Painting Dreadball - The Etherian Horde

You know what's really sad? I've got all four season 1 Dreadball teams in varying states of painted-ness, but none of them are actually finished. My corporation team was pretty much finished until I messed them up, but I'll be posting more about them soon enough.

Anyway, after over two weeks of being displaced from my home I was finally given the go ahead to return Sunday. With hot water and electricity restored I had to begin cleaning unspeakable organisms from my fridge and freezer, start vacuuming, do dishes that had long languished in the sink, and of course...laundry. All the stuff people love to do right?!

With most of that complete or in progress I sat down to some (in my opinion) much-deserved personal time. I flipped the TV on and broke out some figures that I thought would be relatively quick and easy to work my way through: Season 2's robot team!

These things look a lot like the robotic Horde trooper minions that work for Hordak (from Masters of the Universe / She-Ra). Since they can transform, or at least Hordak can from what I remember...it seemed to be the obvious choice to make them The Etherian Horde!

I had put the figures together several weeks ago, but hadn't cleaned them up yet. It took me over an hour to remove most of the mold lines from my dozen digitally-inclined Dreadball miniatures. I'm sure the final few could have been done better, but by then I simply wanted it to be finished. Cleaning models is one of the components of the hobby that I don't exactly love. If I had one complaint about the Dreadball models it would be that the lines often cross details on the chests and faces of the figures. It can be dealt with, but it's time-consuming to do.

With the models finally ready for paint I sprayed them with some Army Painter plate metal colour primer. After an hour or so to dry and set, and I was finally going to get started! The first thing I did was touch up the primer coat on the undersides that the primer spray couldn't reach...and then I broke them up into batches.

The robot team always starts with six Jacks on the pitch so I started with those. I painted one figure from start to finish so that I knew what I was going to get, or at least have a general idea for the rest of them. Once I had a baseline idea of what I wanted I finished up all six Jacks. The paint scheme is easy: Plate Metal primer/base coat, AP Daemonic yellow for the eye lenses, GW Mephiston Red for all the red bits and GW Abaddon Black for the black parts.

The Strikers were next, as they're the smallest and would have the pickiest detailing...and I knew my hands would only get shakier as I went along. It was while doing these that I hit upon a chest 'bat' design that I really liked. It resulted in my going back to the jacks and redoing theirs as well. The extra five minutes was easily worth it in retrospect.

Finally came the Guards. These guys look the part with more armour and bigger size over the other two robot model types. I think it's a cool touch that their glove is actually integrated into their backs, showing that they do indeed transform from role to role.

As a final touch I coated all of the figures with some GW Badab Black wash then did some highlighting with the metal and red to pick out the details. I certainly could go over them again with an even brighter highlight, but I don't think that's necessary. All that's left is to give them all a liberal coat of matte varnish. The figures for Dreadball get handled a lot, so it only makes sense to protect them.

I haven't painted the robot MVP Firewall yet. Since he'll play for anyone I'm not certain if I want to use the same colour scheme on it or not. It'll take some thinking first. I'm leaning towards an inverted scheme with black as the primary colour instead of silver.

The other issue I've got is the numbering on the figures. Due to their ability to transform, any of the jacks (assuming they're numbered 1 thru 6) could turn into a guard OR a striker. If I apply decals directly to the figures that could pose some problems. The jacks I think can have numbers directly on them, but the other roles perhaps not. It does pose a bit of a quandary...