It has been well over a year since I last painted. It’s weird to have a thing that I spent so much time and effort trying to improve become a thing I never do. I’m thinking about trying to get out to Adepticon in 2020, and I remember being crazy excited about all the painting and modelling workshops and now I just…why?
Adepticon. Armada Worlds is there next year. I don’t have a ticket yet, and it’s invite only, but I’ve got 1-2 Primes I’m planning to attend to try to win a ticket, and the Last Chance Qualifier at Adepticon would be fun to play in even if I didn’t make it to the next day.
From there, I start thinking about what makes Adepticon amazing (there’s a lot), and one of the things is all of the crazy cool paint jobs and dioramas and models and such. That leads me to — maybe I should paint my ships?
My thought is that at least one Hammerhead Frigate will appear in almost any fleet I make, so why not try to paint that? I find this photo, which does not help because it’s the wrong scale ship. I find this thread, which does help because, wow.
AND THEN I decide to finally paint a Braha’tok Gunship I bought from Mel’s Miniatures last year, around this time of year, so I can do a test paint.
Here’s an awesome Twitter thread on the Braha’tok, which is a ship I’m sure you’ve never given any thought to it’s existence. It is a neat little ship, and one of the photos in that Twitter thread is the original ILM modellers assembling it very quickly out of a bunch of other model kits they had lying around. Go read the thread if you love modelling and love Star Wars!
I start by building a little table. I’ve really only ever painted Warhammer stuff, so not having a base that I can prime against is weird. It’s made of some wood I found in my bitz box, and has some corners inside it to keep the legs square.
I primed it white, and immediately panicked because it got all primer frosted. >.< Or maybe, it started frosted because the “Mmch” version of this model is pretty frosty already. (a photo of the same model, linked to from the store page) I wish I had bought the non-Mmch version, because photos of Mel’s other stuff look great. Or maybe the 3d printing needs some smoothing done by me? I don’t even know. Here’s a photo of the non-Mmch (I don’t even know what Mmch means) version, also linked to from the store page comments.
Then I started with Codex Grey + Ulthuan Grey (the first bottle of Codex I opened had completely dried up, luckily I had two [or more]). Then just Ulthuan, then White. I want a semi-Clone Wars Republic scheme because I love the orange and white, so painted Troll Slayer Orange and highlighted it up with white.
Then I found my bottle of Nuln Oil had been entirely used/dried up, so I bought a new one and also a Fuegan Orange because I figured the orange shade would be useful. Went in and did Nuln in the recesses and around the bottoms of the rounded shapes, and a bit of the Fuegan in the recesses of the orange pieces.
Crazy frosty, and the detail is really light. I’m not really happy with how it turned out, because of those things and because I don’t really have a lot of freehand skills I could have used to spruce up such a tiny model.
I’m not sure where to go from here, as this experiment is feeling likey a failure and I’m not sure I want to prime and mess up a pricey Hammerhead model. Any thoughts?
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