Blood Bowl Part 3 (maybe 2.5)

07.23.2022

Quick post to wrap up the Khorne Blood Bowl team, as I finished up the balls and turn marker/tokens. I think that's what they are. One of the balls was lost during priming - never to be seen amongst the river rock/pebbles it fell amongst. It was like Games Workshop knew this might happen and thus cast multiples in the kit.


Blood Bowl gaming miniatures

Blood Bowl Part 2

07.14.2022

I stuck to what I said in my last post and actually finished touching up the glossy bits on the Blood Bowl team! And it took less time than I had originally feared.

With glossy metal parts and battle blood splatter applied sparingly, I now proclaim this Blood Bowl team ready for blood bowling. There's still some secondary pieces I've got to ready - like a ball or three - but those are more along the lines of whipping out for fun as opposed to cranking through a team. At least that's my approach.



Next up will be something random which doesn't constitute a lot of similarly painted minis. Considering my year has been made up of this Blood Bowl team and a whole lot of alien zombies, I have a desire to not paint the same colors in mostly the same places over and over again. It might be time to do another terrain/building piece?


Blood Bowl gaming miniatures

Blood Bowl Part 1

07.11.2022

When last I posted I foreshadowed the next post of magnetization and Warhammer 40K minis. It turns out I'm a big fat liar because after 6 weeks of complete silence I'm going to post about non-magnetized Blood Bowl minis while completely ignoring any past foreshadowing. Pastshadowing? Retconning my posts!

At some point this year, my good close personal associate Charles Jr and I decided that we would play Blood Bowl. To be honest, we decided that we would prep to play Blood Bowl, as my joy of gaming for the past handful of years has been in the painting and making of scenery for games which I may or may not play. Now we could prep and not play a game together! The logic makes sense if you read the sentence properly, just trust me.

Now with a common focus, we each stepped out of our comfort zone. Charles Jr purchased the basic rules that came with 2 teams. I purchased a separate team (ok, 2) which I would prepare. Then, 6 weeks ago, I started painting my team of 12 Khorn Whatever-Games-Workshop-Calls-Them. 6 weeks. 2 minis/week (so far). I can whip out a mini or 3 in a day, plus a day for primer to dry and another for base-tweaking to dry. What's taking so long?

I thought I would try the "Don't Get In A Damn Hurry"™ method. We're not in a rush to play a game, so why not take some time and try out some of those things I never do, but I'm supposed to.

WASHING SPRUES - The first step for anything that needs to be glued together is to wash the parts so as to get rid of factory residue, like mold release. I'm not sure my painting is good enough to notice imperfections caused by this, but sure, why not. I washed the plastic bit in warm soapy water and then rinsed them off, followed by letting them air dry for another day.

SPRUE SNIPPERS - While I've gotten better about using proper cutting implements instead of twisting plastic bits off sprues, this time I ONLY used those snips.

SANDING AND SCRAPING - With some sanding strips and scraping with a semi-dull razor blade, I went over any burrs from the above snipping along with mold lines and tried to smooth things out. Enough dusty plastic came from this round that the washing phase was repeated.

PIN TO BASES - These minis had some very action-oriented poses, most of which didn't allow must super-glue friendly surface area between foot and base. Now armed with a new pin vise (see previous magnetization foreshadowing post that I no longer claim exists) and some paper clips, I successfully pinned my minis!

PAINT AND ADHERE HEADS LATER - I knew gluing on the heads before priming everything and then trying to paint details wasn't going to work with the angles I would have to work the brush into. I've never painted parts and then put them together. Except for some tones not matching as well I liked, it worked out ok. It worked a lot better than it would have ended up if I had glued the heads on first.

MICRO SOL AND MICRO SET FOR DECALS - While I used these solutions, I did something wrong as in the end the decals still show the decal part instead of blending in. I think I didn't use enough Micro Sol.

