

It was at this point I started looking into what was available out there, obviously I was aware of X-Wing and Armada and for me there was never really any doubt about which scale of ships I'd be going for because who doesn't want to fly a Star Destroyer!  However what was possibly more important was the rule set to be used, I'd seen games of X-Wing and I didn't like the rules so automatically ruled out both it and Armada thinking they'd both be pretty much the same so my next stop was Full Thrust.  Now Full Thrust is a mighty fine rule set I've looked into before and I thought that it would be perfect for this (which it would be) but in the mean time my starter set for Armada arrived so I gave the rules a quick flick through and I must say I was thoroughly impressed.  Simple rules where the complexity comes through how you equip your fleet and victory relies on your long term tactical planning thanks to the command dials.

Fast forward a month and I was now in possession of the entire range for Armada (with multiples where "needed", in for a penny in for a galactic credit chip as they say) getting plenty of games in and thoroughly enjoying learning the rules.  One of the big things going for Armada, for me at least, is the quality of the pre-paints for the capital ships however I'm not too keen on identical copies and the squadrons aren't painted at all so it didn't take me long to decide on what was landing on my painting table next.

To start with I've not painted anything at this scale before so didn't want to go too crazy, simple colour changes were the order of the day for my first efforts and though subtle I think they work well enough.

As I have another of each of these ships I may go a little further with my next paint jobs and see how they turn out.

Next it was time to tackle the squadrons starting with the TIE fighthers.  For those not familiar with the miniatures they start out in a dark grey plastic, which is serviceable enough but do let the look of the gaming table down when you have painted capital ships.

Naked TIE Fighter

With the size of the squadrons I'm not planning on doing anything other than a simple basecoat/wash/dry brush with some details which I'm hoping will do the trick and allow me to get through them quickly.

Three finished squadrons

Next up will be another batch of TIE fighters and then on to the X-Wings before moving on to some of the squadron expansion boxes.

It's great being able to paint Star Wars miniatures and I hope you enjoy the project as it goes on.