Painting Cthulhu Wars: Yellow Sign

It has to be said that over the past six months or so I've been pretty lax in the old painting side of the hobby - all for understandable reasons - house move, job change, new kitchen, decorating, DIY, birthdays and now holidays - but I've been lax nonetheless. I've not had my airbrush set up, my outdoor shed has been a mess and the loft room is likewise full of somewhat disorganised stuff.

So the past few weeks have seen a bit of a change in this. It started with a damn good clear out of the outside shed, which was used as a bit of a dumping ground for stuff from the old house we weren't sure what to do with or where to put. I got rid of a load of rubbish, reorganised what was left, put up shelves, drilled mounts into the walls for tools and cleared the bench. I installed my compressor, regulator and Tamiya paints, and now I have a decent place to both do some DIY stuff, and to spray my models.

Next was to sort out my modelling space. So again I cleared the area out, put up shelves and organised things. I went that extra step and extended this to the rest of the loft room, getting the kids to sort out the FIVE (yes, 5) containers full of cuddly toys down to one for storage, everything else was to be kept in their rooms or recycled...(car boot coming up!!). I put up all the old shelves I had from my unit, and organised our storage stuff, making it more accessible, creating a ton of room and even impressing my wife.

The grand upshot of this is that I have been able to start painting properly again. I've primed god-knows-how-many Firestorm ships and Planetfall vehicles, sprayed a load of Terrans and Dindrenzi, and am half way through the base coating of Oscar's Aquans.

Now whilst i love airbrushing, it's rare you can finish a model this way, and most of my figures are pure handpainted. I'd been inspired by some awesome Cthulhu Wars minis I'd seen on line, and whilst I wasn't going to achieve that level of excellence, trying to achieve it would certainly stretch my skills and help me get better. So I started on my Yellow Sign minis for Cthulhu Wars with a Byakhee, which is still work in progress and I don't have any pics yet - I'll get some when I'm back off holiday and it's done.

What I do have pictures of are the undead and the King in Yellow. I wanted to keep them low-key in terms of faction colouring, the KiY being the obviously "yellow" mini, but the undead I was going to stick to a dirty bandage bone colour, it being yellow only nominally. As I'd already primed them white, this was a pretty simple process. First, I based each of them in a bone/light khaki stone mix.

I wasn't too careful about this colour, and I mixed more than one batch to vary the shade - I didn't want the six minis to look identical. Next stage was to mix a flesh colour to paint the oozing, mutated flesh, and again I used different base shades on the six figures.

So far so good, and after painting the tongue a darker, pinker shade a wash with Army Painter Soft Tone to bring our the detail without darkening the model too much was next.

Next was painting the original colour on the bandages and the pinker flesh on the high spots of those areas, followed by highlighting and detail (mainly the bandage edges and teeth). 

I'm pretty happy with the way it came out - it looks suitably disgusting and more tentacley than your typical undead - which is exactly as it should be!

The King in yellow was a much bigger job, and is mostly complete, but still needs further work on the base and a few touches. Technique was similar to the undead, but with a lot more shades. I also wanted a dirty and blood-flecked finish on the yellow garments. I'm not 100% with it, but it's OK for now - I wanted the King to look gaunt with almost bloodless skin, whilst the more living flesh colour of the tentacles draws the eye and gives more of a feeling of life there...at least I hope it does! Painting Yellow is always a pain in the arse, but it didn't come out too horrible here (unless you think otherwise!)

Next on the list is Hastur - he's one of the largest minis in the game (i.e. he's HUGE!), but he also needs more work than any other mini too, having numerous gaps and seam lines, so before any painting could start on him, I needed to get all this sorted, or he'd look too toy-like when done. So out with the Green Stuff again, and wet-blending those seams!

Here's Hastur base airbrushed

I actually cheated here, because I've already painted the eyes and masked them before spraying....next step is to remove the masking...

Around the eyes needs tidying, but that's fine as I need to add the redder rims to them anyway...

So there it is, the first forays back into painting, and the first monsters I've tackled from the Cthulhu Wars set. They paint up nicely, and I think painted minis are really going to enhance the gaming experience.

Feedback, suggestions, comments and ideas always welcome - would love to hear from you all!

Magnetising Spartan's minis

As well as getting a storage solution for my Planetfall minis involving magnetic sheets, I've been having more magnet fun with magnetising both my Reinforcement Box ships for Firestorm Armada, and my outstanding Planetfall resin too. This is due to a lot of the modularity and flexibility of the models, and also my liking for models that can be adjusted on the field (like not gluing turrets on tanks etc).

