Distant tooting

It’s May the Fourth, and with that comes my annual Star Wars themed post!

This year’s offering is a handsome Bounty Hunter known mostly as Mando, a Diehard Miniatures sculpt that my wife bought me for Christmas, as we’d thoroughly enjoyed the Disney+ show.

The details are clearly only ‘inspired by’ the star of the Disney series (being different enough to avoid any Imperial  legal entanglements), but he’s still a lovely miniature that I’m glad to now have painted! He’s a little more on the heroic end of scale though, especially when you compare him to another Mandalorian miniature that I previously painted:

All he needs now is a little space goblins buddy!

Tally:

19 vs 18 = +1

Although typing that reminds me that I got a freebie Daemonette from GW with two right legs:

which drops the Tally back down to 

19 vs 19 = +0

I really must nip into town and get a left leg for her... although after the whole ‘Cursed City is now only a sold out limited run’ incident happening so soon after my disappointment in not being able to get hold of a copy of Blackstone Fortress Escalation after having my order cancelled I may be done with GW for the foreseeable...

What else has been happening in the more than a month since my last post? Not a great deal of painting, truth be told. I’ve almost completed the first Kingdom Hearts game, which has been taking up the evening time that would usually go to painting, although I have had a couple of cracks at finishing the scatter and treasure tokens on my painting tile finished but it still feels a long way from being done. We also finally got round to watching Pacific Rim, ten minutes into which my wife turned to me and said ‘I didn’t think it was going to be this silly’ so evidently she had high expectations of the robot vs kaiju slugfest...

Next, who knows. I want to play a solo game, so should probably crack on with that, but on the other hand my having played D&D in a year means I’ve got a hankering for painting something from the Monster Manual...

My backpack's got jets...

...I'm Boba the Fett:

(listen to the song here if you haven't already):

https://open.spotify.com/track/22Y1Gg0uugLCNP48yezX0q

So, it's been a long time coming, but I finally painted my Knight Models Boba Fett: Happy May the Fourth!

It's a gorgeous model (even if that tiny antenna piece was the bane of my life, as it bent if you so much as looked at it), which I watched the Sorastro video as painting inspiration for before realising that I don't actually own most of the paints that he suggests and having to make do.

Painting was somewhat stressful though - how do historical wargamers manage not to tear their hair out trying to match details on often contradictory reference material? I persevered though, even going as far as to use my helmet and Black Series action figure for reference on where to place the battle damage...

Fun fact - this is the only Star Wars miniature in my collection that features grass on his base. I knocked a chunk of sand off in the early stages of painting, and rather than fixing it right then when it would have been easiest, I figured I could paint it to look like a scorched blast in the ground. It did not look good, but by that point it was too late to repair without needing to then repaint the whole base, so out came a little dab of grass to disguise it...

I'm not the world's greatest painter, but (as you can probably tell by the fact that there are more pictures than the usual front and back shots) I'm really happy with how he came out, even the wobbly freehand, which is normally the bane of my painting experience...

So, it's been 6 years, but I now have all of the bounty hunters from that famous scene painted:

(click on the bounty hunter tag over on the right if you want to go back and look at any of the others)

Tally: 10 vs - -42 = +52 (more stuff sold on eBay, as I'm still selling things to fund supporting the Mantic Hellboy Kickstarter)

In other news, I spent the GW voucher I got at Easter from my Mother-in Law on a copy of Gang War 1, in the hopes that I can spur myself to build some gangs for Necromunda! There are some Marvel characters and an assortment of other bits and bobs to distract me in the painting queue though...

In other other news, I also won an Instagram giveaway and was sent a set of Walking Dead figures:

(check out sdb_wargames on Instagram)

and after a tip-off from Uncle Johnny got some 2x2 boards from down the side of a skip:

They're nicely modelled (I suspect whoever made them originally did so as Armies on Parade boards) and I think with a little spruce up they'll be great for some skirmish wargaming like Path to Glory. Currently they're mostly a tripping hazard in the basement.

4-Lom & Zuckuss

We got the bug eyes / it doesn't bug us:

Yes, that is why I painted these bounty hunters as a pair!

 

 

For the longest time, Zuckuss was the only bounty hunter of those seen in Empire that I was missing a miniature of, but after umming and ahhing all this time, I got one for Valentine's Day this year!

 

Both are originally prepainted bendies from the Wizards of the Coast range - weirdly, unlike the rest, Zuckuss wasn't included in the original release (which is probably why I didn't already have one - I bought a lot of boosters when the game first came out, but ended up buying less and less as time went on...). They're fairly nice sculpts considering where they're from - detail was generally clear and pleasant to paint, with exceptions like an annoying mould line over 4-Lom's eye (which are always a pain to fix on models like this, as you can't just scrape them off and have to try to creatively cut them) and slightly soft detail on Zuckuss head, but with careful paint application I think they've both come up looking alright!



 

 

4-Lom was especially interesting to paint, given how scruffy and worn he looks - another difficulty with trying to paint Star Wars miniatures is that you'll often find contradictory information when you're trying to check colour choices! Handily, I have a copy of the old Action Figure archive (so that I can look at both stills from the films and the colours chosen for the action figure releases) and try and make an educated guess from there (with the occasional bout of Google Image searching trying to find a reference image that I like!).

In the end, I washed him with a highly diluted orangey-flesh colour, to try and recreate the tarnished finish on his shell (before giving him a once-over with some sponge weathering), which I'm fairly happy with! Zuckuss' robes were also quite nice to layer...



And for those of you wondering, that thing under 4-Lom's foot is a Rebel Pilot helmet, with an orange band with gold chevrons along it!

