Planetfall Old & New Size Comparisons

On the SG Community there's been some speculation about the size of the new Planetfall models with respect to the older Firestorm Invasion forces previously available from Studio Sparta. As I had the opportunity today, I thought I'd take some comparison pics for all interested.

 Here's a group shot of an old Night Gaunt, with the new Medium equivalent, the new small and an infantry base. As you can see the new medium is slightly larger, but the Night Gaunt is completely compatible in both scale and style with all of the elements.

Just looking at these a little closer, here's the new light tank with the Night Gaunt.

And then the equivalent new medium;

Moving to the new heavy tank, we can see the bulk of the heavy tank, but the design cues are very consistent between the new medium and the old Night Gaunt.

If we move away from the Dindrenzi, we can compare the Night Gaunt to the new Aquan Heavy tank, the Anguta. It's a hellishly large and bulky piece of hardware - see one on the battlefield, you better get out of its way or bring it down as soon as you can!

Speaking more of the Alliance of Kurak, here is the old Valenfyre with the new Terran medium tank. The older sculpt is actually slightly more bulky, but also rather more 20th century. For me, the new model is more futuristic;

Here is the Valenfyre again with the new light tank;

At the other end of the scale, here's the heavy tank dwarfing the Valenfyre.

And finally with the Dindrenzi;

So hopefully that gives you a better idea of what the sizes of the new models are compared to the old, and how they look together for all of you looking forward to fielding veteran units along with the new.

Planetfall Quick Painting Guide

Ok, so I've not been very active on the old Blog for months, and it's all to do with direct activities with Spartan Games, so less time for things like this! Anyway, one offshoot of this is that there's now a large amount of interest around Planetfall, so I thought I'd pop a quick painting guide for those of you wanting to get a force to the tabletop, painted but not taking weeks to complete.

I've chosen a humble Valkyrie Terran Recon vehicle, the smallest piece of armour out there. Here it is in all of it's resin finery;

It's a great little model, but fielding cream resin in a ground combat game is a crime, especially when it's very easy to get perfectly serviceable painting done on 10mm models in a short length of time. Here's one way of doing just that. I'm going to skip my normal resin washing and priming steps just to show that it's possible (so you've no excuse!), but I really don't recommend it - and I'll demonstrate why at the end.

So, the first step is to provide a basecoat - here I'm using a 3:1 mix of Vallejo Saddle Brown and Gold Brown. Normally I'd airbrush a complete squadron, but for the purposes of this demo I've just hand-painted (again, just to show it's possible). It took about a minute to paint, I let it dry and they went over any areas that needed it again to ensure coverage.

Once that has thoroughly dried, I covered the entire model in Umber wash, a process that takes seconds

This takes a while to dry, but hardly an issue as you can do lots at once, then go and watch something on TV for a while, or leave them overnight. You want to make sure they're really dry, however, including any recesses, as the next step is to drybrush with your chosen highlight. I used GW Bleached Bone as I had it handy and I wanted it to show up strongly. You can go more extreme with your choice of shade on smaller scales (even so, I'd normally go for something more akin to the base colour), as it's about creating the illusion of depth here.

OK, this is about as ugly as it gets! Next step is to paint the tyres - don't go for black, use a dark grey. This is black with a touch of light grey mixed in;

With the tyres done, you can paint the base. I'm going for a desert scheme here, so I'm painting the base a sand shade.

We can now start on the details - lights and vision ports, tracking devices, ranging lasers or whatever! Here I've just carefully blocked in the headlights with a rich blue, and the vision port and designator thing with dark green.

To make them a bit more lively, add a second lighter colour - you want to cover about 40-50% of the prior colour.

Next add a highlight of white to them

You can also do the same at the rear;

The next detail is the roof-mounted weapon, which I'm painting in oily steel, together with the hand-holds on the starboard side;

The sharp-eyed among you may notice that I've also washed the tyres with black, which I also carry onto the now steel weapon and rear upper exhausts. This is why I don't use black as a tyre colour, as the black can provide definition here;

The Valkyrie is almost complete now, I just wash the base, this time with Sepia;

After this is dry, I drybrush the base, tyres and lower hull in a lighter sand shade (in this case, Bubonic brown);

Now this little chap is ready to continue the oppression perpetrated by the tyrannical Terran Alliance! He's not going to win any "Best Painted" prizes, but he's perfectly suitable for gaming with and looks quite the part.

Now I did mention at the beginning why I don't recommend painting unwashed, unprimed minis, didn't I? Well, take a close look at the last photo, and the bottom of the tyres - they're showing the original brown undercoat. This isn't really noticeable at all for gaming, but demonstrates that the upper layers aren't fully adhered and have worn off with the last drybrushing - of course I could have left the model for longer to dry before this, but this is a risk - it could have taken off the base layer too, and we'd be left with cream resin, which WOULD show, and would look a bit naff to say the least. So wash and prime your models!

Anyway, I hope this quick tutorial for speed-painting a decent-looking army has inspired you to paint the Planetfall minis you have, or will get when they're released in the very near future! Have fun!