Crashed Aquila Shuttle - Bit of Airbrush practice

I'm still busy cleaning up all the troops but it's high time I painted something. I picked up a new double action airbrush at the recent MOAB convention for ridiculously cheap and scored a 2nd LEG Power Loader !!!

Using some Tamiya paints that I figured were suitable for the Dropship and APCs I thought I should have a practice run on something so attacked the crashed Aquila shuttle that I had picked up off ebay. If the colours look good I can go ahead on the Valkyrie and APCs if not I can buy some new colours.







I couldn't really do any preshading since the model was already primed black when I got it so I went straight over that with XF-62 Olive Drab then lighter with XF-67 NATO Green then highlight with a mix of NATO Green and XF-49 Khaki since Khaki by itself looked too brownish. The engine bits I used Model Air Steel. Also added a bit of heavy shading with Model Air Black.

After that I went in with brushs and drybrushed everything with a lighter mix of off white mixed with a touch of NATO green and some Khaki. Then lots of lining edges with Steel and drybrushing areas I figured should be well banged up. Then drybrushed all the dirt areas with a couple different greys working up to a bit of whitish grey then lots of Army Painter Dark Wash wherever needed to bring the shapes out and to give some good depth to the Steel areas.

The windows got painted a very dark brown then edged a bit with white then had several coats of gloss and Tamiya Smoke painted over them to make them look shiny and a bit translucent even if they aren't.

Oh and lastly I had a mess around with some Secret Weapon brown weathering powder I picked up along with the airbrush. Never tried the stuff before so messed a round a bit making some areas look very rusty.



























Think it turned out alright. The flash made it look a bit lighter than in real life though but brought out the shading nicely. Now I really need to get the interior to the valkyrie painted so I can assemble the damn thing.

New Kickstarters worth watching

After getting a successful kickstarter delivered and pledge managers sorted for Warmachine Tactics and Kaosball there are of course new ones right around the corner too hard to let the bank account recover and ignore.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/defiancegames/28mm-power-armor-hardsuits-defiance-games

Not sure how great an investment this one is but the original artwork that this design is based on has been in my Deviantart favourites for ages. I like the Machinen Krieger look.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1744629938/mars-attacks-the-miniatures-game

Next the much anticipated (by me anyway) Mars Attacks game that I watched the timer tick down to zero then had to wait six hours to start so missed most of the early bird pledges :( Oh well it's full of martians and green army men.

Last and sure as hell not least:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1513061270/reaper-miniatures-bones-ii-the-return-of-mr-bones

Dear god look at all that stuff and then there are the addons:

At least I got into the 3rd wave for this round so I won't be amongst the last 100 to get mine like last time. But my wallet sure could use a break and I haven't even thought about painting any of my 1st Bones.

Blackwater Gulch Kickstarter 2 arrives

Yay another kickstarter finally arrives and I have to say I quite happy with the much improved quality of the sculpts in this second wave. So what did I get:



3 gang sets and all the hired hands stretch goal minis





The Tranquility Crew Trying to remember if this was the 1st or 2nd kickstarter to make mini versions of the Firefly crew, I have to say I am very happy with these, only shame is that it isn't the full crew. Can only hope the rest get sculpted down the track. All the sculpts capture the characters very well, though the coat over the doctor seems a bit odd. Looks a bit like Mal's coat draped over him. Also not sure why these aren't cast on their tabs like all the other minis.





Wilde's Rangers Cool gang of US soldiers packing an excellent looking gatling gun. All the minis in this set were sculpted in 3D and printed. You wouldn't know that looking at the casts, no striations or other usual markers of a 3D print. Also one of the guys with a pistol and knife really looks like Harison Ford.





The Widowmakers third gang I got was the all girl gang. Again they have been all 3D sculpted but these haven't produced quite as nice results as Wilde's Rangers. These have a few of the oddities of scale that you see a bit in recent Malifaux minis. You can see the extreme thinness of the girl on the lower left. Her bare arm is almost as thin as a wire at the wrist. Her upper body and face all seem very small while her legs seem much chunkier. The pistols on all of the girls seem too small in the back half of the gun with the cylinder no larger than the barrel. I'm a bit curious how this set will turn out, I think I'll bulk that arm a bit with putty.





Finally all the hired hands. I got a couple doubles here from the 1st kickstarter. As for the new sculpts some of these characters may look a bit familiar ;) shame Marty McFly didn't make it in the stretch goals. You can definately see the marked improvement in sculpting quality between the earlier hired hand minis and the new ones. All of these look great to paint up, easily recommend all of them.

