I messed up a little bit with the blue cloth here. It had been shaded the same as the rest of the model and I wanted to make it look a little different so I took the Guilliman Blue glaze and just went over the top part. When I was done, it looked kind of cool with a muted blue at the bottom and a strong blue at the top.
Unfortunately, the more I looked at it, the more it was backwards because the stronger blue looked darker than the muted part, even though the muted part had a lot more black over it.
I added Drakenhof blue wash to the recesses, mainly near the lower part of the base because I wanted it to be brighter at the top. Something about dark bases and eye being drawn upwards? I dunno. My eye is drawn towards that badly done cloth. >.<
I cleaned it up a little bit by doing some lighter blue along the edges of the hexagon pattern of the cloth. Oddly, the second photo looks a lot darker, but it’s actually much lighter since it’s been highlighted with white!
Lastly, I found this photo I’d uploaded some time ago and apparently didn’t post, so here it is. Drones!
This is a super cool little kit! After the tournament the other week I wanted to get up to a good 1000 point list so maybe our local community can play that level.
It pretty obviously shares one of its sprues with the C3M4 combat drone, so folks are asking if my M4 is “pregnant” since this thing trades shooting power for the ability to transport.
Here are the common vs T7 specific parts laid out. The top turret is different, since this one doesn’t mount a plasma cannon, as is the “belly”.
This was an excellent kit to put together. The joins are all really well done, with no gaps to fill and all the “boxes” (the front, the middle) fit together really well. What few mold lines I found (I’m miserable at finding mold lines…) were mostly along edges that you were going to glue together, and at worst were along a non-detail edge. Some of the detail is a little soft on the belly and turret, but the common sprue is very crisp and the softness doesn’t look like it will be noticeable when I’m done.
I don’t know why they did this, but the hole in the model where the flying stand goes is partially filled in. I didn’t want to glue the flying stand on, and with this blockage the drone was back-heavy and wouldn’t stay up on the stand. It was fairly easy to clear the blockage, which allowed the stand to fit snuggly into the model so it would stand up without being permanently attached.
I think my only real complaint was given to me by Clark — that it doesn’t come with a batter drone. The kit comes with a spotter drone (which I have a million of) and a shield drone (which is very useful), but the unit can take a batter drone and I wouldn’t have minded getting one here, since they provide everything else!
I hope you can tell, I love the hell out of this model! I’m really looking forward to painting it, but I think I have a couple other things that need doing first. I signed up for a Malifaux league, so I’m assembling a new model to play with…
Unlike the rest of my Antares, I’m hoping to take this Nuhu Mandarin a little slower. So just a very careful recessed layer of Nightshade, and some Sepia in the rocks.
Then onto painting the Chaos Dwarf I raised from the dead during my game against Chris. Similar to the orc, he’s just a zombie. But the opportunity to get models from my opponent and paint them in my scheme is delicious. (I got this unpainted dwarf from Chris, it’s not an actual member of his team…that I know of).
He’s following the shaded basecoat plan of the rest of the team. Sotek Green, Dheneb Stone, Fluoro Yellow, all mixed up with Dheneb Stone and White where appropriate. I painted his skill on his base because I had the Dheneb out. 🙂
I think this is the only time I’ve ever painted a dwarf.
Today one of our club members held a Beyond the Gates of Antares tournament. I got into this game because I had the itch for something a little more “massed battle” than Malifaux and Blood Bowl, but not a GW game. I looked briefly at Bolt Action, but to much Real Life in my Fantasy makes me a little uneasy.
If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know I’ve been busy working on an army. It was 750 points, roughly, which was how many points the event was. We had 6 people to start, and got to 7 (someone sat out) mid-day. The plan was to have 8, but the 8th got busy…something about his girlfriend needing to go shopping or something.
We played 3 games and they were relatively quick. We played scenarios 3, 5 and 6 out of the main rulebook. In short — “get to the other side”, “defend objectives” and “take a thing from the center”.