So I wanted to give a little bit of an insight into how I do this - it's standard stuff, but might help you if you've not done this before or worked with resin much. Now Spartan do help here by having some recesses and centre marks on several of the components, but others don't (like the drop-cast Shield generator and AA turrets for the Terran Alliance  Planetfall forces). Drop-casting, if you don't know, is where the mould has an open face which is the bottom of the piece - this makes the mould simpler and lower cost, but obviously you get no detail on it. The Infantry stands are good examples, and of course no-one cares if your infantry base doesn't have detail on the bottom!

So, the first thing is to buy some appropriate magnets. I bought a bunch of 2x1mm and 3x2mm magnets (diameter x depth), the former for the Reinforcement ships, the second for the Planetfall stuff. In retrospect, I think the 3x2 are better in general since they have a much stronger bond, even though the reinforcement ships have 2mm recesses. 1mm increase in diameter doesn't sound much, but it's more than double the surface area - and that's important;

I'm starting here with Planetfall minis, and the Terran Ground Attack Aerial Helix vehicle, because it's awesome and a great example. The first step here is to drill a hole for your chosen magnet (and for PF I use 3mms exclusively) into the hull of the aircraft in the centre of where the Huscarl will fit. You can then add superglue and push the magnet home. You can see this below - though I only do one to start with, then when I have one Huscarl complete I can use it to do all the others and get the same polarity on each. The picture depicts all in place after I've done this.

Now, when you've one magnet in place, the trick on the Huscarl is - because it's a drop-cast piece - how do you know where to drill? I've used the same technique multiple times, and it works well. You put a blob of paint on the magnet - I usually use red since it's obvious and high contrast on the plae resin.

Next you press down the piece you're joining in position - you want to do this as accurately as possible on the first try - if you adjust you'll smudge the paint and will need to re-start.

When you take it off, it'll have the paint transferred to it in the correct position

This allows you to then drill out this hole

Now before you put a magnet in, remember I talked about getting the correct polarity? This is obviously vital, and not that easy to do by itself. fortunately, you can make the magnets work for you. First, you put the second magnet (the one that will end up in your joined piece) onto the parent magnet in the body of whatever you're joining to, like so.

Then you put your freshly drilled item on top...

...and push down to squeeze the magnet into the hole. You don't need to do this fully, as you can pull it off and push it down firmly using a flat (and preferably non-magnetic) surface - I use the handle of my scalpel, since it's non-ferrous. This also stops any superglue transferring onto the other magnet (if you've been brave enough to superglue it!)

When you're confident there's no active superglue on any of the surfaces, you can try them out

You can then use a magnet on your Huscarl to insert your other magnets into the main body, ensuring they all have the same polarity, so you don't need specific Huscarls in any given position.

So now I have my support all ready to drop its Huscarls in the field, and then proceed on empty...

I did the same thing for my Command Helix

...and also my Relthoza

All using the same process and same 3mm magnets - as you can see they're pretty strong and it works well.

The Firestorm Armada reinforcement boxes are a little different, already having 2mm holes, so I went with the smaller magnets for ease here. This is fine for the smaller elements, and works OK for the Terran ships for example, where there are multiple contact points. In principle it's exactly as above, but made easier since there's no alignment, red paint and drilling!

This doesn't work so well for the Directorate Escort carrier. In hindsight I'd have preferred to use 3mm magnets for these. The holes are a bit too deep for the 1mm magnets, so I ended up gluing two in, which stand slightly proud to ensure contact with the one that's slightly recessed in the other side

This is still a bit unsatisfactory, as the top part tends to move a bit and isn't held on very strongly. Conversely the 2mm magnets are absolutely fine for the turrets, 3mm magnets would be overkill for them.

Going back to Planetfall minis, some of them have holes way too big for an appropriate magnet - good examples being the Sorylian Command bathtub and the Veydreth skimmer tank body weapon mounts. In both of these cases I used 3mm magnets , but prior to placement I put a sausage of Green Stuff around the magnet, or plugged the hole with Green Stuff (depending on the mini and how big the void was). I then superglued this in to ensure it wouldn't dislodge when the Green Stuff was fully set (Green Stuff is NOT an adhesive, despite many people trying to use it for this, it's not cut out for the job!). Unfortunately I lost the photos before painting, but I scraped the Sorylian one to show it more clearly - you can still tell on the Veydreth but its less obvious

All in all, Spartan's minis are generally pretty easy to magnetise (the Overseer Gate being a notable exception), but some of the holes are too big, some of them too small and others just aren't there at all. It would be nice if Spartan designed in the correct size of hole in advance and made recommendations, hell they could even sell kits to do this, which would make it really easy for people...in fact that's a good idea, perhaps I'll start selling those myself!

