USCM - Colonial Marines

I'm gradually painting my way towards having enough stuff to do an Aliens themed RPG. First job is to get the Colonial Marines out the way, then I have a bunch of Khurasan/Elhiem/RalPratha alien minis to make up my hordes of Xenos.

So, set to the task of painting the (Elhiem miniatures) Colonial Marines this weekend. I have to admit, after yyeeeaaars of painting models I couldn't bring myself to paint the marines in their standard all green uniforms. Because. Green is boring. So I decided to go with Green overals underneath blue body armour, with a few little red bits here and there for pop.

Again, this is thinner coats on a white undercoat. With these dudes I actually went in an did more pronounced highlights on the armour, something I'm normally too lazy (and lack the confidence) to try. Gotta admit, it's rough but I'm sold on doing more contrasty highlights. Deffo makes everything pop more.

Now that I've sat and taken some pics, I think I could deffo do with going back and hitting the skin areas with some more highlights too, but overall I'm happy with them (bases are yet to be completed).

As always, comments and crit would be welcome (and encourage me to keep painting and posting).

Bikers!

So this weekend I did a bunch more work on my Elhiem 1:72 backlog!

First up was this Biker gang from the Survivors minis.

These dudes were really fun to paint (although I kinda messed up the guy in the hat, I painted his hat red, thinking it was a hoody and now he looks like a Christmas Elf). Anyway, decided these dudes were called the Death Angels. So used a little 0.05mm archival pen to do the insignia on the backs of the jackets. These dudes are also a bit of an experiment in painting style. Doing everything in much wetter initial layers and building things more slowly. Also working with a White undercoat instead of black is making a huge difference to the vibrance of my models.

As Always, Comments and Crit appreciated (although I'm not sure if anyone actually reads this blog anyway)!

Texas Rangers.

I absolutely love all the 1:72 stuff from Elheim. Their models are always super interestingly posed, and they do a crazy variety of different models from pulp to scifi to modern (all the settings I enjoy most). Anyway, about a year ago I bought like... 100 figures off them and they've sat in the storage for ages, so I've decided to start painting my way through all the different sets I got my hands on. First of these is the Survivors - Law Men pack. I think these are supposed to be usable as "Sherrif" type characters in a zombie survival game. I'm using them more as a 4 person gang of hitmen for a modern day RPG. They're called the Texas Rangers. A crew of 4 hardbitten hitmen from Dallas Texas. If you need someone gone, or a problem just won't get solved, You call the Texas Rangers, and you give them a duffel bag full of 50s and the problem goes away. Left to Right in the picture below they are:
The Alamo Kid.
Chip Jensen
Lincoln
Lily Mascis.

Annoyingly, while varnishing these dudes (after taking these photos) I got a big blob of white on the coat of the dude with the AR15. So going to have to redo that :'(
As Always, comments and crit welcome, don't be shy :)

6mm Mechs!

I've been prototyping a little Mech Board Game, I really used to love Battletech, but the rules are super long to explain to new people, and the actual games tend to take hours and hours. I'm working on somthing that sill maintains the fun of blowing bits off an enemy mech and gradually disables them, but with faster game loop and less stats / lookup tables / measuring etc. Anyway. In the process of making this game I've gotten myself addicted to painting little mechs. I've been painting models from lots of different manufacturers, so here's some pics, and descriptions of what is from where. So far I have 4 factions, although I've not really thought to much about who/what they are, just what their colour scheme is!

First up, the Terran Alliance:

These models are a mixture. The Mech in the Background is from MJFigures. The MJ Mechs are pretty cool, although it's a bit of a leap of faith because the pics on the site are really blurry and there's not much detail about their size etc. Cheap tho at 60p - 4pounds each, so I bough about 40 different models. Quality varies, but there are some really cool designs. The 2 Battle Armour suits are from GW - Epic scale dreadnaughts that have been in my Bits box for about 20 years! Finally painted them. Finally there's the infantry unit. These are Polish Infantry from Brigade Models I absolutely love these minis, the detail and posing is really good for a 6mm figure, and the castings were nice and clean too.

Next Up, the East Asian Battleforce.

Wanted to go for a brighter look with these dudes, and paint much more obvious, cartoony highlights. I'm stoked on how the Battle armour and infantry have come out. Left to Right: Gundam Looking Mecha are from Onslaught Minis The infantry are Onslaught too. Far right Battle armour is GW, with the Larger Mech in the BG coming from MJFigures.

So, those were my first 2 little battle forces. I started to get into the swing of things here, thinking more about colour schemes and how I wanted the models to look. Having painted tons of Dirty/Weathered stuff or realistic-y pallette human and fantasy things, I thought this was a great opportunity to do some more loud, bright colour scheme, so next up was the VDF - Venus Defence Force.

Really pleased with these guys, I'm still learning how to do nice pics of 6mm, but IRL the models pop nicely, and I liked doing the slightly more poppy highlights on this set.

