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...

The aforementioned scum and villainy...

As was the plan, now I've finished the pieces of terrain that I had on the go I've painted some miniatures!

The generic Star Wars thugs that I converted a while back. Once I got into the swing of it, finishing them off was a breeze! I think there's something about painting a batch of non-uniformed figures that I enjoy, making colour choices on the fly, daubing paint wily-nilly as the fancy takes me...

I painted them in a spread of colours and materials - the second guy from the left is painted like he is wrapped in a scavenged tarpaulin, for example, and the armour on the second and fifth chap is painted to look like it's scavenged from Stormtroopers.

In hindsight, it seems like I've subconsciously painted the leader like Kal Jerico. Because he is awesome.

As ever, fun was had with weathering, in this case on the two guys wearing long coats. I think it came out better on the leader, it didn't seem to show up as well on the lighter coat...


The Tally has however moved in both directions this week - as well as finishing these 5 chaps, my DM was getting rid of a box of assorted Orks, so I had a pick through and grabbed some Gretchen and a couple of chunky bodies for the bitz box should I get round to converting some Scavvies for Necromunda/inq28:

Tally:

6 vs -10 = +16

2017 Challenges:

• Finish 5 miniatures from my WIP drawer before starting anything new (5/5)
• Finish 10 miniatures from my WIP drawer before starting anything new (5/10)
• Finish 15 miniatures from my WIP drawer before starting anything new (5/15)
• Finish something years old
• Finish something SUPER old (as in, pre-blog old)
• Finish a piece of terrain x3 
• Empty out my stripping pot
• Paint something from the stripping pot
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Build a wargames board
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Open Star Wars Imperial Assault and paint all the miniatures from it
• Paint all the miniatures needed to replace the tokens in the Imperial Assault Core Game
•  Paint a complete box of miniatures (either a full regiment or starter)
•  Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Batman)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted)

So, plans for the immediate future include trying to smash through some more miniatures from the queue to knock off the second and third items on the challenge list before getting distracted and starting something new allowing myself to start something new (mmm box of Star Wars miniatures I'm looking at you). Timing might be an issue with that though, as if I don't make some headway rapidly we'll be at May 4th before I know it. I mean, I have a couple of Star Wars miniatures in the queue that I could paint for May the Fourth, but none that I want to. I mean, plus the fact that Salute is only a month away already..

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 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!

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]

Gonk, gonk?

Not much to say about this really, I painted a Gonk Droid (or a GNK Power Droid if we're giving it it's full and proper title):

I've no idea what use it will be for gaming, but it's a cool and very 'Star Warsy' miniature, so I had to include one in the project. Lots of fun was had with washes like GW Typhus Corrosion and scrubbing on chips and scrapes to get it looking good and grubby:

Tally: 58 vs 36 = +22

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...)