I took some photos after I got destroyed in my first game. I learned a lot about mortars in that first game, and about how they are supposed to be used. Followed by some bad luck with my own mortars — the first was destroyed in an unlucky 10, and the second spent the entire game trying to recover from a Down result that it just couldn’t shake.
The photo just above this line, at the bottom left, is the mortar that just wouldn’t “go”.
I learned some important things about the game, and my army in particular:
It’s nice to have portable shields (those blue template things), but it’s not as useful to need them to be portable and have them on your long-range artillery. There are other units that can take the shields, and I’m going to look into them as options. Perhaps a General Purpose Drone with a Batter Drone — 40 points for an extra dice (tempo) and a portable shield.
Having no units that can move any faster than 5″ and still be effective, is a real pain. You can see below, it’s a foot-slogging army. Scenario 3 needs you to literally run across the table. Scenario 6 needs you to run in and then out again. Scenario 5, which we all think we messed up on, requires the attacker to run across an open field towards the defenders. Faster can mean moves faster — like jump infantry or bikes — or it can mean has more actions per turn — like tanks. I don’t know which direction I’m going to initially go, but it’s nice to see the use of each.
I lost game 2 horribly, and took no photos of it. Every single attacker felt it was a super lame scenario. The defenders got to place 3 pieces of terrain on their side of the table, along with 3 objectives, and then 3 pieces of terrain on the attackers side of the table. The 3 pieces on my side were all hills, which are True Line of Sight in this game. So I had nothing to hide behind while my gun-line opponent shot me to death. Maybe some trees?!
Game 3 was great. I played against another fellow who had lost both of his games. 😛 It was a “run in and out again” scenario, and we both had some great tactics and bluffs and it just really felt like there was a back-and-forth, the kind that makes for a great game. This photo is of my troops lined up behind a shield, looking for a good moment to grab the prize!
At the end, every one got a special edition Concord model (shown in metal below) and a Ghar battle suit sprue (which I don’t know what I’m going to do with). I won Best Painted, which in this case is also known as Only Painted. 😛 It’s such a small community and everyone is just starting out with it and I guess they all just don’t have the same “if you’re playing in a tournament, it’s gotta be painted” mentality I do.
Lastly, here’s a photo of us poking fun at the special edition model. The model looks very much like it’s on one knee taking a selfie, so we all mimicked it for this photo (not a selfie…)
This photo is suspiciously similar to this one. With the unpacking slowing down at home, we have more time to get back into our regular “wife watches TV while I paint” routine!
Nothing new, paint scheme-wise on these guys. Just the more I paint the same models, the more you get to know the ins-and-outs of common features. They all have these bits of leg armour that I’ve had a hell of a time getting shaded correctly, and the more I did it the more the shading just seemed to work out.
If you’re near Vancouver, Canada you should come to the CHOP! of Antares tournament this weekend. Here’s a Facebook event with some details. These guys are the last models in the 750 list I have planned.
My list is something like this:
3x Strike Squads with Plasma Lance, Spotter Drone 125 each = 375
Strike Command Squad with Medi-Drone, 2 extra troopers = 174
2x Support Team with X-Launcher, All munitions, Batter Drone, Spotter Drone 85 each = 170
Which is 719 points. I think I have another roster at work that finishes off the last 30 points, but if it doesn’t look awesome I’ll be heading into the Army Options section of the book to find something to use there!
This army is not at all optimized for the scenarios. We’re playing scenario 3, which needs fast moving models and I don’t have any and I know it, because I’ve played scenario 3 a bunch. But I didn’t want to buy more models until I’d played with what I had. 🙂
These guys have been primed for a while, but I have a tournament next week and have to finish a few more models!
Nothing new in the paint scheme, just a repeat of previous work. Made even less precise by the moving anxiety and new surroundings and bleh.
I have a lot more space in our new home, so I’m hoping to get some of my photography stuff set up somewhere to maybe get back to taking the nicer photos I was doing a year ago before I got lazy!
