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Craig

Dreadball Base Coats

Posted on January 4, 2013

As no one provided any suggestions on what colours to use on my two Dreadball teams, I decided that bright green and bright blue were the right choices.

DONE.

Kidding. (Although I would have loved some feedback…sometimes a guy just wants to know that people are reading!) Mr. Wappel writes about how he does his basecoat in really bright colours, because he shades the colour down afterwards. I thought I’d try that on these models. So I primed them all white, and then did an airbrushed basecoat of Goblin Green and Meredius Blue.

I’m planning on focusing on the human team first. Think I’ll water down the Dark Angels Green and see where I end up. Nice thing about these models – they are all armor. No silly straps or faces to get in the way.

Work-in-progress

Dreadball Team Colours

Posted on December 28, 2012

A quick post to ask a quick question —

What colours should I paint my two teams?

I’m drawing a blank. I don’t want to do the box team colours, although red for the Orx/Goblins (aka, Marauders) could be good. I don’t like the shiny silver for the human team. I was contemplating a white. I bought a new airbrush to replace my broken one, and I primed them white, so bright colours should be relatively easy.

Give me your opinions.

Work-in-progress

Dreadball Models

Posted on December 25, 2012

Mantic isn’t blowing me away with the quality of their sculpts. Most of them are alright, some of them are just plain strange. Here’s a play-by-play.

The humans are much smaller than you would have expected, if you play certain other games. There are 3 poses total. The game comes with 10 models – 4 strikers, 2 guards and 4 jacks. The strikers have slightly different poses because their right arm is either behind their backs or behind and to the side (the latter shown here). I think the strikers look pretty bad ass.

The orx (yes…) are identical torsos, but interestingly have two different arm/head positions which serve to make it look like there is actually two poses. These guys are mean and brutish looking, which is their job, but I’m not certain about the face helmet thing. You get 4 of them in the box.

The goblins have two different poses and you get 6 of them in the box. The arms from the different poses do fit on each other, but be careful – the guy leaning back (on the left) will fall over if you give him the right arm from the other guy. On my models, their attached-bases were warped a bit, so I had to cut it to glue them flat to the clear acrylic.

Wildcard is an MVP that comes free if you buy the box from a store. The concept art is sexy as hell, but the model is a little strange. Both arms stretched out and one leg crooked backwards. She’s kicking something? She’s…running at something? She’s throwing something? It’s not a kicking game, that I know of… I think I like her, but that’s despite the strange pose. She’s apparently a “season 2” MVP, so her rules aren’t finalized yet.

Lastly the refbot and ball. The refbot is a robot that has a face on both sides of the head. The ball is a ball.

The models were relatively easy to assemble. Very little flash/mold lines (I saw one post that had 3mm deep of it). Each model is at least 3 parts – usually a torso, arm and head. Some models have two arm pieces. From this set, there doesn’t feel like a lot of conversion opportunity.

Despite the “meh” sculpting, I took a look around the Mantic site and saw some pretty damn cool models. I’ll have to head back there for potential conversion ideas…

Work-in-progress

Terrain – Oops

Posted on December 22, 2012

I just found this draft that I had started in August…

After Astronomi-con, I’m usually pumped to work on some terrain. That tournament makes me neeeeed terrain. This year I got pumped to make some before the actual tournament, so I got some work done early.

Obviously since you didn’t see this, and I don’t recall where these pieces are, it didn’t go that far…but here it is.

I use MDF/hardboard for the bases. I have a Dremel that I cut it all out with and then power-sand the edges so they are smooth. Glue gun and kids popsicle sticks from Michaels make the frame.

I did this one a few years ago when I came back from my first Astro. 😛 I had wanted to make three, so when I sat down to make some more, I made 2 more.

At this point the two new ones are completely made and have a little bit of paint on them, but I got excited about other projects…some Forge World, some bases, the stegadon…Dreadball…I love my life and all the little projects…but sometimes it gets to be to much. 😛

Work-in-progress

Sculpey!

Posted on December 21, 2012

More inspiration from my new hero! He uses the baked sculpey in a lot of different ways…but I’m just a beginner, so I decided to make stone blocks with it. I didn’t screw up…but I didn’t do it right either.

You can buy this stuff from Michaels for a few bucks, in any colour you like. I choose white…because…I did.

Open the box and it’s this strange stuff that’s a little brittle to start with. Roll it around and when it warms up in your hands it becomes super pliable. I spent a few minutes shaping it into a long and flat piece of stone for my stegadon Engine of the Gods howdah. When I was happy with the general shape, I used my regular GW sculpting tool and some water to flatten out the fingerprint marks. Then I took the end of one of my paint brushes and rolled it around to create a smooth stone-like texture for it.

