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ImperialStarShop Mat Review

Posted on August 13, 2021

A couple weeks ago I won a brand new Star Wars Armada gaming mat in a radio contest put on by B.I.G. Unnamed Armada Podcast and ImperialStarShop. I feel like I owe those people some advertising, so here’s a review! I know that all parties involved in me getting this mat will read this, and I hope to provide an honest, but not brutally honest, review based on my opinions and experiences.

I’m not a gaming mat connoisseur, but I’ve used a couple in my life.

Here’s some pictures.

TL;DR: Buy this mat, it’s pretty great.

The first thing I notice is that this is a heavy mat. The box it comes in feels like the right weight, but it isn’t until you take the mat out that I noted that most of that weight is in the mat. It came well packaged in a perfectly sized box and with a thin protective plastic sheet around it.

Rolling it out, I sat it next to my Gale Force Nine vinyl mat. The GF9 mat is comparatively light, and has some scratches and feels like it may tear or crease at some point. The ImperialStarShop mat will very clearly do none of that. Another notable difference is that the vinyl “holds” it’s curl from being rolled up, where the mouse-pad material lies very flat. The ImperialStarShop one has a slight curl at the very end where the roll is tightest, but all of us are used to much worse than this.

I have a couple mouse pad mats for other games, and this one feels higher quality. The edges don’t just end, they are sewn down in a really nice finish. The additional weight has a bunch of benefits. It stands up on it’s own when rolled up — that photo against my kitchen island I expected it to slouch a bit, but it held itself up really good. The thickness feels like it gives the mat a sturdiness that some other mats don’t have.

The colours have some really strong pop to them in the brighter areas like the lens flare off the planet, or the nebula in the other corner. However, from a distance of “standing above it with it on my floor”, the middle star area looks somewhat barren and dark. It’s not until you get closer (maybe tabletop distance?) that the stars in the non-planet side appear brighter. That lens flare off the planet looks just as awesome in person as it does on the screen!

I really like that this mousepad mat is matte, rather than the glossy look of the GF9 vinyl mat.

While the mats weight brings a lot of benefits, it has one downside to me. I often take public transit to gaming events and the weight may be enough to decide not to bring it along. If you’re driving, maybe this isn’t as important. I also have a nice mat carry-bag (currently full of mats for games I don’t play anymore) that may be useful here.

Lastly, and nothing to do with the mat, but I feel like the ImperialStarShop website design and layout doesn’t showcase the quality you’re getting out of this company. Their website doesn’t look great, but the mat does. I’m not sure I would have bought this mat from them based on how the website looked. That’s me, I sometimes make superficial decisions.

Summary: Great mat, so stoked to have it and I look forward to playing more in-person Armada so I can show it off!!

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Armada Display board – final

Posted on January 19, 2020

And lastly, a few closer photos of the board and the ships I brought to Armada Prime in Vancouver.

I showed some photos to a friend, and he suggested I add some vegetation to “break it up a little”, but the only plants I had kicking around the house were dust coloured…soo….no so much breaking it up.

I don’t know if it was clear, but the photographed fleet is the one I brought to the Prime (I wrote this before the event, but am scheduling it for after. This is weird.) It’s a bit of an off-meta fleet, but I think it has some parts that will catch people off-guard, and also has the ability to score a lot of points, and maybe not lose a lot of points. I saw yesterday. Or…will see yesterday.

I think if I end up bringing a variant of this fleet to another event, I’ll have to paint the Assault Frigate. Someone on the FFG forums claimed that it is the worst stock painted ship, and looking at it more, I might agree. (haven’t stared at a lot of Empire ships though).

Here’s hoping I won yesterday!

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Armada Display board – some paint

Posted on January 17, 2020

After having finished building this guy last time, it was time to add paint. I talked with some friends, some of whom recommended maybe masking off the ISD and leaving the stock paint job, considering my last attempt at painting a space ship went very very poorly. I took the bull by the balls and primed it anyway, and prayed for deliverance.

I wanted to use my airbrush again, and wanted to wait for a solid block of time to do that (like a weekend, with less toddler-related interruptions over nap time). So I did brush painting on the ISD. It’s a fairly easy scheme:

  • Codex Grey base
  • Fortress Grey edging on all the panels, and a little drybrushing when the panels got to small.
  • Ulthuan Grey, same as Fortress.
  • Nuln Oil in the vertical parts and to start building some shadows.

And that’s it! I didn’t want to over do it, as it’s stuck in sand and painting the desert would add some more colours to it.

Next up, airbrushing.

