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...

Imperial Assault Goals

As one of the challenges featured in the Challenge involved replacing all of the tokens in the Star Wars Imperial Assault core set with miniatures, and another involved painting all the miniatures from said set, I thought I'd come up with a list of what I needed to complete (and links to what I have already previously completed proxies of):

Core set:

Stormtrooper x6

Elite stormtrooper x3

Imperial Officer x2

ELITE imperial Officer

Probe Droid x2

Elite Probe Droid

E-web Engineer

Elite E-web Engineer

Trandoshan Hunters x2

Elite Trandoshan hunters x2

aT-ST

Royal Guard x2

Elite Royal Guard x2

Nexu

Elite nexu

Tokens:

General Weiss

Luke

Darth Vader

IG-88

Royal Guard Champion

Han Solo

Chewie

Rebel Trooper x3

Rebel Saboteur x2

Optional extras:

General Weiss on foot

Wookiee Warriors

Hired Guns

Grand Inquisitor

Alliance Smuggler

Obi-Wan Kenobi

Greedo

You have failed me for the last time!

Painted up a couple of Imperial Officers, because Darth Vader needs someone to show off his ability to choke people using the Force on:

The chap on the left (who holds the rank of Admiral, according to the rank bar on his chest) was painted up as a member of the Imperial Security Bureau, because I figured that if I ever got round to running a Star Wars RPG he'd make a handy mid level villain, or even do nicely for an Elite Imperial Officer in Star Wars Imperial Assault. The chap on the right however was painted as a generic deck officer, and so got a more subdued greeny-grey uniform. If I do any more officers, they will probably get a light grey uniform, which fits how they appear in my memory if not in any of my research!

As the figures were originally bendy prepaints, the detail is a little soft (especially on the face of the figure on the right), but I think they've come out alright overall. Fun fact: these two figures were originally based and prepped on 30mm DS bases, as I'd planned to use the as Alliance Officers for the Firefly/Serenity project that has been on the back burner for a while now, and so were recently plucked from limbo and rebased to rejoin the Star Wars project!

Tally:

21 vs 40 = -19

Talz copilot

Having rediscovered the time sink iPad app Star Wars Uprising, I found myself inspired by one of its loading screens:

Sure, they've just made Chewbacca into the abominable snowman and made Han a gender swapped Twi'lek, but I think it's pretty cool! I like the idea of a Talz NPC or PC if I were to run the RPG, or worst case scenario he can make up the numbers in a Fringer band when I get round to finishing enough miniature to be able to run a tabletop game...

So, after a quick rummage through my supplies (making sure I still had another spare for when I get round to making a Foul Moudama conversion) I dug out an old Talz spy miniature, and set about separating him from his base, as well as popping off the arm that was on a plug for ease of access to his body:

Whilst I wasn't looking to make an exact copy of the character in the picture, I wanted to take several cues from it (mostly the belts and bags) and so set about marking out with a pen where I wanted belts:

I considered green-stuffing belts on, but thought that it might look a bit scrappy as my green stuff skills are fairly rudimentary, and it would look a bit like the belts were laid on top of his fur rather than he was actually wearing them - so I decided to cut in the belts, figuring that if I didn't like how deep the cut went I could always paint some liquid green stuff into the groove to bulk it back out:

Brief side note: despite having spent so much time getting my work desk sorted out, I'm doing this in the living room, as my wife wanted me to watch the Great British Bake Off with her in exchange for watching The Thing with me (because nothing says Happy Anniversary like old school body horror):

[edit - it's a week later as I'm editing this and we still haven't watched The Thing]

Surveying the cuts, I think they will look fine without green stuff, so I set about scavenging some pouches. A modern Space Marine sprue provided a set of three for his chest harness, and a freebie Journeyman Bot Handler sprue from Maelstrom's Edge from Spiral Arm Studios that I got at Salute provided another pouch to go on his leg.

Looking at the figure thus far, I thought he could do with a bigger gun than the somewhat scrawny pistol that the figure originally had; so I turned to the freebie sprue again:

A little trim here, a blob of gel glue there and here we have a completed conversion:

That's a 30mm base he's on, if I recall correctly, to give an impression of what size he is...

I ummed and ahhed for a while over whether to replace the doodad in his left hand (as there was an interesting looking technical aerial... thing on the freebie sprue) but decided to leave it as it is, figuring that it looks enough like a hydrospanner to leave. 

A few days later (well, just shy of two weeks from initial conception to finished miniature) and he's done:

(Pictures were taken with a daylight lamp balanced over my shoulder last night, so are a little better than the usual subterranean nighttime shots, if only by a little)

And the back! The straps turned out... passable, I think. A LOT of tidying up around the edges was needed after I dropped some colour into the grooves...

Pow, baggage and his new gun!

I especially enjoyed weathering the baggage, adding little dings and nicks in a variety of lighter shades, trying to make them look beaten up and lived in!