The X-Launcher is excellent. 40 points base and it provides a lot of excellent support in the form of overhead fire. There will likely be two of them in my list, to provide back-up as they aren’t terribly accurate.
Also pictures are 3 spotter drones, mandatory in many squads because of their ability to re-roll to hit and their cheapness. A medi-drone which can be taken by my command squad, and allows me to re-roll armour saves (“Res”) within a distance (I think 6″?). Lastly on the left is a gun drone. No idea why I painted this guy, I think I picked up the wrong drone because my list doesn’t currently have any gun drones in it. 😛
Shown here are the 3 latest drones I painted – 2 spotter drones and 1 light support drone, done using the same technique as the Strike Squad the other day. It’s good, a lot less frustrating, less layers and more satisfying.
Behind them, are the drones I assembled. 1 nano drone for the NuHu, 2 shield drones, 2 gun drones, 1 medi drone and 3 spotter drones. It’s a little cloud of drones around the Nuhu, since all but 1 of those extras drones can be taken by her!
This latest Strike Squad is coming along much better than the rest. I started with white primer, then painted Ulthuan over the entire model, as I’ve done before.
The difference with this batch, is that instead of doing a wash layer then highlighting up, I painted the Drakenhof shade very carefully into the recesses. This allowed the white layer to be easier, since it was mostly just painting over the first Ulthuan, rather than needing a restorative layer of Ulthuan to bring it back.
I think they’ll need some Ulthuan to clean up the wash edges a bit more, and then I’ll do another thing of white at the top highlights again. But first, I’ll go into the deep recesses with Nuln Oil to deepen them a bit. When playing with the other squads, I found the ones with the darker edges looked better and wanted to go back on the lighter ones with more black.
I did an order from Warlord games and it arrived in less than 10 business days which was awesome! I picked up a NuHu to lead my troops, and an X-Launcher squad to get some more tactical flexibility when shooting those awful Ghar.
I also bought 2 packs of assorted drones, since I need a bunch of batter, shield, gun and medi drones around the army to get things done.
The Warlord metals have this awful thick “plate” of metal attached to their feet. I tried to hide it as best I could with assorted rocks and Vallejo texture paint, but I think I haven’t done as good a job as could be done. The NuHu is pretty good, but the Support team is iffy in places. Not certain what to do with them.
Ulthuan, with much less water. This is the start of the clean-up pass.
White, in 2 layers.
Still don’t like it as much.
I think I’m better served by being more careful at the washing phase. Just the one Ulthuan Gray layer, then careful application of blue, then black and then cleanup then white.
But that’s 500 points of Concord painted for Beyond the Gates of Antares!
Just a quick couple colours after yesterday. I did two layers of white, which were both mixed with more water than I had mixed with the Ulthuan earlier in these guys.
I tried to paint “gems” (lenses) for the first time…I’m going with ever. I didn’t do a very good job of them, but some ‘ardcoat fixed a bunch of problems. 😛
There are two big visual differences between these guys and the test squad.
First, the drones look cleaner to my eyes. The whites look cleaner, which can be attributed to having gone less dark in the initial wash. I think for the next squad of 5, I’ll definitely do a coat of Ulthuan, then wash the recesses only with blue, then Ulthuan to clean up, then some spot black in the recesses, then Ulthuan to clean up, then white (and as many whites as necessary). I think it’ll be easier (although it reads more difficult!) and cleaner.
Second, and this is super weird, but the bases are totally different. I used a Vallejo Surface Primer to prime the drone bases because I didn’t want to spray the flying stands, but used GW white primer (which is excellent, by the way) on the models and the squad. The drone bases almost look fluorescent! They’ve got this odd bright glow to them that isn’t there on the squad bases. I don’t think it’ll be noticeable unless you’re really picky (or you watched the process of trying to dull them…like I did) but it was weird to see the difference between the two “whites”.