Cat hair comes free of charge on all my models…

This part was all easy…

It says to turn the oven at 275F and bake for 15 minutes. So I put it on a piece of aluminum foil and tossed it in there. 15 minutes later, I pull it out and check the consistency. Pretty soft…it says you should bake longer for thicker pieces, which this is, so I put it back in for another 15. 45 minutes later I pull it out and it’s still soft. So I turn the temperature up. 15 minutes later, it’s smoking. But still soft. Another 15 and it’s still smoking…and still soft. I think it was in the oven for almost 2 hours by the time I was done. Still soft. But I had to go to bed. It was hard in the morning and it looked like this.

This thing is going to be so awesome…

It’s supposed to be plain white…but it’s stone-like, and it’ll be painted over, so I call it done. 😛

I did two more pieces the next day (not shown) and put them on for the higher temperature for 15 minutes and they were smoking when I pulled them out. Slightly less dark, but still more pink than white. So…maybe 275F at 15 minutes is the right thing to do.

Work-in-progress

Dreadball!

Posted on December 19, 2012

No photos right now, it’s late, but I wanted to write.

I picked up Dreadball last night from Strategies Games. When I first saw the Kickstarter, I wasn’t that impressed. Models looked “ok”, I didn’t need another game to back that I was going to ignore. On the last day of the KS, I saw someone raving about it and decided to drop $10 on a PDF of the rules. $10 is nothing, and I like the idea of KS, so…there I was.

Weeks later I’m freaking stoked about this game. I have to say it, and I’m sorry that I have to say it. I love Blood Bowl. Love it. And while this game isn’t Blood Bowl, it’s close enough that I’m mentally comparing it anyway.

And let me tell you, that this game reads like it’s going to be awesome.

I assembled the models tonight. The ads claim you can pull the models out and be playing in 10 minutes. I have a little chart for you to compare “market speak” against reality in this regard:

You don’t care about mold lines, heads or arms. 10 minutes. Yes, it can be done. The models have legs and torsos and bases as a single piece. No sprue, no cutting. Pull them out of the box, open the bag, organize them and go.
You don’t care about mold lines. Probably 30 minutes.
You care about it all. Took me 2 hours, both teams including the included Wildcard MVP.

I’m going to finish reading the rules on the bus tomorrow and try to convince someone to play with me tomorrow night.

So stoked!

(now I need team names and colours…:D…and a new airbrush since I broke mine a few weeks ago…and time to post photos of the stegadon in progress…and to wrap presents…oy…)

Featured Images

Stegadon Base: 3

Posted on December 9, 2012

I thought I was done after the last post. But a few things happened. First – I let it sit on my desk for a few weeks. And second, I’ve been reading Mr. Wappel’s blog daily, and he’s been painting some lava bases. My base is mostly black. It’s not mostly lava. There’s no majesty to it! The combination of looking at it every day, plus looking at a better done one every day, made me come back to it.

The first thing I did was re-lighten the lava parts. Last time I had black washed this section to give it some depth, but it was to dark. So I heavily watered down some Cygnus Yellow and some Blazing Orange and went to town in the cracks. I brought the orange up the edges of the cracks a bit, trying to bring some more light to these sections, since they are pretty small compared to the rest of the base.

The next thing I had to do was to give some variation to the black parts. I had previously painted this with two different colours of black, but this wasn’t useful at all. I took Khador Red Base, Scorched Brown, Cryx Bane Base and mixed them with a lot of water and washed it over all of the black. Then I added a little bit of the Blazing Orange, trying to bring the lightest parts and the darkest parts together. I still wanted those red and ragged edges, but I wanted more!

I mixed some of the Cryx Bane Base and Bleached Bone and dotted my grey rocks with them. The two greys I had previously used were the same colour, but different shades. Now I have little specks of slightly different colours in these areas, and I think it’s more interesting. I took a similar wash, with less Bone in it and washed the black areas with it, trying to get more “rock” out of it. After I’d done this, I didn’t have enough red, so I washed with Khador Red Base and Scorched Brown again.

Musings & Meta

CHOP!

Posted on November 27, 2012

My gaming club is trying to expand it’s influence a bit and get some more folks out to our gaming events, which happen once a month on a Sunday.

