Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower - part 2

Silver Tower - Kairic Acolytes, Skaven and Tzaangors

I'm making progress on Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower. I finished the second batch of miniatures. I'm only left with heroes and unique villains, so stay tuned for the next and final update on Silver Tower. In the mean time I'll be also painting some more Imperial Assault characters.

Shadows of Brimstone: City of the Ancients

Speed Painting

Today I wanted to present my most recent work - Shadows of Brimstone. I definitely set a new time record with this one. The painting process took me about a week, not counting prep/assembly (which probably took longer, than actual painting).

Typically I take my time with painting and pay attention to details/highlights, but with this game I wanted to experiment a little bit and see what level of quality I can achieve with rushing. As such I skipped all highlighting apart from some rough dry-brush on the furs. All the figures have been painted with base colors and then washed.

Main reason I picked this game for a quick and dirty trial was that the miniature quality is not that great. I had to apply green stuff on nearly every gluing spot, as the parts didn't go very well together. Also I had to glue the minis together to be able to play the game, so I figured I might as well throw in some paint :)

Below you can see the result - overall given the time I invested in the game I must say I'm quite happy with how it looks.

Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower - part 1

Silver Tower - first batch

Today I'm presenting the first batch of figures from Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower. This is my first time painting a games workshop game and I have to admit I'm rather impressed with the quality of the miniatures. This quality does come with a price though - all the miniatures are on a sprue and require assembly, which adds some additional prep work.

I'll be continuing to paint Silver Tower, but also I decided to do something different in parallel and paint Shadows of Brimstone: City of the Ancients. I decided to paint Shadows of Brimstone, mostly because I wanted to play the game and as the miniatures were on a sprue I needed to assemble them. Since I had them assembled I decided I can do a quick and dirty paint job on them. The quality of the miniatures is nowhere close Games Workshop and I had to apply green stuff on nearly every joint of the figures. Because of that I'm treating these figures more as an experimentation field and will be painting them following only the artwork and own imagination :)

Imperial Assault - IG-88, Han Solo, R2D2, 3-CPO, Rebel Saboteurs

Few new packs

It's been a while since my last update, but I have been working on two projects in parallel - Imperial Assault Villain/Ally packs and Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower. Here I'm going to show a few Imperial Assault figures that I have completed. Again these our made based on Sorastro's painting tutorials.

Overall I'm quite happy with the results, although in case of Rebel Saboteurs, I do believe the green colour match is not the best - when trying to match Vallejo's paints while watching the tutorials using citadel paints, I think I need to also consider the colour wheel and how the selected colours go with each other. Also the highlights on these figures are not very smooth and some mould lines are visible. Again need to practice patience and not rush things :)

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.