Time to get back to the Base-ics

Okay, so I was asked how I do my bases. Warning, this post is very picture heavy.

First off, I start with a coat of Desert Yellow in spray primer form.

Then I do a wash using Strong Tone (from the bottle as opposed from the can).

Next up, a drybrush of Vellejo's Iraqui Sand:

Then I use some watered down Elmers Glue and a brush to apply it. Then I dip it into my flock bucket.

Then I go picking through my woodland scenics bags and pull out some desert brush and green brush pieces to superglue to the base.

Then I finally glued on the finish model...which is a bit of a shame as it covers almost the whole base and all that work. :)

This was my first medium tank to finish and I think it turned out okay. It also matches pretty well with the recon tanks I did earlier.

Hope you enjoyed it. Till next time.

Aquan Mediums and the start of the Directorate

So yesterday was absolutely gorgeous, so I went outside and setup my priming bench. First up was the four medium skimmers for the aquans. That new wolf blue primer from Army Painter is just great. Didn't take much at all to get solid coats over the whole model.

Then I pulled out the Directorate recon buggies and a few of their medium vehicles. For these I decided to go with Bright Red from Army Painter. I know this may seem like a bold choice, but actually it comes out pretty well. I've used it before with my Dystopian Wars Blazing Sun forces.

I just need to decide upon some other colors for it. Obviously I can't go with the wooden plank look. :)

However, I have used this color for my 40K Tau as well. Which apparently I have never taken a finished photo of. Hmmmm. Anyways, maybe we'll see some photos after this weekend.

He has friends

So I finished off the whole unit today. Pretty happy with how it turned out. I was expecting them to be lighter in color...but eh...I'm not complaining.

Now on to the next unit. :)

We have Aquan sightings...

So just a quick little update. I have finished an aquan recon tank! Okay, so it isn't a whole lot, but it is something. And actually, I have two of them done. But just pics of the first one. So here it is...what do you think?

I'll try to take a few more..maybe on actual terrain or something. Like an action shot. If the weather holds, I may prime more.

Quick Planetfall Update

Hello Gentle Readers,

So I made a little bit of progress on my Aquans yesterday. I have washed all of the models (just to make sure any molding residue is off) and then I busted out the color primers.

The bases got a nice coat of Desert Yellow by Army Painter. I love that color and it works great for bases. I'll most likely hit it with a very light drybrush of a slighly lighter color (or just mix a bit of white in with the desert yellow paint), and then go over with one of their washes. I also have some desert foam tufts that I can glue down to give it some foliage. Really easy and always looks nice (well at least on my FoW bases).

Oh oh oh...an idea just hit me. See normally I use Vallejo pumice on my FoW bases in order to hide the raised infantry. I could easily use that stuff on these bases just to give them a few spots of minor elevation. The texture shouldn't look too out of place either. Awe-sommmmmmmmmme.

Okay...so after the bases, I took out my little recon skimmers and hit them with with wolf grey primer from AP. I recently got myself a small Space Wolf force for 40K, so this way this can will perform double duty. It is a really nice blue/gray color. Somewhat dark, but not so dark that an ink won't pick out the recesses. My next step is applying the Ash Grey color to the models. I haven't decided if I want to drybrush this on, or try to hand paint the panels. There are lots of little panels on these models. Since Ash Grey is so light, I'm leaning towards drybrushing because it is safer, and I can still paint over it with any other color.

At this rate, I should have some good progress pics to show you by the weekend. :)

Plans within plans

So I went to my favorite LGS to buy the Relthozan Core Helix so I could get started on my bugs! But alas, I was foiled when my favorite LGS did not have said Core Helix. So instead I walked out with some color primer and a nice blue ink.

So I have a plan. The plan is to prime the vehicles with the new spray primer (wolf grey). I will prime the bases with another color primer (desert yellow). I will then ink the vehicles with the new blue ink, and then I will either drybrush Ash Grey over the top half...or I'll try to carefully paint the panels with the Ash Grey. By the way, these are all Army Painter colors.

I'm still debating on using orange for the energy colors, or something else...like light blue or light green? The end result, will be spaceships with a light top half, a darker bottom half, a nice bluish detail lining...and then some other color effect for the energy. All of this over desert style bases.

The bases will be inked with my standard brown ink, and then I have various desert-ish flocking to sprinkle about. I think it will look nice and be pretty easy to do.

Fairly excited about this. The models aren't many...they aren't overly large...so it should be possible to do most of them over a weekend as long as the priming can get done.

I also need to bust out my Dystopian Wars models to check the armored bases sizes that came with them. If they are the same, then I can safely order some Dystopian Armored Clash foam trays from Battlefoam which will work with my Planetfall guys.

It would be fantastic if I could get my aquans all painted up before my Relthoza arrive.

