Blood Bowl Part 2

07.14.2022

I stuck to what I said in my last post and actually finished touching up the glossy bits on the Blood Bowl team! And it took less time than I had originally feared.

With glossy metal parts and battle blood splatter applied sparingly, I now proclaim this Blood Bowl team ready for blood bowling. There's still some secondary pieces I've got to ready - like a ball or three - but those are more along the lines of whipping out for fun as opposed to cranking through a team. At least that's my approach.

Next up will be something random which doesn't constitute a lot of similarly painted minis. Considering my year has been made up of this Blood Bowl team and a whole lot of alien zombies, I have a desire to not paint the same colors in mostly the same places over and over again. It might be time to do another terrain/building piece?

Permalink Blood Bowl gaming miniatures

Blood Bowl Part 1

07.11.2022

When last I posted I foreshadowed the next post of magnetization and Warhammer 40K minis. It turns out I'm a big fat liar because after 6 weeks of complete silence I'm going to post about non-magnetized Blood Bowl minis while completely ignoring any past foreshadowing. Pastshadowing? Retconning my posts!

At some point this year, my good close personal associate Charles Jr and I decided that we would play Blood Bowl. To be honest, we decided that we would prep to play Blood Bowl, as my joy of gaming for the past handful of years has been in the painting and making of scenery for games which I may or may not play. Now we could prep and not play a game together! The logic makes sense if you read the sentence properly, just trust me.

Now with a common focus, we each stepped out of our comfort zone. Charles Jr purchased the basic rules that came with 2 teams. I purchased a separate team (ok, 2) which I would prepare. Then, 6 weeks ago, I started painting my team of 12 Khorn Whatever-Games-Workshop-Calls-Them. 6 weeks. 2 minis/week (so far). I can whip out a mini or 3 in a day, plus a day for primer to dry and another for base-tweaking to dry. What's taking so long?

I thought I would try the "Don't Get In A Damn Hurry"™ method. We're not in a rush to play a game, so why not take some time and try out some of those things I never do, but I'm supposed to.

WASHING SPRUES - The first step for anything that needs to be glued together is to wash the parts so as to get rid of factory residue, like mold release. I'm not sure my painting is good enough to notice imperfections caused by this, but sure, why not. I washed the plastic bit in warm soapy water and then rinsed them off, followed by letting them air dry for another day.

SPRUE SNIPPERS - While I've gotten better about using proper cutting implements instead of twisting plastic bits off sprues, this time I ONLY used those snips.

SANDING AND SCRAPING - With some sanding strips and scraping with a semi-dull razor blade, I went over any burrs from the above snipping along with mold lines and tried to smooth things out. Enough dusty plastic came from this round that the washing phase was repeated.

PIN TO BASES - These minis had some very action-oriented poses, most of which didn't allow must super-glue friendly surface area between foot and base. Now armed with a new pin vise (see previous magnetization foreshadowing post that I no longer claim exists) and some paper clips, I successfully pinned my minis!

PAINT AND ADHERE HEADS LATER - I knew gluing on the heads before priming everything and then trying to paint details wasn't going to work with the angles I would have to work the brush into. I've never painted parts and then put them together. Except for some tones not matching as well I liked, it worked out ok. It worked a lot better than it would have ended up if I had glued the heads on first.

MICRO SOL AND MICRO SET FOR DECALS - While I used these solutions, I did something wrong as in the end the decals still show the decal part instead of blending in. I think I didn't use enough Micro Sol.

Now, after 6 weeks, I have a team of 12 painted, along with 2 coins. I haven't read any rules so I don't know what anything is named or does (especially those coins). While the team is painted (and sealed), the metal parts still need to get a splash of hardcoat to be glossy. For fun, I thought I would post pics as the final glossy bits are glossified - which will hopefully continue over the course of this week.

This post also gets all of the various in-progress pics I was sending Jer for the past month and a half

Permalink Blood Bowl gaming miniatures

The Final Trio

05.24.2022

It appears that painting 3 alien zombos takes a lot less time than painting 20.

The final 3 baddies from Zombicide Invader are done! 130. Done. Maybe not the prettiest, but done.

Although I painted this mold/pose previously, I wanted to try out a little of what I had learned over the past couple of months. My meaty-muscle paint scheme came back in. There was another Color Shift color I wanted to try out - Solar Anomaly, which kind of looks like glittery pale pink nail polish when you first apply it. For each iteration of these beasts I've had a hard time mentally differentiating between bone and armor, so I leaned toward more bone bits this time.

