Spatha Gunships

I acquired some more ships for my ever-increasing fleets back in the summer, these being some Spatha Gunships (the subject of this post), a pair of Cataphract battlecruisers (oooooh!) and a pair of Raptors for my Relthoza. Oscar has also got a new pineapple, sorry, Kraken Dreadnought to add to his monstrous Medusa, together with its attendant escorts. Since I've had almost no time for any posts in the months since I got them, it's time to put that right.

So as I said, I'll start with the Spathas. I shouldn't have to describe the format to anyone who's a regular reader of the blog by now - sturdy cardboard box with nice glossy full-colour card sleeve holding its contents in;

The Spathas come in a standard cruiser-size box, which is a nice compact size. Inside the box all the components are held in bubble-wrap or press-seal bags for their protection. Unpackaging all this produces the following array of parts;

The Hulls are single-piece mouldings, which is an impressive achievement given the complexity, depth of some of the detail and undercuts present. Added to each of these are two handed engine blocks, each sporting two universal drive exhausts. The final part is the flight stand peg, in similarly standard format (it's the same piece as on the cruisers).

The engine blocks do need some trimming with the faithful #10A blade in the Swann Morton, as you need a nice snug fit onto the recessed moulding on the hull;

This includes the rear, as there's not a lot of room for play.

The engine exhausts (same on the Cataphract etc) do need quite a bit of tidying up as well.

This generates a fair bit of resin spoor!

Whilst we're talking about trimming, be careful when you're looking over the front section, as there are two panels that overlap the forward diagonal sweep of the hull - these are meant to be there, so make sure you don't trim them off!

Once trimming is done, however, the Spatha goes together seamlessly, and in no time at all you have three of the beasts!

Here she is in all her glory;

That's a lot of guns!

Nice view from the bow...

 Side view showing the upper and lower broadsides;

Here she is dwarfing a Gladius (forgive the unfinished paint scheme) - she really is a HUGE bulk!

The Spatha is a beast of a ship - both in-game and in model form. It's a great model, with fantastic detail, and I'm glad to have some available to my fleet now. Until next time!

Planetfall Quick Painting Guide - Dindrenzi & More Complex Schemes

Following my prior post on quickly painting up a basic camo scheme on the Planetfall 10mm Terran Valkyrie and getting it to the tabletop, I thought I'd balance the equation by popping a guide on for the noble Dindrenzi as well. In addition, as the basics of the technique remain the same for a more complex scheme, I thought I'd demo that as well, since that's exactly what my Terrans needed (being fielded in a derivative of modern Russian armour camo).

Let's start with the Valkyrie again, and show how to quickly put up a camo scheme that isn't a single block colour. This time I primed the resin in auto spray primer as a base, and quickly blocked in the base brown (I had 15 of these to do!);

As I'm going with a three-tone camo with grey, green and black, the primer served as my base colour. Next up I blocked in areas of green - the important thing is to ensure you're using paint thinned enough to flow but still provide good opacity;

After this it's onto black - or actually dark grey - to finalise my paint scheme.

Once that has thoroughly dried, I covered the entire model in diluted black wash (1:1 Vallejo black wash: diluent), exactly as the Umber wash used in the desert scheme. The trick with this is that the wash needs to be dark enough to provide definition without darkening the model too much overall - it's also one of the reasons you should use lighter shades than your final intended scheme, as this will pull them down a little.

With 15 of these plus the Dindrenzi to wash, the early ones were actually almost dry by the time I'd finished them all!, Next step, as before, is dry-brushing. You want a lighter shade of your base coat, so I used some old GW Foundation Astromican Grey which is suitable stodgy. The most important thing here is to make sure the brush has hardly anything on it, as over dry-brushing will overpower your camo scheme.

So here we can see we've caught the edges of the model without eradicating the underlying colours. The next steps are all exactly as before - tyres, detail painting, base dry-brushing and flocking. Viola!

I'm quite happy with the scheme - here he is with the rest of his tyrannical buddies - reconnaissance in force!.

Ok, so to balance this Terran onslaught we need some Dindrenzi freedom fighters! This comes in the lovely little package known as the Dagger. I used exactly the same principles for the Dindrenzi as for the Terrans, but as the base colour was black I simply primed and went straight to drybrush...

Tracks next;

Side panel detail, vision ports, lights & track wash;

Drybrushing base and weathering vehicle;

Flocking & final brown wash on tracks;

No turret was painted for the Dindrenzi - these are only stand-ins for testing purposes, but there's nothing magic about the turret - same principles apply.

So I hope I've shown that complex camo on PF minis is not that hard to do, I painted up all these minis (38 in all - including Black Rain, weapons platforms, heavy tank....) using only an hour or so on intermittent days over the course of a week. Not hard to do, no long laborious painting sessions and no airbrush (just to show it's possible - my main forces WILL be airbrushed! :-) ).

The cost of paint and materials used probably can't be measured in most currencies (maybe Yen...), and I think the look of the finished minis is pretty good. If you want to spend a bit more time on yours, I'm sure you can make some incredible forces! Now we just await the release announcements :-)

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!