Thinking Outside the Box

When I got my first shipment of stuff for Dreadball from Mantic Games  and played a few games I was hooked. It's hard to believe it was over three years ago! The models, especially the early seasons, are a little fiddly and some folks don't like them, but I do. I think they are nicely sculpted and affordable, and the game itself is very solid. If anything they're almost too detailed for my skill set to do them justice. Of course being a sports game I needed to come up with team names and colours. They should be bright, with high contrast, and have a logo of some kind. But what to do...? My first team didn't start out with a name, simply a couple of colours that I chose thinking they would look good. I ended up with the "Avion Yellowhawks". Why 'Avion' you ask? Well, because I'm a child of the 80s who grew up watch poor quality animation that were thinly veiled toy commercials. Anyone remember Masters of the Universe ? You know, He-Man and Sk...

When the flooding hit our city last summer, I was evacuated from my home. This meant I didn't have much of my hobby stuff with me while I was displaced. I did have enough time to pack up some clothes and my kitty and still have a few minutes to spare. I grabbed a few paints and my Orx team, knowing that I'd have a fair bit of time to fill while waiting for news about returning home. Being without all of my regular equipment meant either suffering with bad lighting and crappy brushes, or finding some new materials. A trip to Wal-Mart yielded a $17 alternative to my Ott lamp. My two brushes didn't survive the escape from home intact, so a stop at the Michael's next to the Wal-Mart and a 40% off coupon got me a set of nice (albeit synthetic) brushes for $5. Finally the nearby dollar store provided me with the one colour I forgot to bring: black. Some excellent interlocking plastic cups and some small paint trays rounded out my materials. I was ready to go; for about $25 ...

I painted these for the girlfriend a few weeks ago and put together a little shadow box display for her birthday. They went over extremely  well and she said I should post a picture of them. They're on 25mm magnetic round bases and are removable from the display. Before you ask...no I can't tell you where I got them, it's a secret! Yellow...such a great looking colour, such a huge pain in the arse to make look good!

In the last year I have picked up a few items from the SuperFigs line from a local shop. They're inexpensive, generally characterful sculpts and overall quite easy to paint. There are two packs of ninja figures out there, but I was only able to find one locally. Being a child of the 80s I immediately wanted to make warriors from the Foot clan (that's from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for those not in the know) out of them! As I've mentioned about some other figures, the sculpting isn't great, especially in the hands. However the detail is pronounced enough that it makes the models very easy to paint. They are also all one-piece sculpts which means no construction. I like figures that I don't have to put together! The paint colours: - 2:1 mix of GW Codex Grey and black for the clothes - GW Elf Flesh for all of the skin - Codex Grey for the handles of the weapons - GW Fortress Grey for the undergarment sticking out of the jacket - 1:3 mix of Liche Pu...

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...

Even though I've been playing a lot of Star Trek: Attack Wing in the past few weeks, I have also been painting. With Fallcon fast approaching and me slated to be running a tournament / demos for Dreadball , I wanted to get another team finished up. To my disappointment, I wasn't able to conjure up the energy to get them completely done. After almost a week of required rest following Fallcon (required because I caught a brutal cold during the event), I finally mustered up the fortitude to finish another season 1 team: The Royal Eternian Rams ! When I played in my first league early this year (January thru March) I decided to play with this team so that the Forge Fathers would be represented. We had one player drop out and I took up the slack by also playing a human team as well. ( The Avion Warriors have already been showcased on my blog, you can read about them here .) Like most of the other players in that league, none of us had fully painted teams. A few were primed i...

After all of the positive feedback around the interwebs I received about my Skeletor and Panthor figures I was eager to continue on with this project. I don't have a ton of figures for mini  MotU , but there are enough to allow me some options in my gaming. I just recently finished reworking my season 1 corporation team "The Avion Warrors" for Dreadball , so their coach Stratos seemed the easy choice. As the second figure from the old Grenadier line I'd be working on, I had a decent idea of what to expect while painting. The sculpting is good but not excellent. The feet are a little bit too small and blend into the base a bit, and the mould lines are a bit of a pain. However, other than the line that runs along the top of his outstretched left arm, they were fairly manageable. He is certainly recognizable as Stratos, and that is the important thing to me. I had good results priming with gesso on Skeletor so I thought I'd do it again with Stratos. I found that...

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 obscu...

I mentioned acquiring some old 28mm Masters of the Universe figures (produced by Grenadier in the 80s) several months ago, and I've finally gotten a start on them. While working on my Etherian Horde and Avion Warriors for Dreadball  I was thinking about the coach models for my teams. Since I have no Hordak figure at the moment my thoughts immediately turned to Skeletor. My Orx/Goblin team the Snake Mountain Smashers  are going to be Skeletor's, even though thematically it would make more sense for them to be Caligars coached by Whiplash. Perhaps later on I'll do another team for that. The Smashers aren't ready for prime time yet, but their coach is all set for his debut appearance. The paint work was pretty simple. Army Painter Crystal Blue for the skin, a little GW Liche Purple mixed with AP Uniform Grey for the cloth on his armour, and P3 Greatcoat Grey for the leather armour bits. Matte black for the spear shaft and fuzzy shorts, gloss black for his claws. GW ...

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 o...