Firestorm Armada Terrans

Since I was already painting up my X-wing stuff my mate talked me into painting up a starter fleet of Firestorm Armada Terrans to have some painted examples for their con store. I took it as a chance to play with my at the time pretty new gravity feed double action airbrush and some Vallejo Air paints.

I started with Panzer Grey then worked up to a medium Tamiya Grey. Then I sprayed the glows in Ultramarine Blue followed by Cyan then White. The Engines were done in fluero orange then a touch of yellow.



After that the ships got drybrushed a bit in lighter greys all over to bring out the edges and detail. Then bits were picked out in metallics and stripes were added for a bit of extra detailing. Then I used GW washes to trace and shade in panel lines and detail like the turrets to make them pop out more. The main fleet was actually all painted in a day :D



Since I got through the starter set so quickly I grabbed a few more ships to and a station to add some variety to the fleet. Pretty much the defining feature of the shield ships is the big glows I did on the generators on their sides and the engine bloom on the back. For the station I kind of went a bit Thunderbirds and made it green so it'd just be different. I masked the detail bits on the sides to spray the white stripes then painted on the diagonals for the hazard stripes before peeling off the tape. Happy it mostly didn't bleed under the tape.

They look pretty dramatic on the a space mat and with the DSLR flash all the painted glows just jump out immensely.

X-wing Repaints #1

I know I've been neglecting the blog so thought I'd start getting it flowing again by reposting stuff I've been putting up on the FFG X-wing forums. I've gotten totally addicted to the game since it pushes all the right buttons: a love of the original Holy Trilogy, the wonderful extra ships that popped up in the 90s X-wing and TIE Fighter series of PC games, the console Rogue Squadron games and even Dark Forces and the Jedi Knight series. The game is easy to learn, has straight forward rules, they actively put effort into keeping the thing balanced and the FAQs are up to date. Oh and the game comes prepainted so you can crack open a starter set and immediately start playing after popping out the tokens. I of course could not leave well enough alone with the prepainted ships:

After seeing so many repaints on the forums I finally cracked and got to work on my fleets.

Started with just wanting to light up the engine glows but it's hard to just stop there.









Once I started dirtying up one X-wing I couldn't stop and kept going lining all the ships with Deep or Dark wash from Army Painter. Then of course I had to do the yellow markings and the red number markings, then i started looking at the movie models and adding more markings like the candy stripes, the red lines around the engine intakes and the heap of yellow on Wedge's X-wing and of course all the R2 units painted silver then colours ove the top.



Used a mix of Model Color fleuro magenta and orange to get the right colour then a bit of white mixed in then straight white in the middle to get the nice glow effect. For the big ships I pulled out the airbrush





So far I've only done the glow on these, need to get to work on detailing up the rest and converting one of the Falcons

also made some asteroids from lava rocks

One thing is that after painting the Rogue squadron markings on you feel compelled to run them as the characters instead of just Rookie pilots. In their 1st game they seem to gain some luck though since even Biggs managed not to die and you can see Wedge lining up a sweet Expose shot. Can see a few of my tokens I designed too in the last few shots.

It's been a while, I'm not dead

It's about time I got back to writing stuff so I shall be posting up a heap of lovely X-wing stuff that I got totally hooked on playing and then started repainting cause I couldn't help myself :D I've also recently been doing up those Dystopian Wars fleets I picked up a year ago. My FSA is one model from being finished and the Russians, well I'm lacking in inspiration a bit there but the carrier is done and the rest are all started. Also my ALIENS project has not died. It was kind of T-boned by the AVP kickstarter, I was putting so much effort into converting and hunting down models and then this new official game came along and kind of let the wind out of my sails on doing up my own stuff. I've recently returned to painting up the Colonial Marines with their way too much camo. Also been doing much smaller marines in the form of a small Dropzone Commander force a mate gave me to knock out to see what they'd turn out like. Also been trying to finish up a few Malifaux models I've had lying around in a half done state for too long.

Would you like to know more...