Score Board Finished

I decided to go black for the score cards so sprayed them all black and masked the main board
 

then drybrushed them all grey to pick out the edges before trying as hard as possible to paint in the numbers cleanly white. Then used black to clean up their edges. I put some effort into doing up some nice looking wood grain effect on the back of the cards and the board but of course didn't take photos XD take my word for it. Of course when you pull out the airbrush to paint one thing you may as well spray some other stuff too
 

try and guess what all this random stuff is ;)
 

Back from PAX AUS 2013

Just got back from the very first PAX in Australia down in Melbourne. I braved the cheap flights, the rain and cold and had a great time at the con and then copped excess baggage charges on the way back :(



On the Sunday I decided to have a crack at the Speed Painting competition since my friend Andrew had snuck into the Saturday night one and scored himself a medal. I made sure I got there early for the Sunday event. With a bit of warm up painting: a leopard from the paint and take.







Here's a shot by Andrew of me putting way more stress and focus into one hour than I really should on a holiday XD







Here's my mini. They had good paints and primed models, the brushes though had been through 3 days of paint and take abuse. Also Model Color Orange does not cover over grey primer.











the stress did not end with brushes down as we hit the one hour mark, then I had to watch the intense judging as the models were slowly eliminated and it finally came down to mine and one other painter.





SHINY :D :D :D

I figured it'd be a nice gift for my Niece since I was staying at her place to give her both minis hope she likes them.

Hoffman Avatar Progress

It becomes pretty obvious as you try and work out how to base Hoffman's Avatar that he was designed to fit a flat 60mm disc instead of a round lipped base. He'll quite happily even stand without a base with those big feet of his. Problem then was how to base him. I was toying with the idea of him standing on big cogs or maybe another wagon wheel poking off the side of the base. Instead I decided to make a raised deck from coffee stirrers. I split one part to make the raisers filled between them with sand and texture paste and then glued down planks on top. I left a gap just for interest so some grass could poke through and added an animal skull at the front from the bits box. Also added in a small cactus at the back so it matches the rest of my bases.





I also decided to rework his feet a bit. I wanted them to look more like talons so I clipped off the spiky bits from the front of his toes and glued them to the knuckle. For the foot overhanging the side I cut it off a bit further back and pinned it back on bending down over the side. Gives a nice feeling that he's digging his claws into the ground as he walks.





After priming all the parts over the weekend I didn't have enough time to start airbrushing on the copper but I did have enough time to paint up the base. Lots of drybrushing and washes same as the other ones.

Eucalyptus Bowl Score Board - WIP

My friend Jose did some special CAD work and did up a custom Scoreboard for the folks running Eucalyptus Bowl 2013 (which I believe was 2 weekends ago). I got passed a sample from Andrew at Aetherworks to paint up.





Here's the progress so far following the artwork for the shield from this



If you want your own scoreboard go HERE, I think they have a free shipping deal on them at the moment.

Bandwidth exceeded :(

Seems my blog has been hammered a bit this month so I've run out of bandwidth, don't worry everything should be back up on the 14th.

Hoffman Avatar of Voltron... I mean Amalgamation WIP

I finally got my hands on the crazy Avatar version of C. Hoffman on Saturday :)



Here he is all on one well packed sprue. I clipped off all the parts and got to sanding off mold lines.



to match the rest of my crew I had to work out where to put in some gems. 1st obvious spot was to drill the eyes out of the face.



I used a round rotary bit on the back of the mask to open up the eyes area to fit in the smallest of my green gems.



They fit in nicely. I'll glue them in place after painting the mask.



The chest of the robot already had a sculpted gem in the middle of it's chest continuing the Iron Man look of the other robots. I drilled this out then used rotary bits and a knife blade to expand the hole big enough to fit the largest of gems I have. I went a bit deep drilling though so had to fill it back up a bit with a cut off bit of sprue.



There it fits in just right.

After the converting I kept cleaning parts and glued him into his stock pose.











He really is quite a beast. Nice presence on the table. The only dissapointments I have is the plastic version of C.Hoffman seems less defined and a bit weedy compared to his metal version. Not that keen on him just being kinda strapped to the robot's arm either. Lastly The design of the feet is a bit weird, and more importantly, doesn't really fit on the top of the base. Surely the sculpter knew what size base this would be going on, yet the very fragile claw tipped feet look destined to get hooked on stuff in carry cases and break off. They also seem very flat which I don't like very much. Maybe I will think of something that extends over the lip of the base for him to stand on or I will redesign his feet.

Flyers get ya flyers here

Here's a couple toys that could be used as drop ships or objectives in a sci fi game.





I have to say I loved the design of the Quin Jet in the Avengers and have wanted to pick up a toy of it since the movie but due some oddaity it was never released in Australia. You can buy the much bigger Helicarrier and you can get the Quin Jet in LEGO but none of the toys. This was the 1st version released which I picked up on ebay from the UK for about $44 including postage. There's a later version with slightly different colours and red canopy and another smaller one that is a remote controll vehicle that drives around or something. I went with this one since I'd seen several gamers mod it a bit and repaint it as a drop ship. I liked the idea so grabbed my own.











with some minis for scale





and ramp lowered.

To mod it properly you'd either want to paint over the canopy or mod the interior to have a couple pilots in place of the one big seat. The canopy isn't very transparent though so it may be easier to just change the frames on the outside so it seems smaller and give some coats of Tamiya smoke over it to be super dark.

For the back transort area I think you need to unscrew the body and do some interior work removing the seat that is in there and maybe putting a couple rows of benches on the sides.

Some missiles or something under the wings wouldn't hurt either. In anycase it's a very nice chunky looking yet sleak flyer.





This bird on the other hand is a clunky looking giant helicopter. I saw someone post about this being on sale at Big W for $38 and it's possibility as a vehicle for Infinity, problem is we both assumed the figures it was scaled to were LEGO sized (which is pretty much the same size as a space marine) but the figures are actually nearly double that size. So in scale this thing would be a beast of a heavy lift carrier. Though I could totally see this thing dropping off an entire squad of TAGs (the big Landmate style things)





Note you'll be putting this baby together for a few hours.



She is big.









Looking at it, it is kinda huge compared to say a BlackHawk but compared to a Sikorsky (which I think it's based on)  it's a pretty good match. Problem is more that 40K and most other SciFi games seriously undersize it's aircraft.