Star Wars Imperial Assault Core Set Complete

Core Set Complete

After three months of work I finally managed to finish painting Imperial Assault Core Set. As usual my big thanks to Sorastro for his video tutorials, which I've been following to paint all of my IA and Zombicide miniatures.

I feel that my highlighting skills have improved significantly thanks to the tutorials and that I have a good grasp of the basic painting techniques repeated for each miniature. I hope that this will allow me to do more painting of miniatures that don't have good tutorials on my own and doing more experimentation. I also learned the basics of basing, both using custom raisin bases as well as doing sandy/tuft bases.

Thinks I learned the hard way

• I had very little luck using Vallejo's glaze medium. I tried to use it for the light sabers to achieve a glowy effect. Unfortunately the paint mixed with the medium was drying practically indefinitely. The paint I mixed on my palette was still wet after 24h. Apparently I must have used it incorrectly (wrong proportions?) as the way I applied it, it's practically unusable. This combined with my impatience has has resulted in a very patchy glowy effect for Diala. I switched to Citadel's Lehmian Medium to produce the glaze, for the next coats and it worked like a charm.
• Make sure there is no dust on your miniatures before applying varnish. I paint my miniatures in batches - because of that it can take a while after finishing a miniature and before applying varnish. Unfortunately It turned out there was some dust built up on a few miniatures that I failed to remove and that are now stuck in the varnish. This is especially visible on the black bases.

What's next

I'm thinking about switching to something else now - I wanted to try out painting some games workshop miniatures, so most likely my next project will be Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower. However I also want to continue my Imperial Assault adventure, since I already bought a few expansions for it, so we'll see how it goes.

XCom Evolution

Small Side Job - XCom Evolution

XCom was the first board game I painted. It's also I game that I enjoy playing quite a bit, hence I decided to buy the expansion. The expansion has only three miniatures, so I decided to paint them in parallel to my ongoing Imperial Assault project. I also wanted to give it a try with painting a few miniatures on my own, without following a video tutorial. My main source of inspiration were pictures available on BoardGameGeek. I have to say I'm quite happy with the result.

Star Wars Imperial Assault - Guards, Officers, AT-ST, Hunters, Nexu

Second Batch of Imperial Assault

I completed the second batch of Imperial Assault Core Set miniatures. Again following great video tutorials by Sorastro. This almost completes the imperial miniatures from the Core Set - I still have Darth Vader and all the heroes to go, which I'll be tackling as next. Together with them I also want to paint three miniatures from XCom Evolution expansion. For these I want to experiment with my own colour schema without following a particular guide to see If I'm ready to paint something relying mostly on my own imagination :)

For the Nexu I decided to deviate from the tutorial a bit and do a sandy base, using Citadel's Agrellan Earth. I also applied some rocks and tufts. This gave a great result, however I had to paint the bases two times, as on first attempt I applied Agrellan Earth directly on a white primer and when the paint dried, the cracks revealed the white primer, which I don't think I need to tell you how poor looked :) I tried to fix it applying Vallejo's Umber wash, to darken the cracks, but the result wasn't as good as I hopped it would be. Again I was disappointed with Vallejo's washes and definitely recommend Citadel's washes over Vallejo's (note this only goes for Vallejo's washes, not for paints which are great!). So to sum up, always paint the surface on which you apply any chipping/cracking medium/texture paint.

Star Wars Imperial Assault - Stormtroopers, Probes, E-Web

First Batch of Imperial Assault

Following Sorastro's video tutorials I decided to paint Star Wars Imperial Assault. It's a very cool dungeon crawler, that I highly recommend. I already played two campaigns with my friends and I'm also keeping my fingers crossed that FFG releases a co-op mode app as it did for Descent, so that I can also play it solo.

So far I completed first three miniature sets - Stormtroopers, Probe Droids and E-Web Engineers. Below is the result. As always any comments/suggestions are highly welcome!

Zombicide Black Plague - Zombies

Painting some zombies

Two months have passed since my last update - I've been working intensively on painting the zombie, abomination and necromancer figures from Zombicide Black Plague. I'd like to start with thanking and giving credit to Sorastro for his absolutely incredible black plague painting tutorial video series. If you're a beginner/intermediate miniature painter they are a great guide how to paint miniatures and use various techniques. All my work presented here is based on his tutorial. Also as my next project I want to tackle Star Wars Imperial Assault for which Sorastro has also prepared a painting guide.

 

Lessons learned

• Blood: I tested out Citadel's blood for the blood good and it's ok, however as one of my friend said, the figures look like someone purred some jam on them :) Sorastro presented an alternative method of mixing Tamaya's clear red with some brown and black paint. I tested this technique out on my last zombie batch and I'm much happier with the result - the blood looks darker, more realistic (less "jam'y") and you can apply different shades.
• Varnish: I tested out Army Painter's Anti Shine Varnish and I have to say I have mixed feeling. The result is generally good (although sometimes a bit of "sparkling" is noticeable), however when painting a batch of 20 zombies it's very difficult to fully cover all figures so that no glossy patches remain. To get a good result I'd need to do a few layers and in the last one spray each figure individually, so I think for batch painting I'll just use my airbrush and Vallejo's varnish and if I just want to spray a single/few figures I'll use aerosol varnish to avoid the airbrush cleaning overhead.
• Highlighting: I'm not very happy with highlights on the abomination and necromancer. I followed the tutorial, but my result is far from the original - the edges between different colors are too noticeable. I believe I need to apply more layers with more intermediate shades to get a smoother transition. I'll keep on practising on upcoming figures :)
• Pictures for blog: I decided to buy a black screen for the background so that my figure pictures look more professional and it's better, but in general my picture quality is still quite poor. I definitely need to work on the light, so it's less direct and higher resolution camera would also help. Turns out making good pictures of your miniatures can be as challenging as painting itself.

 

Result

And finally here are all the miniatures painted

 

 

What's next

For my next project I decided to pick Star Wars Imperial Assault. I'll be following Sorastro's guide. I already finished building my own insert from foamcore to help protect my minis. The foamcore insert did require some effort to build, and the cut lines aren't as clean as in professional inserts, but overall the insert seems to be more durable than I expected and fulfil its role well, so I'm quite happy with the result.

I will also want to finish Zombicide Black Plague by painting the hero figures, however I decided to wait for Sorastro to release videos tutorial for those, as till now 2 out of 7 videos appeared, so that will probably come later in the year :)