In the end, these 3 were more colorful than their predecessors. Maybe even on the verge of gaudy, but that's also when I remember that the purpose of painting all of these was to test out some color combinations and techniques, which "don't do that again" is valid. Gaudy, but good enough for an alien monstrosity.

Now on to the 40K minis I was going to tackle next. After the pin vise arrives. Magnetic foreshadowing!

Permalink gaming miniatures Zombicide Invader

The Biggest Batch of Alien Zombies

05.21.2022

In Feb I posted my first progress on Zombicide Invader. My intentions were (1) to use it as a paint test for some techniques to use on the (movie) Aliens I'd picked up, and (2) paint an "army" since it looked like a game Jerry and Keith might also enjoy. 127 Alien Zombos later I (1) finally tried out one of those painting things I aimed to attempt, and (2) know that I should never attempt to paint an army, especially if I'm making up my own color schemes.

My bane for this project over the last 3 months has been color choice(s). I do ok if I have a template or a picture to use as a reference. For the Zombicide pics, I was painting nothing similar to anything I found online. After all, these were practice for something else which I was wanting to hone up my skills and do a specific thing. I've never had much of an eye for non-human figures, and here I learned that it took a couple of batches of priming and painting details to discover what some of those details might be - muscle? skin? armor? other?

I got a little side tracked from my Aliens start to trying to get meaty-muscle colored right. I came close, and then would veer away. Muscle is red, with white strands of tendon and fat running through it. An easy concept to say, not so easy to pull off, especially without going through multiple layers of shading and highlights. I finally gave in that alien muscle is not red.

My final formula for the basic color scheme finally came together well enough that I'm not frustrated with the end result.

• Good old Tamiya fine primer (grey)
• Citadel Horror Pink - cover everything with the base for my "meat" layer
• Wash with either Citadel Orange, or Fleshshade + Yellow. It turns out close to the same either way.
• Armor/hard bits alternated with Vallejo German Grey or Citadel Contrast Black, depending on my mood.
• Wash those bits with good old Nuln Oil
• Just to make the heads different, I decided to go an old fashioned Skull route with whatever shade of white I grabbed, and then the 50/50 mix of Fleshshade and Sepia washes.

And that was the majority of my painting for the 20-odd minis that I cranked out. The only reason I ended up working on so many at once is that I would dollop some paint into a pallet (old fashioned, scoops to hold paint) and wanted to use what I had before it dried out. That's also why there's 3 Alien Zombos left to paint - pallet ran dry before I got to them.

There was 1 last trick I finally got around to trying out. On the more cockroach looking aliens, I added some (Green Stuff World) Color Shift paint. This is the paint I wanted to test for (movie) Aliens use, albeit a different color. It was a good test, as I learned you really have to glob this stuff on to get the color shifting effect. Globbing on works well for smooth surfaces, but not so much for intricate or detailed areas. It also looks a little weird when sealed with matte varnish - kind of an old, tarnished metal, but a follow up layer of gloss shines it all up.

There are still 30 minis left for Zombicide Invader - 3 aliens, 27 hero/human/robot thingies. I'm planning to take a little break and switch over to some prep work for Blood Bowl, which Jerry and I have been threatening to get in to. Jer's even purchased the base set, which has set the virtual pun-laden ball in motion.

Permalink gaming miniatures Zombicide Invader

Glossy Alien Zombies

05.11.2022

Let's speed paint the whole Zombicide alien game, I said. It'll go quick, I said. It's all basically the same.

3 months later....

Ok, more xenomorph monster zombies painted. This time there was a better tweak to meaty flash - Citadel Pink Horror (plus glaze medium) atop a grey primer seems to work. I added Citadel's crimson wash, which after the fact makes is all too dark & purple. To try to give the meat a wet look and armory-bits a hard/metal look, I added a gloss sealant instead of my normal matte. And boy is it glossy.

Close up, well, these don't look too good. These are definitely table-top quality. Far, far away table-top. I'm not sure why I'm consistently having a hard time getting a decent paint job on the minis for this game.

I keep all of my minis in Feldherr boxes. There still 31 aliens left to paint after this batch, and I think everything might fit into 1 box.

Along the way has also been some desk optimization. All of my art/hobby pens and brushes are now easily accessible and not as easily forgotten. I came across 22 paint brushes that were still affixed to their Hobby Lobby hanging-cards. I've also got a spot for sanding sticks so that I won't keep forgetting that I have them. All of this is thanks to a new desk I got from Amazon that features an extra 10" of desktop length, plus it's 24" deep instead of 21". I'm much more excited about the desk/layout than getting these minis painted.

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