Finishing these two brings the Tally to:

27 vs 40 = -13

Who knows where we'll go next...

Someone's in the kitchen with Dengar...

...someone's in the kitchen I know (oh oh oh)... (I blame that episode of The Big Bang Theory with the work songs for this terrible, terrible intro)

Now that's out of the way, I think that makes it time for the embedded video of the MC Chris track about the Star Wars Bounty Hunter that I've recently painted, as is by now tradition:

Ah, Dengar, you toilet roll wrapped psycho you...

As is the case with the majority of my Star Wars miniatures, he was originally one of the bendy Wizards of the Coast prepaints, and suffers from some of the softness of detail that is so prevalent in the line. I still like him though, mind, despite his flaws...

Admittedly, I realise that what little that I know about Dengar outside of him standing on the deck of a Star Destroyer largely consists of the first few chapters of 'The Mandalorian Armor', the audiobook of which I have fallen asleep to many times over (hence it only being the first few chapters), Wookieepedia browsing and a number of Robot Chicken skits, but into the project drawer he goes regardless!

As it's been a little while since my last post, I also have other things to report - whilst I was on Paternity Leave (which seems so long ago, even though it was only really a few weeks) I treated myself to some (more) goodies:

The new Mantic Enforcer Support Booster that I'd been considering buying, as the chaps with large shields and shotguns will make excellent Guardian conversion fodder when I start putting together some Cerberus Troops to kickstart the Mass Effect project;

And the long-awaited rulebook for the Batman Miniature Game from Knight Models. Although I missed the cutoff for pre-ordering the book with the limited edition model (as I was still awaiting the arrival of my daughter when pre-orders closed, and I was still managing to be a good boy and not buy any toys), luckily I was able to source one through eBay not long after they were released!

1 miniature painted and 7 added to the mountain unfortunately takes the Tally in the wrong direction though, to:

15 vs 22 = -7

However there are a couple of bits half-finished in the painting queue, so we might just be able to get the Tally balanced back to zero before Salute comes along and throws it out of the window... 

Manners are their own reward gentlemen!

Another day, another bounty hunter. Even though he's clearly not actually holding that gun, I think this is a great little sculpt (from the first set, Rebel Storm) that I had a lot of fun painting. 

While there have been some duff moments, like the Lizard Dance from The Mandalorian Armor (because yes, it makes perfect sense that a drunk Trandoshan would refer to their ceremonial dance as 'the lizard dance', as that's not ridiculous at all), there are more reasons that I love Bossk:

I'm always a fan of canonically accurate nerd core rap about Star Wars Bounty hunters:

Although he's no Boba Fett, Robot Chicken has shown us that Bossk is a suave, smooth operator:

Who also teaches us that manners are their own reward:

[Tally - 63 vs 36 = +27]

Primer update

So yeah, Craig from Adventures In Miniature Gaming was right, you really need to shake the bejeezus out of Imperial Primer before using it:

I mean really, really shake it. About twenty seconds in to thorough shaking, it almost felt like something shifted inside the pot and now it's paint consistency rather than wash consistency!

(Don't worry, I haven't missed some bits, I'm planning on applying both black and white undercoats rather than trying to paint white over black and so on)

Why you gotta player hate...

...on IG-88?

Gotta love MC Chris. On that note, gotta love IG-88:

I've been in a Star Wars kinda mood recently, hence digging out a load of the old Wizards prepaints, the first of which to see the business end of a paintbrush being this. He got finished off today whilst we watched the classic Star Wars trilogy back to back. We were originally going to watch all six, but realised that none of us in the house actually owns the prequel trilogy... Cue a walk into town, where in HMV we find that they haven't done the prequel trilogy since they released the Blu-rays a year ago, and they didn't have those in stock either... Yet another reason for me to be angry at George Lucas. But I also bought a large cake that we ate whilst savage ewoks tore apart the Emperor's finest, and I can't stay mad through that...

And yes, I know, I strayed from the canon colour-scheme: his bandolier should be black, not brown, and the buckle isn't bronze, but I fancied injecting a little more colour. And anyways, although you can't really see it in this picture, I painted in the extra detail of the ammo on the belt that wasn't sculpted on, so that should allow me some leeway...

Unfortunately whilst painting IG-88, it seems I forgot to double coat his base with glue, as I realised when I put the first wash on his base and the sand started lifting... cue a rush job to mash it back down, recoat it with glue and repaint it (admittedly it would probably have been easier to scrape it off and start again, but once panic set in I didn't think of that...)

It'd be an unusual week though if there were a post that pushed the tally positively without something else dragging it in the opposite direction, which bring us to this:

Five Slayers, bought for the two on the left which I thought were the last two modern sculpts that I needed. Until I dug out my box of Slayers though, when I found out that the two on the right were also different to any I already had. Which brings the tally to:

57 vs 84 = -27

and led me to dig through my stripping pot, to see whether I now had enough different sculpts to make a unit of 30 (the current maximum size), which revealed these:

As well as some em4 minis that I was stripping to use for various modern or Judge Dredd projects, there were some classic Marauder Slayers, which brought my total of different sculpts of them to 9 (of a possible 10, according to an old catalogue, though I was sure I'd seen more), and bringing my unit total (counting the old Games Day Slayer on Daemon head as a 4 model unit filler) to 28. So close! Ideally I'd like to get the Slayer stood on Dragon head mini that appears every now and then on eBay, but I can't really justify spending any money on this project right now... Although I will admit that I'm tempted to make up a Slayer army using the Storm of Chaos list using the spares (I've got a bunch of duplicate Slayers, as well as Ungrim and Garagim Ironfist and a couple of the chaps with axes on chains...)