I have a love-hate with my airbrush. I’ve always felt like I could do some cool things with it, but more often than not I’m trying and failing. I needed this to work, and I barely even know why!

I bought an obscene amount of GW airbrush paints, because the GW is half a block from my house, found some time that my wife wouldn’t be annoyed by the sound, and got busy. I started by using a mid-tone colour all over, then highlighted up and shaded down with paint, rather than washes/glazes/etc.

For the first time (maybe) I felt like the airbrush was working with me instead of against me! I’m super happy with how this stage went, and even had a couple moments where I felt like I was building a cool gradient on some of the hills by lightly dusting just a little bit, pulling the trigger back a little less in places and more in other places. You know, like I knew how to use the damn thing!

While doing this, as I mention above, I made sure to add some dust and dirt colouring to the ISD.

I wasn’t super happy with the ending highlight colour, I wish it was more yellow and less white, but it has it’s charm, and I think trying to fix it much at this point would have taken more time and effort and risk really messing it up!

Airbrushing done, I started going in with a brush in places. I did a bunch of washes to deepen some shadows with a Fuegan Orange and Drakenhof Nightshade. I painted the edges of the board to make it classy.

In the middle of all this, I took part in two other hobbies I picked up since Christmas. My in-laws got me a beer making kit, so I bottled some “Canadian Blonde” that had been fermenting since I got back. And my in-laws got my wife a bread maker, which is really a gift for me, and I made a honey nut loaf which is fucking fantastic.

At this point on the board, it’s about letting your eyes glaze over a bit, and “feeling” where paint needs to go. The board is done, but when you go all magic-eye on it, you can see places where it makes less sense, or the shading isn’t good or correct (or you forgot).

This is about when I put some ships and squadrons on it again to take a couple more photos of some space ships flying above a wreck!

Next post will be some close-ups of places, and I’m hoping the one after that will be a Prime tournament report which has me winning a ticket to Armada Worlds!

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Painting Squadrons

Posted on January 15, 2020

I finished the display board, but we won’t get to that for a couple days.

After I finished the board and put all my ships on it, it was exceedingly obvious that my squadrons had no paint on them. The main ships come out of the box painted, but not the tiny little squadrons. I had to fix this before the Armada Prime this weekend.

My fleet is now set, not in stone, but in a stone-like substance that could still be changed but is unlikely to. So I grabbed the 12 tiny little space ships and set to painting!

I started with white primer, as is my tradition, and then split the painting roughly by ship:

  • VCX – Drakenhof Nightshade all over, drybrush Fortress Grey, drybrush Ulthuan Grey, drybrush white highlighters, Trollslayer Orange spot.
  • Y-Wing – Drakenhof Nightshade, drybrush Fortress Grey, drybrush Ulthuan Grey, Dwarf Bronze spot, Nuln Oil over it.
  • Shara Bey/A-Wing – Rakarth Flesh, Trollslayer Orange triangle and some spots, Bloodletter glaze all over, Scar White on the wing tips and guns.
  • Lando Calrissian/YT-1300 — Nuln Oil, drybrush Fortress Grey, drybrush Ulthuan Grey, Dwarf Bronze spot.
  • YT-2400 — Nuln Oil, drybrush Fortress Grey, drybrush Ulthuan Grey, Trollslayer Orange spot.
  • Black + ‘ardcoat for shiny cockpits, and Ice Blue for all the engines.

When I got half way through the A-Wings, I was pretty sure the colour combination was not going to work. I had this feeling that Rakarth was a lighter beige than it really was, and when I put the orange over it, it was pretty bad. That’s when you start experimenting! The Bloodletter was an attempt at bringing the two colours together, and the Scar White really gave them a great pop.

Before starting, I scoured the FFG painting forums for examples of how people painted these things. While I could have “just started painting”, I think the old adage about knowing the rules before you break them is a solid one. See what others have done, then try to improve on it.

Here are two links to some painting threads of folks on FFG who are doing a phenomenal job, and who’s style I attempted to emulate:

And last, here’s a couple photos of the squadrons.

See you in a couple days for some more display board photos!

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Braha’tok Gunship

Posted on November 30, 2019

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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Old Stuff and Spring Cleaning

Posted on March 10, 2019

It’s been 6 months since I posted. I can’t remember if I wrote about this, but I’ve discovered since having a baby that I don’t paint if I don’t have an event or regular gaming time. I really like painting, but I don’t love it on it’s own. And with the kid, I’m not gaming that regularly so I’m not painting and so….I’m not posting about painting.

We did a kitchen renovation at the start of this year and after we had packed up all our kitchen into our storage space, it showed us just how much garbage we had in our storage space. A bunch of games that I just don’t see myself playing anytime in the next 10 years so why bother taking up space with them?