Now, after 6 weeks, I have a team of 12 painted, along with 2 coins. I haven't read any rules so I don't know what anything is named or does (especially those coins). While the team is painted (and sealed), the metal parts still need to get a splash of hardcoat to be glossy. For fun, I thought I would post pics as the final glossy bits are glossified - which will hopefully continue over the course of this week.

This post also gets all of the various in-progress pics I was sending Jer for the past month and a half


Blood Bowl gaming miniatures

The Final Trio

05.24.2022

It appears that painting 3 alien zombos takes a lot less time than painting 20.

The final 3 baddies from Zombicide Invader are done! 130. Done. Maybe not the prettiest, but done.

Although I painted this mold/pose previously, I wanted to try out a little of what I had learned over the past couple of months. My meaty-muscle paint scheme came back in. There was another Color Shift color I wanted to try out - Solar Anomaly, which kind of looks like glittery pale pink nail polish when you first apply it. For each iteration of these beasts I've had a hard time mentally differentiating between bone and armor, so I leaned toward more bone bits this time.

In the end, these 3 were more colorful than their predecessors. Maybe even on the verge of gaudy, but that's also when I remember that the purpose of painting all of these was to test out some color combinations and techniques, which "don't do that again" is valid. Gaudy, but good enough for an alien monstrosity.

Now on to the 40K minis I was going to tackle next. After the pin vise arrives. Magnetic foreshadowing!


gaming miniatures Zombicide Invader

The Biggest Batch of Alien Zombies

05.21.2022

In Feb I posted my first progress on Zombicide Invader. My intentions were (1) to use it as a paint test for some techniques to use on the (movie) Aliens I'd picked up, and (2) paint an "army" since it looked like a game Jerry and Keith might also enjoy. 127 Alien Zombos later I (1) finally tried out one of those painting things I aimed to attempt, and (2) know that I should never attempt to paint an army, especially if I'm making up my own color schemes.

My bane for this project over the last 3 months has been color choice(s). I do ok if I have a template or a picture to use as a reference. For the Zombicide pics, I was painting nothing similar to anything I found online. After all, these were practice for something else which I was wanting to hone up my skills and do a specific thing. I've never had much of an eye for non-human figures, and here I learned that it took a couple of batches of priming and painting details to discover what some of those details might be - muscle? skin? armor? other?

I got a little side tracked from my Aliens start to trying to get meaty-muscle colored right. I came close, and then would veer away. Muscle is red, with white strands of tendon and fat running through it. An easy concept to say, not so easy to pull off, especially without going through multiple layers of shading and highlights. I finally gave in that alien muscle is not red.

My final formula for the basic color scheme finally came together well enough that I'm not frustrated with the end result.

And that was the majority of my painting for the 20-odd minis that I cranked out. The only reason I ended up working on so many at once is that I would dollop some paint into a pallet (old fashioned, scoops to hold paint) and wanted to use what I had before it dried out. That's also why there's 3 Alien Zombos left to paint - pallet ran dry before I got to them.

There was 1 last trick I finally got around to trying out. On the more cockroach looking aliens, I added some (Green Stuff World) Color Shift paint. This is the paint I wanted to test for (movie) Aliens use, albeit a different color. It was a good test, as I learned you really have to glob this stuff on to get the color shifting effect. Globbing on works well for smooth surfaces, but not so much for intricate or detailed areas. It also looks a little weird when sealed with matte varnish - kind of an old, tarnished metal, but a follow up layer of gloss shines it all up.

There are still 30 minis left for Zombicide Invader - 3 aliens, 27 hero/human/robot thingies. I'm planning to take a little break and switch over to some prep work for Blood Bowl, which Jerry and I have been threatening to get in to. Jer's even purchased the base set, which has set the virtual pun-laden ball in motion.


gaming miniatures Zombicide Invader

Blog Archive

As always, correct spelling is optional in any blog entry. Keep in mind that any links more than a year old may not be active, especially the ones pointing back to Russellmania (I like to move things around!).

Tags have been added to posts back to 2005. There may be an occasional old blog that gets added to the tag list, but in reality what could be noteworthy from that far back?

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