Another miniature painted takes the Tally to:

24 vs 333 = -399

What to paint next though? I've got the Star Wars thugs previously showcased undercoated on my desk, as well as some Lannisters for the A Song of Ice and Fire project; an undercoated obscure Batman character and a moderately obscure Batman villain that's had some red base coats and little else, or maybe something else entirely?

In other news, Blogger informs me that this was my 250th post - blimey!

Star Wars objectives WIP

For a while, I'd been thinking about making some objective markers or small pieces of scatter terrain for my Star Wars project, and so finding myself with a few minutes spare I had a dig through my supplies...

These round flat bases (from a box of Frostgrave soldiers iirc) I thought would be perfect for this - they're about the right size (being roughly the same size as the bases that I use on the rest of my Start Wars miniatures), but as they're flat, they won't look like the objective is on a little platform (looking more like a piece of scenery than a miniature per se)...

What objectives would the armed forces of the Star Wars universe be after? Probably some damaged droids containing secret plans or some such...

I also had 75% of a sand trooper knocking around:

(I think he was a casualty of my search for a rifle for my scout trooper sniper, and his head later went on to decorate Chewbacca's base)

I'd originally planned to scavenge his backpack to spice up a miniature, but playing around with it and one of the bases I decided to use it for this:

Maybe it's the body of a trooper on a top secret mission carrying dastardly secret Imperial plans, maybe you're just scavenging the body for supplies, either way, it's a stormtrooper's butt as an objective and that makes me laugh because I am a mature adult...

I thought four was probably a good number of objectives to aim for, and so had another dig and found another droid:

Then, out came the Instant Mould - you didn't think I was going to cut these long out of print bendies up did you?

(Side note- I currently have serious concerns that I might have burned my thumbprint off incautiously transporting a ramekin of boiling water)

They might look like chewed and squashed jelly tots at this point, but hopefully they're actually a useable mould...

It turns out my milliput isn't the freshest, so there are no pictures of the next step, as it was somewhat mucky...

And then the morning after:

3P0 might be useable with a bit of carefully applied battle damage, but the other two certainly aren't (although admittedly R2 came out better than this, but this picture is taken after me going 'hmm they still look soft I wonder oh dear' as I squished it) so back into the moulds they go for another try!

Some time after this last picture was taken, C3P0's head seems to have been interfered with (potentially by someone with tiny hands, but equally likely it could have been me) so this particular cast will need even more battle damage if I'm going to use it!

The next batch came out looking like this:

R2 might be useable with a lot of battle damage and targeted burying in sand, whereas the R5 has disintegrated and C3P0 looks like something from the Eva graveyard:

So I think it might be back to the drawing board for these in this form until inspiration strikes again - maybe only one destroyed droid, and acouple of differnet objectives - maybe a crate of credits, or some bacta, if I can think of a way to make them less visually boring than just a box!

Star Wars thugs WIP

So, this is what the blurry out of focus project alluded to in a previous post is:

Having vague intentions to at some point run a Star Wars RPG, a few months back I read through every back issue of Star Wars Gamer magazine, and it would seem that something approaching 93% of every Star Wars D20 adventure features an encounter with around four human thugs - equipped with this knowledge, I picked up a handful of Mark Copplestone sculpted scavenger types from em4 at Salute with the intention of 'Star Warsifying' them - some were fine straight off, whereas with others, all it took was a minor alteration like removing the gun magazine to make it look more blaster like:

(Sadly in my enthusiasm I didn't take a before picture!)

The mini that I bought to use as a leader type came slightly miscast, with a stubby little blob for a left hand, so it was conversion time! 

His gun was also too clearly modern, so that had to go too (after all, there's a fine tradition of hands getting lopped off left right and centre in the Star Wars universe!) and a suitable donor was located after having a shuffle through a selection of the prepaints (fun fact - most of my original choices for donors were then discounted due to having alien anatomy, like only having three fingers, when I wanted the whole hand for ease of pinning and hopefully not looking too differently scaled to whatever hand I ended up using to replace his left...)

[insert your own 'totally armless' joke here]

And lo, one donated fun and a clenched fist from a Perry sprue later we have a rejuvenated leader type, ready to spring an ill-fated and ultimately doomed ambush on a party of PCs before being recycled to the next encounter:

And here's the complete group ready for undercoat:

Well, it turns out that my can of flat black was pretty much dead, so here they are less than half undercoated waiting for an application of brush primer!

Zomtober 2015 - big finish!

As alluded to in my previous post, I had big plans for my final week after Zomtober post: a zombie herd!