Which, by the way, I'm going to keep the desert base theme with them as well, but was going to do a light green as the base for them. Have to see what Army Painter has and if I like it or not. Just need to figure out what the other colors to compliment would be. Hmmmmmmm....

Well till next time...with some WIP pics if you are lucky and I'm not lazy :)

Planetfall Game One

So this weekend, my friend Robert and I busted out my two player box set and gave Planetfall a spin. I had spent the last week watching various battle reports and reading the rules and forums. So I felt pretty comfortable with skipping straight to battle 4 in the campaign book. I packed up my warmaster terrain and some FoW card buildings (I haven't put together the spartan pieces yet) and off I went.

Robert owns a directorate fleet for FA, so he got that army...and I played the Aquans. I also own some aquan ships for FA, but haven't used them at all. Now our original plan was to play at our club's meeting space...but alas, it was closed that night for some reason...so we headed down to the best LGS in Portland instead (shout out to Guardian Games!). They had some open tables, so I got setting up right away until Robert got there.

As this was a learning game, we knew it was going to take longer than normal to play. Even so though, we got through a full game round in under an hour. That really impressed me. And unfortunately, we did have to flip through the book quite a bit. For instance, I never found where moving Flat Out prevented you from shooting. It wasn't in the flat out area of the rules, and I didn't see it in the shooting rules. (I did find it later that night, it was mentioned one place at the very start of the shooting rules). So I'm going to have to reread the rules quite a few times I think to make sure I get it all down.

That being said, the flow of the game was great. I thought it went really smoothly. Thanks to my warmaster terrain, our table actually looked quite nice with a couple of hills and several forests scattered about. The FoW buildings didn't look too out of place either. Most of the games I have watched, only had the spartan buildings on the table for shot blockers. The woods and hills really made a difference. For instance, our infantry and recon units could not shoot through woods, but the armored units could. Not only that, but the Directorate's wheeled vehicles didn't care too much for all those trees but my aquan hover vehicles zoomed right through them.

I learned some valuable lessons about sky-dropping units. Plus I need to review the rules a bit more on that area because I think we did something wrong (CQB-wise). However, even with that, things went well for the most part.

I am definitely going to be investing more into this game. I really like the 10mm scale. I love how the tabled looked with the terrain on it too. I have a feeling this is going to be my go-to Spartan game.

Oh, we had to cut the game short due to the store closing earlier than expected. As it was, the Directorate was winning 11 to 15. 

Planetfall! (insert cool guitar solo)

Party on Garth! Party on Wayne! This week, Planetfall. Or I suppose, more correctly, Firestorm Planetfall.

This is the new 10mm Sci Fi game from Spartan Games. Now when I say new, it has been out for several months...it is simply new to me, and it is the latest product out from Spartan. I will admit to some hem and hawing over purchasing this game. I own three games from Spartan, but rarely play any of them. This is mostly due to a lack of opponents and a general feeling that the game takes a long time to play.

Well for whatever reason, I recently took a hard look at Planetfall, and I really liked what I saw. In order to make the purchase, I needed to reduce my stockpile of minis and finally made that happen. Well worth the sacrifice.

So I'm sure you guys can find unboxing videos on Youtube. The models are fantastic. I'm not sure exactly how they make these, but damn..they do it well. The level of detail on the models is amazing. I won't be able to paint any of them in dark colors for fear of hiding how awesome these are. I think they also did a great job with the infantry bases. The mixture of static models and plug in models will let there be some individuality to each one and still have incredible depth. I just love the guys that are actually interacting with the scenery. Brilliance.

Lets go down the list of contents:
Models - A+ in my book
Rulebook - A, good size, readable, examples
Dice - B - they are dice, and appropriately colored :)
Terrain - B - it looks good, both sides of the card are printed, so you have an option as to what you want the building to look like. My only somewhat complaint, is why not use plasti-card? You have clear acrylic frames, and then printed card stock. Why not just use printed plasti-card? That way you can skip the acrylic completely. I have models from a few games that use it and it was pretty decent for what it was...I mean it is so close to the printed cardstock...not a huge complaint obviously...but something they might want to consider in the future.
Templates - C - and the reason here, is because the darn token sheet is not pre-cut. They have pre-cut templates...but not the tokens. Now I think I know why...they would not be able to have the same size tokens or as many on a page if they had pre-cut...but seriously...I'd rather have smaller tokens then to have to go through the pain of cutting them myself. Small annoyance...but you'd think they could have done this.

Overall though, the product gets a big huge A out of me. Stacked full of models, terrain, a fairly clear ruleset, tokens and templates, dice...and a scenario book to get you right into the action. Oh, and they do include resin objective markers too...again..a nice touch. I need to hurry up and show this off locally so I can suck some more peeps in. :)

Till next time....