This force has some of my favourite models from MJFigures. Here are 2 Battle Armour units and a Think Tank. THe battle armour are vanilla (although I drilled out some gun barrels). The Thinktank is a kitbash using a Turret from the AutoKill Bits series.

Infantry are Onslaught Minis again, These little dudes are great, they're small enough that you can gently bend the arms to repose them a little bit and reduce repetition.

Finally there's the Mechs themselves. Left we have a Timberwolf looking assaultmech from Brigade Models TBH, I'm not a big fan of the cockpit on this Mech, but the model is cool overall. On the Right we have a lasermech from MJFigures. This Mech originally had arms that go straight down, which I wasn't really into, so I made some forward facing laser cannons from some bits of sprue. At super closeup like this, the casting on the model doesn't look amazing, but on the table it looks fine. Ultimately making teeny tiny arms is pretty tricky and I'm pleased how this turned out!

Finally, we have the Opish Rebellion. This is the last set I painted, and I tried some new techniques to get a really neon look to the green on them. I still have Loooooads to learn about painting obvs, but was super pleased with how vibrant these dudes look.

First in the frame, Hyrda Battle Armour (made up the name) MJ Figures again. Like some of the others, this mech's arms just went straight down, so I cut them off and made my own lower arms with forward facing guns. On the Right is an APC with some gatling cannons. Can't remember where this model is from (sorry).

It's so hard to get nice pics of tiny infantry!! I'll have to look at my setup and maybe get a Macro Lens. Anyway, Thought I'd do something a little different here and have some normal infantry units but a few that have a micromech for support. Soldiers are Brigade Models Polish Infantry, Minimech is another from MJFigures.

Last but my no means least are the 2 Opish Mechs. Left is another of those Bridage Kirin Walker Mechs Although with this one I added a massive chaingun to the front, to cover that cockpit detail I wasn't so keen on. The other mech is again a kitbash of a MJFigures model, I added a super long Yellow Laser cannon for his right arm and a 4barrel AA cannon on his left. I'm stoked on how these 2 turned out, with the lime green looking super vibrant!

Anyway, that's it for the MEGA MECHA POST. I have a lot more Mecha on the Painting table, but I'm taking a break to do some Elheim Pulps for a few days :)

Thanks for Reading. As always comments and crit are welcome, but be nice!

Mutie Rally!

These are probably the most fun vehicles I've made for Gaslands to date. Thought it would be really cool to do a bunch of mutant cars from the wastelands. The cars are covered in a kind of sentient, tentacle and exhaustpipe covered fungus that controls the vehicle it's covering and attacks wouldbe opponents. Not much done to the actual vehicles here. There's some light decal work to add a skull decal I made to all the cars and give them some uniformity. The mutants themselves are made from Greenstuff and just sculpted around the vehicle. The little dude with the MG in the back of the Pickup is originally a Caesar minis US marine, I cut off his head and carved away most of the torso to just leave the gun and legs, then modelled in the mutant over the top.

Performance Cars and Exotics

So, after doing loads of dusty and dirty cars for Gaslands, I started really wanting to do some cleaner custom vehicles. Basically doing cars that look like they were built to drive in a death rally, as opposed to a soccer mom's estate car modified into a deathwagon. With that, I came up with 2 gangs - the Kyoto Daggers, and the Aces. The Kyoto Dagger drive high performance exotic cars, their focus is on speed, but their cars pack some serious ordinance too. The Aces drive classic american muscle cars, tricked out with rockets and chainguns. The Key thing I was trying to achieve with these models was a cleaner look - no rust, much less dirt and for them to kind of feel more like "real" racing cars - like something you might seen in Nascar, or Rally. With that in mind, I had a shot at printing up my own waterslide decals. I can't take credit for any of the imagery, it's just logos and brand icons pulled from image searches, I've simply scaled them down (super feckin' small) in Photoshop and printed to waterslide paper. Really pleased with how these turned out in the end, it totally inspired me to go off and do more stuff with Waterslides, which I'll totally post up another day! Anyway, here they are :)

So that's the Kyoto Daggers, After painting so many minis that are supposed to be cobbled from many different parts and made up of different colours, it was super liberating to work on 2 cars and really only have 1 main colour - Poison Green. With the Aces, I decided to throw a new technique into the mix, and so while they again have a super limited (red/black/white) colour pallete, I thought I'd also have a go at doing some masking, to get my stripes and lines super crisp. It's my first time masking, and I think (for cleanness) I would deffo use the blue masking tape next time. With these I used hobby Store papery masking tape, and while it worked, there was some soak through that needed tidying up, and it had a habit of trying to rough up the edges.

Scream Roller

For a long while I wanted to make a Boss character for Gaslands. I had this (over scaled) steam roller sitting in a bits box for ages and finally decided to dedicate some time to making it into a cool Gaslands Vehicle. Initially, here's some WIP shots of the build.

And here's some of the final model.