Hope it's been helpful - as always, feedback, comments and requests are all very welcome!

Stabilising the Return of the Overseers Gate Piece

Now I don't know about you, but I loved the RotO boxed set - the set had great models, including a lovely extra scenario piece, actually composed of 6 individual parts (5 resin, one acrylic) that build up into an impressive scenery piece for any space (or other sci-fi) game. There is a catch, however...the pieces have no positive alignment with each other, meaning that a knock of the table of a brush with models moving will cause it to fall out of alignment, or for the acrylic piece to fall off. This is annoying, especially when you're trying to enjoy your game and not do corrective assembly on scenery pieces.

One solution, of course, is to glue it all together, but that makes it cumbersome to cart about (it's a pretty substantial piece, even without the acrylic insert, plus I like the modular nature of the piece. The obvious solution was to magnetise. Now as there are no positive locators (the "tabs" that key into each other aren't directly aligned in the z plane), this makes it tricky to do. I started off using 2mm Neo magnets glued onto the arms to give them enough reach to get to the centre piece;

I put additional 2mm magnets on these and dabbed the ends in red paint to mark their position on the centre piece.

Unfortunately when trying to glue the magnets onto the centre piece this proved impractical - there's just not enough surface area to resist the magnets pul to each other, so I quickly scrapped this idea. I then toyed with adding Green Stuff inserts to the arms so the centre piece tabs would have a positive location, but then the idea came to me that really, all I needed was a base.This was a much better idea - it meant everything could be magnetised well and remain modular.

To make it, I found the thickest plasticard I had (just under 2mm thick), and arranged the gate on it, marking position roughly with a Sharpie (roughly as I didn't want permanent blue marker on my gate!)

I then cut the plasticard into a rough rectangle using the outer points as guides, then marked out and connected the guide points with the Sharpie more carefully based on regular distances

For those of you not familiar with cutting plasticard, especially thick plasticard, this is achieved by simply scoring with a sharp blade (NOT trying to cut through it, which is likely to end up with you spilling your own blood), and then bending the parts so the material splits.

You need to be careful when doing this with cut-ins like here, otherwise you can have a tendancy to run on the split into the piece you want to preserve, especially which the piece you're trying to remove is larger that that remaining, as here. Care and patience will serve you well here! Reversing the direction of the ben often helps to get things started at the edge too. If all goes well, you should end up with a cross piece and four rectangles (which I'll probably use for bases at some point in the future).

The next step was to drill a 3mm hole in the central piece and glue a 3mm diameter by 2mm thick Neo magnet in there - I wanted this to be solid!

Once glued in, I used red paint on the magnet before positioning on the cross support to mark its position.

Once marked, the corresponding hole was drilled in the plasticard and magnet inserted by placing on the existing magnet on the gate piece and pushing hole - this ensures the correct polarity. The magnets in the plasticard were all snug enough to fit without needing glue at this stage. This process was repeated with the arms...

...and the piece built up this way, one piece at a time.

Here is one of the long pieces with magnets placed on the already magnetised resin piece, ready to push home into the hole in the awaiting plasticard - in fact this is the last one!

And here it is all assembled, without and with the acrylic;

I also took one "in space"

So this works really nicely, and isn't too obtrusive, but I wanted to finish this off, so I trimmed the corners, filed down the hard 90 degree edges on the top of the plastic and smeared superglue over both sides of the magnet areas. This meant nothing would come out, and its a bit more aesthetically pleasing.

The very last step was to take it outside and give it a good coat of black primer. Once dry, I assembled it all again and took a final picture to show the effect - which I think is pretty good - it doesn't detract from the piece at all, and holds it really firmly...success!!!

If you want to make one of these, you'll need 18 3mm x 2mm neodymium magnets, which should cost no more than £3 or so (I buy them in 100s, they're much cheaper that way - around £8 for 100), and some thick plasticard - 2mm or 80 thou, which should be around £1.50-£2 for an A4 sheet. As you don't use it all, the total project cost for this for me was probably around £2, but if you're buying specifically for this it could cost around £5. I consider that a small price for the time it'll save, and actually the gate looks better because it's pre-aligned, you don't have to worry about lining things up carefully.

Anyway, I hope it's been helpful, please don't hesitate to ask questions or post comments. until next time, cheers!