XCom Board Game Painted Minatures

How I got into miniature painting

Playing board games was a hobby of mine for the last few years. Since that typically requires a group of people (unless you're playing solo, which I also sometimes do ;) ) I decided to fill in the gap and use the time when I'm home alone to try out miniature painting. This allows me to spend more time in the hobby doing other things than simply reading reviews and buying more games :) Also giving my games a "personal" touch is a very cool idea!

When I was a kid I used to assemble plastic models, but when I was done the resulting models consisted more of glue than the original plastic. And my soldier painting technique was simply dipping the figure in a green paint jar. This childhood experience however gave me a very basic knowledge of model assembly and painting. Since then I always wanted to atone for my gluey sins and try doing it the proper way.

XCom project

For my first set of miniatures I decided to pick XCom. It's a cool real time cooperative game with a very original mechanic. And most importantly there aren't that many miniatures inside and the ships seemed to be quite straight forward to paint.

I used Vallejo's "Game Color" acrylic paints together with their primer, washes and varnish. When I was starting I didn't have an airbrush, so everything has been painted with a brush. I only used my newly acquired airbrush for the final layer of varnish.

Here are the minis after painting:

I'm not an artistic person and don't have a very good aesthetic touch, so when picking colors I was searching for inspiration in the internet. So all credits for the color scheme go to the authors of these pictures: interceptors, ufos, soldiers. My minis seem to have come out a big lighter than the ones that were my inspiration.

Learnings

The biggest difficulty I have encountered was that the primer was bubbling and the coverage was very poor. I don't know if its my technique (I used a brush) or a faulty product batch (the bottle arrived with the lid skewed), but I found in the internet that I'm not the only one that experienced this problem with Vallejo's grey primer. For my next minis I'll use an airbrush which should resolve the issue.

Primer bubbling unfortunately left visible marks in a few places on the minis. I can only blame myself for being lazy, not washing the primer off and buying a different one :)

My second mistake was mixing a color for the body armor and then forgetting how I created the mix. Because of that when I needed to make some minor corrections I had a hard time recreating the same color. I should have either used an existing paint, saved some of the mixed one in a bottle or make sure I know the exact proportions.

Next error was applying too much varnish beneath the figure which resulted in an uneven surface. I used a brush for the varnish - starting with the next set I'll only be using an airbrush, so that shouldn't be an issue any more.

And lastly I still need to learn to be more patient and precise. When carefully looking at the final result you can see that there are a few spots that I missed. Also the colors came out a bit different than I expected - I guess that's a matter of practice and getting more experience with mixing colors, applying washes and using other advanced techniques.

Summary

All in all I think it was a great experience and the final result is quite decent taking into account it's my first batch. Because of limited time the whole project took me four weeks. I can't wait to get my fingers on the next batch of minis. I still think I need more practice around the basics, so as my next project I want to pick Kemet. The minis there are quite interesting, but their total count isn't overwhelming. This will be a next step on my road to getting ready for the first league - Imperial Assault, War of the Rings etc. :)

If you have any questions or tips for what to improve, let me know!