Small Aliens update

Tiny update



sculpting feet on Bishop





and ruining my hand hacking the bases off of facehuggers with side cutters and a big box cutter. Oh if you are curious about the big alien in the back there it is a Hellion from Kryomek with Genestealer arms instead of his sword weilding arms. I should try and get a few more to use as Praetorians

Those missing Leading Edge Aliens photos

Uploaded those missing shots



the Leading Edge minis I managed to get





you can kinda see what I meant about the waist up matching 28mm



though Gorman is super weedy





Oh and some shots of the conversion to the female smart gunner to give her the eye piece and added the cable coming off the camera on all the smart gunners.

There's movement all over the place... ALIENS Continued

HUDSON
This signal's weird...must be
some interference or something.
There's movement all over the
place...

HUDSON
Twelve meters. Man, this is a big
fucking signal. Ten meters.

RIPLEY
They're right on us. Vasquez,
how you doing?

Vasquez is heedlessly showering herself with molten metal
as she welds the door shut. Working like a demon.



HUDSON
Nine meters. Eight.

RIPLEY
Can't be. That's inside the room!

HUDSON
It's readin' right. Look!

Ripley fiddles with her tracker, adjusting the tuning.

HICKS
Well you're not reading it right!

HUDSON
Six meters. Five. What the fu --

He looks at Ripley. It dawns on both of them at the same
time. She feels a cold premonitory dread as she angles
her tracker upward to the ceiling, almost overhead. The
tone gets louder.

Hicks climbs onto a file cabinet and raises a panel of
acoustic drop-ceiling. He shines his light inside.









You may have thought there had been no progress lately but I've been busy. I've been scouring ebay and forums chasing old Leading Edge Aliens, marines, doomed colonists and even the ever elusive power loader.

Thanks to Comsquare I was able to get a veritable hoard of LE Aliens and damn I am happy with them. They scale beautifully with the Eureka Chaos Weasels and look good with my 28mm marines.





From a local gaming club that runs the yearly MOAB convention I managed to trade some warmachine minis for this treasure trove. Considering my failed attempts to get the Power Loader on ebay I can't thank this guy enough. Seems they'd been tucked away in zip lock bags for the last decade so he was happy for them to go to a good home :D





Despite the standing marines from LE being somewhat squished proportions 25mm the Riply in the Power Loader is 28mm and totally in scale with my marines.

Speaking of LE marines I got a handful of them off ebay for £1 each while I was being outbid on aliens and a power loader.. (and I notice I forgot to upload their photo. Doh I'll edit this later to put them in) Odd thing about them is their scale isn't really 25mm well that's their height but if you compare them waist up they are the same as 28mm but with even chunkier heads, all the small scale part of them seems to be in the legs. I'm semi tempted to give them new legs or mod them. Since I don't have many flamers and I somehow ended up with 4 characters with flamers. The Bishop I got was missing his feet so he will get a bit of sculpting done to make him stand taller. The colonists last stand set minis are weirder still being more like 30mm minis but in funny poses or being dragged off by an alien (love that mini).

Back to my marines I got it in my head that their helmets weren't enough like the movie ones so I decided to add those plates to the front of all of them...





a bunch of gluing on then cleaning up plastic strips later. Since then I've been so very slowly filing off all the damn mold lines and getting them primed a group at a time.







I got this idea to print out sheets of the badges the marines wore on their uniforms, all about 2-3mm in size since I don't look forward to painting a US flag that size on every uniform shoulder so printed lots of them but had room left on the paper so decided to pimp up their carry case too











Also built these on the weekend. Why Merkavas you might ask. Well in the Colonial Marines Technical there is this little illustration



Which is obviously a Merkava with a funky gun and some add ons on top of the turret.

The Academy kit was really easy to clean up and assemble, the cheap chinese kit on the other hand was more detailed but was covered in mold ejection marks, flash and was generally a pain to clean up before assembly, also needed a hammer to get the drive wheels on their axel Also they seemed to have left off the bottom of the turret for some reason...





I don't mean under the middle bit, no kit has that covered, I had to make the disc there so I could shape the plastic to fill in the front and back of the turret ring and fill the visible voids around the barrel and the back end of the turret. Also the hull didn't line up too well and was too short, like the suspension had been lowered.



So I added extra to the hull at the front and back so the bottom and top sections would join up properly and the hulls of the 2 kits would match heights.





My issue is how to sci fi them up a bit and do they actually look any good next to the behemoth Khurasan APCs??? Makes me wish they made their medium and heavy tank in 28mm (that may take a while going by how long it took the APC to come out in 28mm) So I have ordered a somewhat more sci fi looking tank kit this week a Leopard 2 A5 in 1/48. I'll see how that looks with the APCs.

Lastly I've been cleaning up all the damn parts of the GW Valkyrie and the odd and ends from the hanger kits.



I hate cleaning off mold lines