My tradition with stuff I used to love but don’t anymore is to take a photo and use that to convince myself I don’t need the actual thing anymore. So you might get a couple posts of old stuff for a bit. 🙂

Here are two pieces of terrain I was so proud of back in the day.

This one is the more recent of the two. I had this grand plan for a Big Mek table with a hangar bay and planes and shit like that. The only piece I built was this attempt at a crashed rocket that never really looked the part and was shit terrain to boot. The only part that looks good is the very nicely done layering of dirt and dead grass. 😛 Here’s a post from way back in 2010 when I wrote about it originally!

The next piece saw more play because it was actually useful as terrain. A ruined little corner of an ork fortification. Less nicely done layering, but I agonized over how to paint the walls so they weren’t just one solid colour. This is about when I started experimenting with washes, and I’d had enough failures on flat surfaces to know that I was going to have to deal with tide marks. I think I did ok with this one.

Both have been relegated to the trash bin now. I almost started playing 40k recently, but the timing and a lack of enjoying the game made me stop again. Which means I don’t need 40k terrain taking up valuable space in my loft.

Thanks for the fun, terrain!

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Necromunda – Walls

Posted on July 29, 2018

I took and uploaded these photos months ago – they were a thing I painted in the middle of that big lull I had, but I was so lully that I neglected to post the photos at all.

I bought the new Necromunda box set because I love the shit out of Necromunda and wanted the terrain and tiles so I could play the 2D version. I’m sick of carrying terrain from a back room, pulling terrain out of boxes, praying it isn’t destroyed, and then reversing the process after a game. 2D terrain is making me happy, so I did a really rough paint job on these guys (but still nice) and have stacked them in a tupperware that I carry to games.

I couldn’t even tell you how I painted them, it was so long ago. Just that I did! 🙂

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Necromunda – Ganger “Farok”

Posted on July 26, 2018

I thought I’d posted this conversion and set about writing about it in the past tense, when I found I couldn’t find an article to link to.

This is an Orlock model with a Genestealer Cultist shotgun on it. It fits really well, with only a lot of putty in his shoulder joint, and a little bit of putty in the hand/gun connection.

There’s a story. So I was agonizing about shotguns. My gang has 4 of them, and there are…zero on the Orlock sprue. Worse, the Forge World Orlock weapon expansion sets only have a single regular shotgun. Which is absolute garbage. So I did some research on third-party shotguns, decided I didn’t want to spend that much to ship a couple bits from Europe and tried to find someone to sell me the GSC bits.

Found a dude on Facebook, and he was hard to get ahold of after he’d said “yeah, I can trade those”. In fairness, he was just giving them to me, so he didn’t have a lot of incentive. But after I hadn’t heard from him after 2 messages I’d sent over 3 days, I figured he’d had enough of me. I bought some shotguns from Bitz of War, costing $10 in bits and $10 in shipping. Annoyed, I spread my annoyance to CHOP! chat enough that I think I annoyed everyone else too.

2 days later, Facebook guy contacts me, we set a time to meet and it works out.

The Bitz of War order still hasn’t arrived. >.>

This guy got the same paint job as the rest of the basic members of the gang.

I really like the scheme. It’s easy enough to paint and replicate, and it looks super nice with some good contrasting colours. It’s kind of a scheme I’ve wanted to do with my ancient Orlocks for a decade or more, but never wanted to strip them and repaint them.

And then a photo of the whole gang so far! I want the BoW order to come in so I can do another 3, and then I need to figure out what to do with the juve in my gang. So far I’m using an old Orlock juve model, but it looks weird. Stoked with how they are turning out!

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Necromunda – Leader all done

Posted on July 19, 2018

After doing some putty and conversion work the other day, and with a foundation in the paint scheme I had set already, this guy was pretty easy to make look awesome!

The only real difference in the scheme was to paint his armour in Calgar Blue, a somewhat lighter pastel blue. This received a couple shades of Nuln Oil and drybrushes with Runefang Steel and Ushapti Bone to weather it just the right amount!

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Necromunda – Two more Orlocks

Posted on July 16, 2018

I painted these two guys at the same time because they were the only 2 left that I had assembled. They were painted the same as the last guy, and I’m loving this colour scheme! It’s a little less yellow in person though, closer in colour to the bottom photo.

That’s a champion with a Heavy Stubber, and a Ganger with an autopistol and a fighting knife, and he has blasting charges in his pockets. I’m thinking I should paint their names on their bases, because it’ll help link them to the cards I have for each model.