Into the Heart of things

Right, i'm getting to the point now where I have based up all my minis and have painted quite a few, got some terrain made up etc but i'm at a bit of a crossroads as to where to head of to next? Do I keep painting up war-bands for skirmish or start to pull in new elements and begin building up some forces for larger scale combats..I think i'm going to start pulling in some more troops and armour to match up with what I've already painted up and to hopefully start to get some cohesive paint schemes together.

Terrain wise I still need plenty more! I realized what I was missing during my last game and that's some kind of sense of height/verticle perspective with buildings etc, I want to start off with a north African or mudisley esque set of buildings so this week I have been researching these from buying pre painted through to casting my own.

Painting this week has been pretty good, managed to finish off all the GZG Mercenaries, love these sculpts so painting them was no chore. I think i'm going to use these at a couple of squads of Guln/Nerg for Gruntz as they fit the fluff pretty well. Definitely going to pick up the other Mercenary pack GZG sell as well to bolster this lot up.

To paint these I used the following for the basecoat (over black spray):

Skin: Enchanted Blue

Boots: Scorched Brown

Armour: Boltgun Metal

Leather: Bestial Brown

Trousers: Adeptus Battlegrey

Then washed the skin using Leviathan Purple and the rest of the model with Devlan Mud.

To highlight I mixed some bleached bone with the base colours and used some Mithril silver for the armour plates.

It's a pretty basic scheme but it was fairly quick to paint and I think it looks pretty effective, if I was going to change anything I wouldn't have used quite such a heavy mud wash on them as they dried quite dark.

Had a bit of a bargain turn up in the post this week from ebay :

A mixture of 12 Tom CATS and Wild CATS along with 16 Bio Soldiers from Rebel Minis, they need a little bit of work and I have started to re-base them but they should provide a substantial force! :)

Also this week to stop me getting too drained with the painting I got a bit of time to update the Fubar Mech one page rules with a few small changes such as:

- removed the mount points limits.
- removed limit on jump packs.
- Added restriction to Evasive actions for Heavy Mechs.
- Added some additional modifiers to the Damage charts depending on Mech class.
- Edited the layout of the document to provide more space for further work.

With some great input from Chris from the Basement Gaming Bunker (these changes were his ideas and I agree they fit well), the latest version can be found here. Hoping to get some play testing on this under way in the next few weeks once I have finished painting up some of these Mechs on my table.

Got cracking making some new pics of my mini's ready to create some cards for Gruntz, I used Gimp to format the images and then Inkscape to read in the PDF templates and alter the details. Looking pretty good so far, will get these printed/carded and ready to roll soon. :)

All in all a fairly productive week, got some travelling to do next week but it's pay day as well so I am eyeing up some big hitters! Enjoy. :)

This weeks show is sponsored by the color red.

Really productive this week! the cold weather still meant I can't get to the garage but...I created a super small paint tray out of an old place mat and brought my lamp up to sit on the edge of the sofa and hey presto, way more time to get painting. My pics are a little dark this week at I took my mini's down to the garage where my photo setup was only to discover it had vanished! My father in law had mistaken my empty box light box as an empty box and had promptly folded it up and thrown it away, apparently he did find it odd that a lamp was poking inside it....

On the left is one of the Chronotopia mechs I picked up earlier that I want to use as a droid attachment for skirmish games, the other two are EM4 miniature plastic Mechs, the green one I am a little unsure about, I like the scheme but I think it needs a spot color somewhere? .I got a box of 5 for £2.50 and to be honest they are great, once based and painted they look good on the table. I based them on two penny pieces to give them more weight and I have no complaints with any soft details etc, they look good after a coat and wash.

A couple of the Mechs I finished a few weeks ago but this week I managed to paint up 20 15mm.co.uk cultists, painting them all in one go in a kind of production line I was able to get them all finished for the tabletop pretty quick but still need to do some extra details to single out leaders. Really like these, the sculpts have just enough detail (some of the hands and feet are a little flat) but are still easy to paint.

These pics made me realize that i'm probably using way too much red in my minis, so hands off it for a while. I'm painting up some GZG Mercenary aliens at the mo so plenty of blue :).

I also bought and printed a copy of the Gruntz rules this week, really liking what i've read so far and I'm planning to get a few plays in before reviewing it fully but in the meantime it has got me in the mood for some armour so i'm scouting to pick up some sci fi tank minis. :)