Painting Dreadball - The Avion Warriors

I have finally finished (re)painting my first season 1 team for DreadBall. In the first league I ran this spring, they were called the Avion Yellowhawks and I won the Trilogy Cup with them! *gasp* *shock*

Then

This was going to be my first serious use of Army Painter Quickshade varnish. However, when I tried out my Soft Tone on a few old Horrorclix using the brush-on method the results were pretty good but turned out 'dirtier' looking than I wanted. The second attempt was with the soft tone varnish on my Judge Dredd zombies, which worked very well but wanting a cleaner look for my team I opted not to pursue it on my Yellowhawks.

With winter weather being cold and snowy (did I mention cold?) during mid-December I couldn't spray prime, so I painted a base coat of white directly onto the figures. It took several coats of thinned down P3 Menoth White to get an even shade but it did work. An unfortunate side effect of all those coats of paint was a bit of obscured detail.

Being a sports team I went for some very vibrant colours on top of the white: blue, silver and yellow. I used Formula P3 Cynar Blue Highlight and Cygnus Yellow for the non-metallics. The metallic detailing is a 1:1 mix of GW Mithril Silver and P3 Quicksilver. I found that the P3 metallic just didn't cover very evenly, and the GW stuff is too thick, so I mixed them together. A few additional drops of Vallejo matte medium and a dash of water rounded out the mix and turned into a really smooth metallic that I quite like the feel of. It's still a touch too thick to use straight out of the pot but works nicely from a wet palette, which I generally wouldn't use for metallic paints.

After all of the block colours were applied I put some of the water transfer number decals on their backs. I'm glad I ordered some extra transfer sheets, because I have enough for all 12 teams. They work very well and look great in my opinion. It would be nice tough if you could order sheets of different coloured decals from Mantic, rather than them all being plain white.

I had also painted the team logo insignia on their shoulder free-hand using P3 Coal Black. A few of them turned out very nicely, others not so much.

To finish everything off I tried three different washes. The first was a gray that I mixed myself, and looked passable on the white, but resulted in a washed out look on the other colours. The second wash I tried was some GW Gryphon Sepia, which was too much of a reddish brown. I hurriedly rinsed that figure in the sink to get it off. Finally I tried GW Badab Black wash, which looked good when it was wet...but looked like utter shit after it had dried. It made all my bright colours look dirty and gross.

Now

In retrospect I should have taken a photo before the washes. In fact I wish I had one just so that I could remember how nice they looked before I went and fucked them all up. I tried going back over the yellow on a few figures but it just didn't work (mottled greenish yellow is NOT what I wanted).

So I still need to find a way shading bright colours. Recently I saw some videos about oil and watercolour washes, which might be better suited to shading lighter colours because you can wipe off the extra after it dries. I may try that out some time in the future.

After all that work and the destruction of my beautiful yellow I decided to just ditch the yellow entirely. I went over the yellows with GW Mephiston Red and renamed them the Avion Warriors. I still have to redo all of the shoulder logos, but otherwise they're as finished as they're going to get. The red fits their name and coach better than the yellow, but I still miss the yellow.

I had a ref-bot sitting around on my painting table that also got finished during the red-redo. She looks decent enough although I couldn't get the white smooth enough to look like lacquered armour as I'd planned.

"Ladies and gentlemen! Please welcome the reigning Trilogy Cup champions, the Avion Yel...er, Warriors!"