This blog probably reaches about the same audience as my Facebook page, but I thought I’d try here as well. We’re changing our advertising strategy such that Facebook, Twitter and the WCP forums will all be good places to learn about the latest CHOP! event. I know that I never check the WCP forums…but I’m available on Facebook regularly.

I’m writing to link to our new Facebook page – we get fun things once we get 25-30 Likes. 😛 (including a more useable Facebook link…)

Thanks everyone!

Work-in-progress

Stegadon base: 2!

Posted on November 23, 2012

Wanted to take a break from working on my Android app tonight, and thought I could gather the courage to paint my stegadon base. The problem is, that I’m pretty happy with how the sculpting went, so if I screw up the painting it’ll be tragic. Take heart and stare down the enemy!

I started by doing the part I knew I could do. Drybrush a Codex Grey and a Fortress Grey over the rocks. This is the colour scheme of the rest of my bases for my Lizards, so this was a foregone choice. I wanted the volcanic rock area to be mostly black, so I took some P3 paints of Thrallmar and Coal Black and highlighted that up. You can see the last layer of black here quite clearly at the lips of the channels.

Now we get into the scary part. I started with my Raphael brush, but felt it was to big for the job and dropped down to the GW Fine Detail. A good lot of Sunburst yellow later, and I have yellow rivers running through my base.

Next layer was a bunch of watered down Fiery Orange just above the top of the yellow. Because it’s watered, some of it flows into the yellow and the pigment spreads out to be a little transparent. After this dried, there were spots that looked a little “dry”, so I went over it with Badab Black, which I then took a wet brush and spread around in the channel. Effectively I watered down my wash.

Two last layers – a Baal Red wash over the top of the orange and the lip of the channels. This was somewhat plain, and I wanted a more obviously glowing effect. Heavily watered down some Blood Red and painted it over the area I had just washed, which gave a great looking effect!

Overall, I think that the lava looks ok, the big rocks look ok and the volcanic rock looks…eh. But the plus side is that I’ll have a giant dinosaur standing on top of it, so it’ll be fine. 😛 I’m not certain what I would do differently next time. I feel like there is to much black area, and that the bottom of the lava doesn’t look right. Maybe a little bit of water effect? That would be neat. Maybe if I tried to make a flowing texture with the putty? I won’t be doing this again for a while anyway, so it’s not a huge issue. 🙂

What will be interesting…my lizards are traditionally a Shadow Grey. That’s a lot of grey in one spot, even though it’s not the same colour. Any thoughts on how to resolve this problem? I’ll make something up if you don’t. 😛

Later!

Work-in-progress

Stegadon Base: 1

Posted on November 6, 2012

My Lizardmen have sort of a yellow/red and grey colour scheme going on. The idea was that it was volcanic/lava colours, to better blend into their natural environment. I’ve looked into “lava” bases before, and while I was able to find some that looked ok (most of them are for 40k…), I’ve never gone ahead and bought them.

A quick search last week showed me that I might be able to…make them myself. So here I am, testing this idea on the largest base I’ve got.

I started with more cork. After using it on my skirmisher movement trays, I’m pretty impressed with the stuff. It looks like rocks when you’re done! The only concern I still have is longevity – will it all last longer than a few days.

After the cork, I set about trying to emulate this YouTube video on making lava bases.

I got a box of Milliput, so I wouldn’t feel like I was mushing hundred dollar bills onto my base (in the form of GW modelling putty). It has a very different texture than the green stuff I’m used to using – I used the “standard” milliput and it’s much more grainy when you’re mixing it together. Comes off on your hands, almost like a flaky dough.

I mushed it on there and then tried to use my sculpting tool to smooth it all out. That didn’t work, so I ended up wetting my finger and using that. Worried about fingerprints? Me too. But the tool I have is to thin, and so it left edge marks where it depressed into the putty.

After I’d covered the base, I used the tool as shown in the video to cut in and pull the putty apart to create channels. Then I used my exacto blade to cut mini-channels.

Lastly I used some extra putty to build up a step on one of the cork pieces for the stegadon’s back foot – he’s kind of standing on a rock or something.

I want to paint this separate from the model, so now I’m thinking of how to attach them afterwards. Patrick says he hasn’t had any issues with this sort of thing, but I’m thinking I’ll try to pin it, and then glue the pin down after painting.

For colours, I was thinking: the rocks my usual drybrush fortress/codex grey, the puttied ground a darker grey/black and the channels a red/orange. I’m hoping to do some source lighting such that the edges of the channels can “glow” a bit, but we’ll see how successful that is.

I would love if you would give your opinion on colours! What would you do with this?

Thanks for reading!

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