November 14, 2013

Painting Dreadball - Female Corporation team #1

I already wrote this article once and lost it due to some very odd incident where an article I had edited just before coming back to this one overwrote all my text with its own and then saved itself. Hitting undo did...nothing. So here I am writing it again, in a much briefer form.

Here's the brief painting step-by-step:

First I primed the figure with Vallejo airbrush grey primer, then the faces were painted with GW Elf Flesh.

The rest of the figures painted grey with a mix of 6:6:2:1 of GW Skull White, water, AP Ash Grey and AP Deep Blue. I then added AP Dark Tone ink to the above paint until it was a slightly darker colour than the ash grey and used it as a wash on all of the grey base coat.

The metallic pink base colour is a 2:2:3:3:4 mix of GW Skull White, AP Alien Purple, Vallejo Metal Medium, water and AP Pure Red. Not only was this team an experiment with white, but also creating metallics out of regular colours and some more aggressive mixes to obtain unique colours.

On top of the washed grey base coat I added a first highlight of 6:3:2:.5 mix of white, water, grey and blue. At this point I had a very nice three-colour gradient to work for shadows and depth to the white armour. I finished this off with a pure highlight of white.

The pink armour looked good, but I felt it could use some more depth as it looked rather flat against the white. First off I started with a purplish colour for shadows by mixing 2:1:2:1:2 of purple / AP Dragon Red / water / black and / metal medium. At first this didn't look very good, but I was patient and didn't freak out.

Finally I added a highlight to the pink with a 3:1:1:1 mix of white, purple, pure red and metal medium.

Once all of that was done I painted the visors with some P3 blue, and a highlight of P3 Frostbite. I touched up their lips with a coat of a P3 red/purple colour I can't remember. The skin got hit with a quick GW wash of Devlan Mud.

At this point I realized I had a problem. I'd painted half of the back plates pink and the other half white. That wouldn't work with my white number transfers, so I had to paint the yellow stars on their backs so that the numbers would show up. (Note: the pictures are crap. The foam I used as a backdrop picked up most of the camera's focus.)







This is the only team so far that doesn't fit my Masters of the Universe theme. Laarni wanted a pink team, but since I already had plans for my female corporation and had a second female team pack, this is what we did. She watched a lot of Jem as a kid, so I thought I might as well keep the animated references going and present to you: the Synergy City Holograms!

3 comments:

Simon Quinton said...

Very nice they look to! Bad luck with the dodgy edit, done that myself its extremely frustrating!

Obsidian3D said...

Thanks. It's a bit of a shame that the pictures aren't good, because I think they're probably the best team I've painted so far.

Obsidian3D said...

Just as a brief addendum: I played a game using the Holograms yesterday, and it was the shortest game I've ever played. The initial launch on the first rush (mine) ended up with the ball way down in the opponent's end. I was able to pick it up and score a 3-point strike on my first rush. In the fifth rush I was able to steal the ball, dash into the bonus hex and score a 4-point strike (using only one die!) to win the game in a landslide.

It'll never happen again, but it was quite the debut game for the ladies in pink and white!