Alas, the pictures that I took while there was still natural light were blurry and horrible, and the ones that I took later were dark and grotty, so apologies in advance:

The herd is mostly those horrible plastic multi-part zombies that were the first release from Wargames Factory (before they'd gotten used to CAD) with a few Heroclix and Doctor Who and Stsr Wars miniatures mixed in for a bit of variety, with the occasional metal zombie head from Westwind mixed in to disguise their origins! On the Wargames Factory zombies front, after the first coat of grey on the flesh I thought they might not turn out looking quite as bad as I'd expected, but sadly the second lighter shade of grey robbed me of all illusions that they wouldn't look bad - the detail is just too soft! I thought that I'd probably end up covering the majority of them with blood, but ended up being quite restrained when it came to it...

In terms of rules for the herd, I think I'd planned for them to be something of a roaming hazard rather than an enemy per se - too big to really take on single handedly, winning a combat against one would be more surviving to get away rather than glorious victory...

I'd pictured 'wounds taken' being less damage to the herd, more a loss of cohesion - potentially having some stats equal to the number of wounds that the herd has remaining, so as the herd is taken apart it starts being less of a maelstrom of destruction.

I also condsidered a special rule where whenever a wound is taken by the herd, a fresh (single) zombie is a placed in base contact with the herd, to represent it spreading out until eventually all that is left is a scattered handful of single zombies that can then be singled out and exterminated rather than the unstoppable wave that is the herd at full strength - so it would take some doing, but you could eventually wear away at the herd until all that is left is say 8 or so zombies - but in a game where ammunition is scarce and prolonged gunfire is only going to attract more enemies, is it worth it?

Finishing the herd (which I think I started at some point a couple of years before I got married, and potentially long enough ago that I could still have been described as being in my early twenties) brings the Tally to:

59 vs 131 = -72

So, overall Zomtober productivity this year leaves me with this:

Not a bad result I don't think? Plus, seeing everyone else doing it left me with more ideas for things I want to do, so roll on next time!

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... 

Never tell me the odds!

Han Solo, everyone's favourite scoundrel! It probably says a lot about my tastes that I've still as of yet to even consider painting a Luke miniature...

With this miniature finished, that's the end of the group of Star Wars miniatures that I was working on as a batch. Although I should probably prep and paint some bog-standard Rebel Troopers (and work on the rules!), I think I might take a brief diversion for other projects, namely Pathfinder (as I'm hopefully joining a new campaign, so have the opportunity to build a one-off character miniature) or taking part in Zomtober!

[Tally: 65 vs 36 = +29]

Still no troopers...

Not a lot to say about this really, it's a Rebel Pilot. I added red bands and some gold squiggles to his helmet to try and diversify his paint job somewhat, but other than that he's mostly an orange blob. He'll hopefully see use either as an objective (in 'rescue the pilot from the crash site' type scenarios, if I can find a Star Wars model kit in the right scale on the cheap) or as an unnamed hero/captain type!

[Tally: 64 vs 36 = +28]

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]

Leia? I hardly knew her!

Oh Leia, the Disney princess we waited so long for...

I had a couple of sculpt options for Leia, but went for this one, sporting the classic 'Danish Buns' 'do. It's a little petite compared to some, but I think it should do just fine. As you can see, painting white is still a pain, and the face was a bit of a nightmare - the sculpts on these bendy figures can vary between fantastic and terrible on the same figure! I did what I could though (including having to completely redefine her nose through the careful application of lines of flesh wash at one point), and so she should look fine on the table!

In other news, I've still got Han, Bossk and a rebel pilot half painted, then I really should get round to prepping a squad of rebel troopers...

[Tally - 62 vs 36 = +26]

Dark Trooper Phase 2

Having briefly played Star Wars Commander before my attention waned when it turned into another pay-to-win app, I thought one of these lightsaber-resistant robo-meanies would be a good add-on unit for my Imperials. He was surprisingly difficult to photograph for such a straightforward paint job too...

[Tally - 61 vs 36 = +25]

Death Star Protocol Droid

Like the Gonk Droid, another one that doesn't have the most obvious uses for skirmish wargaming, although I'm sure I read somewhere that these things were stuffed with secret recording devices, which would play nicely in a scenario with Rebels trying to sneak him away from an Imperial base...

[Tally: 60 vs 36 = +24]

Let the Wookiee win!

My first painted Rebel miniature is Chewbacca, walking carpet Hero of the Rebel Alliance: 

Although I wasn't originally super keen on the sculpt (having originally planned on picking up either the one from Rebel Storm or the now unavailable Knight Models sculpt), I think he looks quite snazzy now he's gone under the tender ministrations of my paintbrush.

Careful attention was paid to reference pictures of Peter Mayhew in costume in order to ensure that I was able to duplicate Chewbacca's fur markings, using several careful applications of various washes:

That little lump decorating the front of his base was originally a discarded Stormtrooper helmet, but unfortunately the detail was so shallow on the original donor figure that I ended up adding more and more battle damage to it to cover its crappiness that in the end you can barely see what it is...

Tally: 59 vs 36 = +23