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GZG’s Grav Mini Drones

Hello. I noted a few days ago that I was painting GZG’s Grav Mini Drones for Reddit’s April mini painting challenge. Well, they are complete.

Cleaned up and ready for primer. As you can see, they are pretty small.

Primed. “But,” you ask, “There are only seven. Where are the other two?” Well, I primed these in the backyard at night, and when they were dry and I was bringing them back into the house, I dropped two in the grass. The very long grass that I have not cut in too long. I went back outside with a flashlight, but I could not find them.

The next morning, in the sunlight, I found them right away. 🙂

Attaching the “post”. I got some acrylic rod at the local hobby store. It cut easy with wire cutters, and super glue worked just fine on it.

Painted. Not the most realistic paint job, but a real drone would have been solid gray or dull black, and where’s the fun in that? Most of the detail is in the bottom. which you really won’t see much of during game play, so I had to do something to give visual interest to the smooth top.

I painted the top first, then the bottom, and then washed the bottom in black. If I was to do it over again, I would had painted and washed the bottom first, then painted the top.

Making bases with Green Stuff. This was the first time I didn’t have to work around the figure’s existing base, so I had a lot more freedom.

Complete.

This base is my favorite. I might go with variations of this base in the future. It looks good, and was fairly easy to make and paint.

What would I do differently? I would take more time making sure the base edges were flat. Some of them had rounded bulges on the edges, and when I painted the edge black, it resulted in some sloppy looking paint jobs.

Reddit’s Monthly Painting Challenge

I’m a redditor. Reddit has several excellent subreddits related to gaming and miniatures. http://www.reddit.com/r/wargames is an especially friendly place for 15mm Sci-Fi gamers.

Anyway, a new subreddit, http://www.reddit.com/r/taleofredditgamers has just been started, and each person states what they will paint, then posts progress reports. The project must be done by the end of the month.

This month I am painting GZG’s Mini Grav Drones, and I’ve already run into problems. 🙁

Adventures in Basing

Last week I tried my hand at making bases with Green Stuff. I was painting GZG’s 15mm Ravagers Pack A and I really wanted to make nice bases. I had some Green Stuff freshly delivered from Amazon, and I decided to give it a try.

I hadn’t really planned ahead at all, so I was improvising. All in all, I think it came out pretty well.

Here’s all 8 figures in Ravagers Pack A, 4 models, 2 of each. I plan to use these for role playing, so I wanted to make them different – like the two women were different women, despite the same pose.

Here’s the four figures I concentrated on painted and washed.

This is the disposable wet palette I use. A paper towel, soaked in water, with parchment paper over it. The kind of parchment paper I found in my kitchen, on a roll. It will keep the paint wet and ready to use for hours. Thanks to Rottenlead and his excellent videos for introducing me to the wet palette concept.

I use 0.8mm plywood bases, 20mm diameter, from Litko.net. I put their “Heavy Duty Magnetic Base Bottoms” underneath them. Above is the plywood base only.

Those are the plywood base with the magnetic bottom attached. Putting the minis on a stick with poster sticky stuff during painting is something else I learned from Rottenlead’s videos.

Glued to the base with super glue. That glue in the picture is the best. The glue is very thick, and the squeezable sides give great control. “Gel Control” is a very good description.

Green Stuff on the base and textured. I used some of the metal mesh I use for chain link fences (article coming soon), some sewing thread to press straight lines, and the texture from one of my metal files to press the details into the Green Stuff. You can see on the black haired woman that some metal dust came off my file. I later used some spare Green Stuff to clean my files to almost new. 🙂

The file. You can see the textures I used.

The finished bases. I used Citadel’s ‘Ardstuff to make them glossy. Two coats. My drybrushing of the yellow could have been better. 🙁

I think it was a good first try. I have a ton of ideas on what to do better next time.

Sandbag Terrain Made From Green Stuff

This past week, when I wasn’t at Kingdom-con, I made some sandbag terrain from Green Stuff. I’m not going to get into how to work with Green Stuff, the link I provided covers that.

I’ve never worked with Green Stuff before. It wasn’t too difficult. I made 2 different sandbag walls, using 2 different methods.

I was making some bases for Khurasan’s Female Auxiliaries and I had some Green Stuff left over, so I made the first sandbag wall. A few days later, I made the second one. The first one, I kept the sandbags connected in a row, not cutting all the way through Green Stuff. For the second set, I decided to make individual sandbags, and stack them.

I think the individual sandbags looks way better. It didn’t take much longer to do, either.

I have a tool that has a textured grip, so I rolled the grip across the top of the sandbags for texture. Paint, black wash, sepia wash, and a dry brush.

I based them on thick cardboard, because that’s what I have around the house. Vinyl wall spackle mixed with sand in a thin layer on the cardboard, then some sand and very little static grass, since my battle mat is desert themed.

I hope to mess with the Green Stuff some more in the future.

Kingdom-con Day 2 – part 2

I am recovering from last nights Drunk Quest events, slowly.

Saturday at Kingdom-con was much busier. All the tables in the wargame room were being used, and there were a lot more people around in general. Parking was tight, but I eventually found a spot.

As I said last night (this morning?) I played a lot of Drunk Quest. It’s a very fun game. I also played a demo of Flames Of War. That was really fun. We played with the figures provided by the Open Fire! starter pack. I played the Allies, and I had 2 groups of tanks, and 1 group of infantry. Tom, who was hosting the demo, played the Germans, and he had 2 groups of infantry and 1 group of tanks.

The figures are plastic, 15mm. I was very impressed with the details, and the paint job and basing on them was really good. The game took about 2 hours, and I really enjoyed it. Tom plays regularly at a local game store, and I might go over there and play again. Here’s some pics: