Numbat :: In Miniature

Team Yankee: Harrier Jump Jets

2017-04-01T09:21:00.000+11:00

Recently I have been reading the rules for Team Yankee with the aim to paint up a small playable force - I eventually settled on a Soviet Afghantsy force, but when the Harrier Jump Jets for the British were released, I couldn't resist painting some up.

The reason was because as a 7-year old child, I had received this kit - the actual model has long been lost in the midst of time, but I can still remember assembling it and studying the colour scheme to determine how to paint it (along with a trip to the model shop to get all the necessary colours, in enamel no less!). So seeing the Team Yankee release, I was determined to paint up a box in the old faithful colour scheme.

With the Team Yankee versions, they come mostly pre-assembled, with a few extreme details such as the nose, wing armaments and tail fins to be attached. I had done all of this but left the armaments till last as I knew they'd be mostly a uniform green colour, and it would allow me access to paint the undersides of the wing. An initial undercoat of Vallejo Air camo green with the airbrush to start. A soft highlight of camo green mixed with rotting flesh was applied,

I then masked off areas I wanted to keep green, so that the model was ready for the next colour. I had cut the camouflage mask out of soft masking tape, and made sure it was attached firmly to the body of the aircraft.

The next camouflage was a spray of Vallejo Game Air shadow grey.

The panels were then given a highlight with Vallejo Game Air wolf grey, still using the airbrush.

The masking tape was removed, and it was time to pick out the details. I washed the panel lines and did some weathering using Army Painter Strong Tone and Dark Tone. The canopy and air vents were picked out with black. The armaments were applied, and were given a coat of camo green.

To apply the decals, I got ready my Mr. Mark Softer and Mark Fit Strong.

I then chose the decals I wanted to apply, and with the above mediums, got them into the right place.

Finally, glued in the flight stems and the harriers were ready!

Sedition Wars: Akosha Nama

2016-12-28T20:12:00.003+11:00

I finished Akosha Nama from Sedition Wars over the weekend, trying to find an effective way to paint characters quickly.

I started with a spray undercoat of GW Corax White, and then did two washes of Asurman Blue over her body suit, followed by a light drybrush of GW Lothern Blue.

Hair was done in GW Liche Purple, highlighted by mixing GW Skull White. Skin was P3 Midland Flesh with GW Ogryn Flesh Wash and highlighted with Midland Flesh and GW Skull White. Brown straps was Reaper Harvest Brown washed with Army Painter Strong Tone. Armour plates painted with GW Codex Grey.

Armour plates painted GW Skull White.

Finally, some scratches on her armour plates with a brush and a sponge, using Vallejo German Black Brown.

Sedition Wars: Painting Sci-Fi Bases

2016-12-16T02:23:00.002+11:00

The Sedition Wars board game comes with some great sci-fi bases, all in hard plastic. I'll go through my process of painting them in this blog post.

I start by sticking them down with blu-tac (or whatever your local equivalent is) to a big board, and give the whole lot an undercoat of Chaos Black spray.

With an airbrush, I use Vallejo Air German Grey and spray all the main big areas of the bases, leaving a darker gap along details such as panel lines.

I follow this with a second spray on a progressively smaller area of Vallejo Air Light grey. I then use the airbrush to pick out areas which I want lit up with P3 Arcane Blue (thinned with Windex). This is the start of the lighting effects on the bases.

I then use a sponge (just a corner ripped off the foam backing in a blister pack) to dab on scratches. The scratches are Vallejo German Camo Black Brown.

I then had some Anarchy Stencils handy, so I jused a few to airbrush on some writing and designs onto a few of the bases. I used Vallejo Game Air White for the writing.

I then go back and lightly dab brown over the writing to look like worn off.

Here's a photo of me comparing the batch of bases with some test models I did to determine the colour scheme.

The last steps are to add a thin mix of Arcane Blue and Skull White and paint the center of the lights on the bases.

I then followed up with a light pigment of MIG Rust, just to give the bases an additional colour as a point of interest.

Sedition Wars: Painting the Strain

2016-12-16T02:05:00.001+11:00

Once upon a time, I backed a Kickstarter named Sedition Wars. And this month I decided to paint it - boardgame painting mode in full swing!

I started by undercoating a batch of the Strain with GW Corax White and gave each of them two coats of GW Carroburg Crimson.

Here are some shots with the first coat of the Carroburg Crimson wash. A close up of a phase 3 Strain showing all the details on the restic.

And a larger batch of them.

After a second coat, the colour really gets a lot of depth.

I worked in smaller groups of 3 to 4 models. The next step was to pick out the metal parts in Vallejo Air Steel.

All the steel bits now got a wash of Army Painter Dark Tone.

As I wanted a space prison theme, I painted all the clothing in orange. I found Army Painter Lava Orange was perfect, easily covering in 2 to 3 thin coats.

Again I worked in batches, painting the orange in small groups. The orange was highlighted by mixing a small amount of GW Skull White (White Scar now) and layered up.

The bigger guys did not require any orange, but had a lot more metal areas.

Here is a finished group mounted on bases. I'll do a separate blog post on how to paint up the bases - it's quite fast when done as a big batch!

And a few more to the left making their way through the painting pipeline.

A close up of the finished batch.

The last thing to do was paint the base rims black, and work through the remain batches of Strain!

Reaper Bones Mocking Beast

2016-12-11T18:23:00.000+11:00

Here's a Reaper mocking beast (i.e. not-a-minic) I painted recently. Based up and ready to include with my Super Dungeon Explore.

Basically all washes, drybrushing and a few details picked out such as the teeth and tongue. Added some diamontes to the base for a bit of extra colour.

Hero Quest Barbarian and Conan Boardgame Size Comparison

2016-12-11T17:02:00.003+11:00

So recently, I received my rewards from the Conan kickstarter by Monolith Games. What a crazy box of miniatures! Since I had painted the Hero Quest barbarian and blogged about it recently, I thought I'd show you a comparison of the Conan miniatures so you can see the scale and size difference.

It's a shame the light grey plastic fails to show off the details, but it definitely is quite a nice Conan miniature! Here's a photo of the awesome Amari miniature from Reaper's Pathfinder range as a comparison.

Amari (and the Reaper range in general) are better scaled with the original Hero Quest miniatures, but having said that, the Conan game does it's best to give you a full complement of heroes, anti-heroes and denizens if you wish to use them in your dungeon crawling game.

PS. Yes that is Sedition Wars in the background. More on that one next time.

Hero Quest: Barbarian Repair and Restoration (Part 3)

2016-06-12T01:24:00.000+10:00

The last part of my Hero Quest Barbarian restoration project. All finished and ready to smash some heads in the next game of Hero Quest (or any other dungeon crawl that needs a buff meat shield). For the previous instalments:

Here he is with the rest of the flesh finished. Same technique as described in Part 2. I also added some Burnt Umber oil paint to add some further depth to the shadows.

I base-coated the other parts of him brown or black. I used Vallejo Game Air Charred Brown as it is nice and dark.

Reaper Leather was used to then highlight his boots.

I liked the colour so much that after doing the boots, I then did his fur loin cloth in the same colour and then did another highlight over the area with some white mixed into the brown. The boots were then given a wash with Army Painter Strong Tone.

I painted the sword in Vallejo Air Steel.

I then changed my mind and painted it with GW Lead Belcher, and gave it a very soft wash with thinned down Army Painter Dark Tone.

Finally I painted the gem on the sword with GW Blood Red, highlighted with White and shaded with Black mixed with Blood Red. The details on the belt were painted Steel and washed with Dark Tone. Here is a front and back shot:

Here is a photo of my barbarian flanked by Rob Jedi's barbarian and an unpainted barbarian.

Let me know which hero I should restore next:

Wizard
Elf
Dwarf

Hero Quest: Barbarian Repair and Restoration (Part 2)

2016-05-21T12:09:00.001+10:00

Part 1 is here!

So after a year of having this guy sit on the shelf, I finally returned to him to see if I can get this project finished.

I started with a Skull White spray undercoat.

Next came an airbrush coat of Vallejo Air Dwarf Flesh.

I then gave the skin a good wash with Army Painter Soft Tone.

Finally I started with painting the eyes and highlighting with Vallejo Air Dwarf Flesh and Pale Flesh. Only the face, abs and fingers done so far. I'll follow this technique over the rest of the skin areas next.

Reaper Bones: Kraken

2016-05-15T22:13:00.000+10:00

Managed to finish this Reaper Bones Kraken. I tried for a tinted blue base to give the feeling of underwater, but kept the kraken itself in strong contrasting colours.

Here are a number of work in progress photos (and the full size versions of the above photos at the bottom):

The base was actually painted in normal colours, and then tinted with blue paint via an airbrush.

I mixed the original colour with blue to dry-brush back up the texture, and also used washes to tone down the blues.

Kelp was added using foil and dressmaker pins, and then airbrushed and added to the base.

Here are the full size photos against the black backdrop.

Work in progress - RTB01 Marines

2016-04-12T01:16:00.001+10:00

I hear someone is having a birthday...

Reaper Bones Cthulhu Finished!

2016-03-27T12:23:00.001+11:00

I managed to finish Cthulhuthe other week.

See him in black and white glory!

WIP: Reaper Bones Cthulhu

2016-03-27T12:18:00.001+11:00

A quick airbrush and wash job so far.

Here are the WIPs:

Relic Knights: Princess Malya

2015-09-18T00:28:00.002+10:00

Finished this one off over the past three weeks. Quick army paint job so I could get her onto the table - though unfortunately, this one was fully assembled when I got it, which made some parts quite awkward to paint!

Buildings are courtesy of Mantic. The mat is the Relic Knights mat from Soda Pop Miniatures. The base is a base topper from Aetherworks.

Warhammer Quest Wizard

2015-07-19T20:04:00.001+10:00

Finished a Warhammer Quest wizard, trying for the classic 90s paint scene and bright colours.

Here's some WIP:

He's pretty short next to a Sigmarine!

Reaper Bones Orc

2015-06-24T00:13:00.001+10:00

Just painting a small bit at a time when at Turelio's place - mostly washes and drybrushing. Went for human colour skin for bit of difference.

Here are sme of the work in progress photos:

Mantic Battlezones Dice Roller

2015-06-15T16:23:00.003+10:00

So I don't own a dice roller, but I do like rolling dice. What I wanted was a dice roller that could seamlessly double as a piece of terrain, especially in games such as 40k, Infinity or Deadzone.

I wanted to set about making a dice roller out of Battlezones terrain by Mantic. It's very affordable and easy to build. I don't claim credit for this idea - there's a multitude of dice rollers made from Battlezones out there, but I hope to show you how straightforward it is to construct one.

Please let me know if you give it a try!

Let's start. Parts required:

1 x Fortified District
Two small triangular ruin pieces from the Ruined District

You can build the dice tower entirely from the Fortified District and saw one of the floor panels into triangles to make the top steps if you wish. Even after building the dice roller, there should be plenty of pieces left over to make more defence lines. You will also have a cool gun and a satellite dish thing.

Here's the basic internal layout:

It's easiest to construct the 3 walls of the tower first as separate pieces, and then join them together. Then attach the internal ramps and flooring, before finishing with the final wall. Here's a photo as I was laying out and assembling some of the pieces. It's important to consider which way up you want the connectors - in this case I wanted to make sure they were all on the outside of the tower.

I used the angled connectors to join the main interior ramps of the roller to the walls.

I made a piece that was 1/3 the length of a standard piece above where the dice are ejected from the dice tower by sawing one of the Defense Line walls in half.

This is the top of the roller - I added two of the smaller triangular floors from the ruined district to allow models to stand on the top of the tower if I were using it as scenery.

The main tricky parts were to remove about 1.5mm off each side of the internal ramps so they would fit cleanly inside the tower when all four sides were fitted together. I did this with a saw to do the initial cut and then used sprue cutters to remove the edges.

A shot looking straight down.

The dice roller in action:

Next is to paint it up. I want to give it an internal floor as well, probably out of MDF, and a nice layer of felt. I also want to add a barrier to stop the dice going behind the bottom ramp once the floor is in place.

Speed paint: Reaper Bones Halfling Thief

2015-06-02T23:01:00.001+10:00

Quick paint job over two sessions of a Reaper Bones soft plastic Halfling Thief.

40k Rogue Trader - Space Marines WIP (Part 3)

2015-06-01T09:17:00.001+10:00

Some more work on these guys.

Bases were washed with GW Agrax Earthshade, and all the metals were washed with Army Painter Dark Tone.

Bases were then drybrushed with GW Snakebite Leather, and some blue areas touched up with a mix of P3 Cygnar Blue Highlight and Arcane Blue.

Hero Quest: Barbarian Repair and Restoration (Part 1)

2015-05-23T16:04:00.002+10:00

Once upon a time, I painted up the four heroes from Hero Quest. You can guess the era from the colour of their bases! I feel the time has come to give these guys a proper restoration and bring them up to the quality they deserve (I'm not particularly attached to my old paint jobs, though I'll probably keep the colours reminiscent of their existing schemes).

As you can see, the Barbarian has a broken sword, so first-thing-first, time for a repair. My friend Rob Jedi suggested I use a plastic cocktail skewer - these turned out pretty close in width and let me choose the length I wanted. Pulling out a spare Barbarian from another set of Hero Quest as reference, I went to work.

I used a brass-etched saw blade to remove the remains of the original blade, and then cleaned up the hilt with a triangular file so I could get right into the corners. I then measured up the sword and did a cut with the saw again to get a clean edge.

Next, I used a 1mm drill bit to drill out a hole, going about 10mm deep into the blade. I drilled out the corresponding hole in the hilt.

Comparison photo with to make sure things were looking right. A minor amount of filing to fit it into the hilt. My new sword is slightly longer than the original, but that's ok. Better than the blunt rounded end!

And now time for a bath in Simple Green (without the new blade).

Stay tuned for part 2 once the old paint is removed!

D&D 4E Game - The Temple of Silence

2015-05-23T15:49:00.001+10:00

Some photos from our D&D 4E game - just two encounters to finish off an adventure we started 3 years ago...

We use a mix of painted and pre-painted miniatures.

Hero Quest: The Rescue of Sir Ragnar

2015-05-10T13:45:00.001+10:00

We continued our Hero Quest games with the Rescue of Sir Ragnar. Here are some photos from the game, this time with a new wizard and elf to replace the ones that failed to survive the Trial.

Fortunately they managed to dispatch all the monsters before finding Sir Ragnar. And no one died this time.

40k Rogue Trader - Space Marines WIP (Part 2)

2015-04-28T23:13:00.001+10:00

Some more work on these guys...

More GW Leadbelcher on the weapons and GW Snakebite Leather on the bases. Less of a crazy blue tint to the photos now!

Super Dungeon Explore - Nyan-Nyan Step-by-Step

2015-04-27T12:49:00.001+10:00

I recently tried my hand at painting a Nyan-Nyan for the game Super Dungeon Explore by Soda Pop Miniatures. It was an interesting challenge as it is a bit outside what I usually paint. I wanted to stay true to the anime feel and keep the colours bright and clean.

Step by Step

The base had the tab filled with putty and then sanded back with a flat file. I carved back in some of the lines with a sharp blade and scribing tool.

Cleanup was a bit involved - the casting of the restic makes cleaning of some parts very awkward. I ended up removing her arms to get into the hard to reach areas. In the end, I also cut off some bits on the claws due to the casting - it was easier to remove them than to try and repair it.

So the first thing I painted was the eyes. I airbrushed the skin with P3 Midlund Flesh and then begun to paint the eyes.

Here's a sketch my friend made of the rough strokes for anime eyes. I painted the eyes white and then used a black to define the eyes. I then painted in the colour of the pupil - I used the GW colour Emperor's Children, though it looks brown in the photos!

I then proceeded to paint the hair with GW Emperor's Children as well. The skin was given a light highlight with P3 Midlund Flesh + P3 Menoth White Highlight.

The hair was highlighted with GW Emperor's Children + GW Skull White.

P3 Skorn Red was used to line the hair to give it depth. I kept the paint very diluted at this stage.

The yellow cat suit was given a base coat of P3 Rucksack Tan.

Here are all the colours used so far.

The cat suit was highlighted with P3 Rucksack Tan + P3 Menoth White Highlight. The claws and other metals are a mix of P3 Coal Black + Vallejo Air Steel. This gave a nice tinted blue metallic.

The stripes were painted GW Chaos Black and highlighted with P3 Coal Black.

The bell was painted Vallejo German Camo Black Brown.

Finally the white fur trim is painted with P3 Underbelly Blue.

Next I painted the base, using a mix of P3 Iron Hull Grey, P3 Trollblood Highlight, AP Ash Grey, and Vallejo Air Light Grey.

A photo of the finished base and the colours used for the metallics (Vallejo Air Steel + P3 Coal Black).

I used W&N black oil paint to shade the metals, paint it on and rubbing it off the raised areas. This gives a very realistic look the shades, as the oil paints matt the shine in the deepest areas.

The fur trim was highlighted up with P3 Frost Bite then GW Skull White. Finally, her mouth was painted with diluted P3 Skorne Red. Here are some photos of Nyan-Nyan from different angles.

I hope you enjoyed this step-by-step. I am looking forward to painting more chibi miniatures in the future. I believe Nyan-Nyan is due for general release with updated rules for SDE: Forgotten King (the new core set) later this year.

40k Rogue Trader - Space Marines WIP

2015-04-01T00:04:00.001+11:00

I don't often paint space marines, but when I do, they're RBT01 marines.

Dropzone Commander - PHR Reinforcements

2015-03-30T21:57:00.001+11:00

Some reinforcements in the form of Triton A1 strike drop ships and some Zeus command walkers.