Greetings Earthlings! I come in peace, and have a quick post for you today – I’ve had a bit of a monster painting session over the weekend, and have no fewer than 18 painted models to show for it! First up are a couple of fishmen that I picked up at BOYL – quirky little sculpts, nice and easy to paint up:

They were fun to paint, mostly done with washes and a quick drybrush, so nothing too demanding. I have no specific plan for them, so they can just hang with the rest of my galactic scum. My league of Xeno adventurers is growing!

Secondly, I have a bumper haul of 16 Johnny Lauck droids to share, (you can see details about Johnny in my last post), hence the post title. Droids… chips… computer chips…? oh, never mind :-/      Anyway, I speedpainted them up with no great attention to detail – simple colour blocks, wash, drybrush, weathering, done. I plan to use them as scenery items or plot points rather than characters in their own right, so I treated them as such. I painted five up each in blue, red and yellow, and I singled out one chap to be some sort of protocol droid ;-)

Here, protocol droid ‘AR53’ attempts to diffuse a tense situation between Hraxi Jonas and a couple of fishy customers… apparently only one of the aliens appreciates Mum jokes!

I love these little critters, and was instantly hooked on these when I saw them available on the undead kickstarter. I really like the idea of little civilianised droids bumbling around the place… probably something to do with growing up a long time ago, with my head stuck in a galaxy far far away :-)   Some of these guys do look weaponised, but they can equally be drinks dispensers, fire extinguishers, hoovers, fumigators, etc.  I’ll go back and add fine detail as and when the mood takes me, but I’m calling them done for now.

So that’s it for the time being – what a productive weekend! I have an assignment to write over the next couple of weeks, so painting time is going to somewhat limited for a while. That said, I’m sure I’ll manage a bit of painting here and there ;-)   Catch you sucker DJs on the B side

Hello chaps, my BOYL buzz has receded as the week has progressed, but I did get a few bits and bobs finished last week/weekend. First up, we have a nice little Freebee from Curtis @ Ramshackle games – he’s a generic priest/administratum type, appropriately/amusingly equipped with an old hammer. I added the servoskull to 40k him up a bit, and painted him quick to hang with my slowly expanding Administratum group:

Next up we have a random chap that has been in his undercoat for ages and ages – I just never got around to him, despite the fact that he is such a cool model. He is from Moonraker Miniatures I think, and he’s a cracking little wasteland/bounty hunter type. I painted him up in quite a muted palette, with no particular purpose in mind. Here he is on his own, and with a bunch of reprobates from the RT Pirates range:

Finally we have another BOYL gem. He’s actually an impulse purchase from Johnny Lauck – I backed a recent Kickstarter by Johnny, (a very cool series of undead dungeon monsters – watch this space!), and I added a few sci-fi minis that he also produces to the order. You can check Johnny out here, but suffice to say that the quality and service were both excellent, though I did cop a customs bill for the delivery :-(

Anyway, I actually picked up the KS package on my way to BOYL, and had a good look over the minis on the Friday night. I knew that the mighty Kev ‘GoblinMaster’ Adams was going to be at BOYL on the Saturday, and would be sculpting faces for folks in exchange for a modest donation to charity. I selected a rather cool mini with a disc cutter and blow torch with the Kev face sculpt in mind. This is what poor Kev had to work with:

And here is the resulting mini with my face!

Pretty good eh? This guy is going to go very nicely with my Colony 87 Star Port crew, (coming soon), but he can hang with my conversion of Techpriest Schlan for now, and just chop some shit up:

It was great watching Kev work – the guy is a legend, and it was fascinating to watch him building up the face, sculpting in the detail etc. He sat in a hot tent all day long, sculpting and chatting with folks about all sorts, and all done with a broken arm! The conversation was great, so many rock’n’roll stories from the golden age of GW, and a fair few of Kev’s own adventures since. For example, did you know that Kev’s Night Goblins were inspired by the Jawa from Star Wars? No? Me either! (Sure makes me look at that range a bit differently…)

Anyway, that’s it for now, but I’ll be churning out some more random bits over the coming weeks. I’ve kind of parked the whole Silver Tower set for now – it wasn’t bringing me much pleasure tbh, so I’m going to crack on with some of the many Kickstarters that have been fulfilled lately. Expect RT civilians, random undead, hordes of robots, and lizard men in spaaaaace! Catch you on the flip side.

Hello chaps, I hope you’re all well! I have two minis to share with you this week – again, I have been working through my pile of undercoated but otherwise neglected minis. First up is this official looking chap from the ‘Spacelords’ range from Moonraker Miniatures:

He’s pretty straight forward on the painting front, and is very much intended to fit in with my PDF types on the clothing colours, (though he can also double up as a generic civilian, security guard, robot handler, prisoner transport officer… he’s quite a flexible little fella!). The model isn’t that great if I’m honest – loads of nice detail, but I suspect it is slightly miscast around the insides of the arms… it doesn’t show too much though, so he’ll do:

Secondly, I have an experiment to share. I returned to a mini that I have started and stopped about three times – I have really struggled to find any motivation to paint this guy for a number of reasons…  1: He’s an Eldar, and I really don’t find the faction that interesting (even in RT). 2: He’s an Eldar, and that means clean lines, crisp colours, sharp highlights… a far cry from my usual weathered look. 3: He’s an Eldar.

BUT… this time I grasped the nettle and decided to get this guy off my bench once and for all. I also had an idea that I wanted to test – I wanted to see if I could get a reasonable coloured metallic look out of the new Citadel gem paints, and this guy got to be the guinea pig. I decided to try the green gloss over a copper base coat on his body armour, and it turned out like this:

Hmmm…  Not sure if I like the effect or not – the paint is basically a coloured gloss and so looks quite thick and gloopy on the model, (though to be fair, I did get a bit impatient with the application, so this is at least partially due to my own heavy-handedness!). I also think that the colour scheme is a bit ‘meh’, which doesn’t really help the overall look. However, looking at the positives, the end result is certainly is metallic and coloured, so I have to conclude that the test is at least a partial success. I am certain that a more patient approach with thinner layers of this gem paint will likely look much better, and I strongly suspect that the blue one would’ve looked better too. I’ll probably test this idea further, (I quite fancy trying a Sigmarine in blue enamelled armour instead of the usual gold), but I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide if you like the result or not :-)

Anyhow, that’s it for another week dudes, have a good one, I’ll catch you on the flip-side.