I don't remember who came up with the name originally, but it stuck. Definitely it wasn't a Grey reference, but that certainly fits.
The miniature came originally from the game Space Crusade, a sort of joint venture by Milton Bradley and Games Workshop. Unfortunately I forgot to take any pictures of the assembly stage, but it wasn't much of trouble, just standard wash'n'go.
The model isn't as detailed as it might be, I get the feeling that it was simply done in the same detail level as the smaller figures in the set, but never reduced as much in size (plastic masters are always done overscale and reduced to final size when the molds are made).
For this reason, I drilled out the gun barrels. I think they would have looked rather silly otherwise. The model came with three optional shoulder weapons, I chose the gatling and the flamer mainly because I felt the clip in the missile launcher looked silly. I chose not to smooth the mounting points to show that the weapons are interchangeable... naawwww, I was just lazy.
Again, rather simple. I took a can of cheap ass matt black spray, and sprayed the
thing, well, black. After leaving overnight to dry (mostly because the fumes make
my workplace uninhabitable), I took a pot of black paint and touched up those spots
the spray inevitably missed.
Most of the time I work from a black undercoat. It does dull the colors and some colors don't cover well over raw black, but it's so much easier. If you miss a spot, it's likely to be one of those nasty hard to reach places and basically guaranteed to be a shadow anyway...
Nothing remarkable here, so you're not really missing anything even though I forgot to take a photo of this stage. Once the model was black, I took some gunmetal and liberally drybrushed all of it.
I couldn't quite decide how to paint it, so I held a small poll. Here are the results:
Carefully considering the poll input, I decided to try my hand at
Narn camo. So I decide that panels
and plates should be in color, while exposed machinery would remains a drybrushed
black.
Red is often a rather weak color and doesn't cover well over black. Therefore I apply a coat of thinned white on the parts that would be red (still visible on one of the shoulder joins). After that has dried, I grab a pot of deep red and brush away.
Next comes the wash. Even though most of it is going to be obscured under the camo scheme,
I still wash the red surfaces. Some chestnut ink, straight up. In retrospect, I should have
mixed a darker shade of chestnut for more contrast.
The basic idea in the Narn camo is black irregular shapes, outlined with white, on a deep
red background. We already have the background, so now it's time for the patterns. When
doing patterns like this, it's pure insanity to try to do the outline by really painting
the outline. It is much easier to paint the whole shape (or at least a thick border) in the
outline color, and then block in the inner color just a tad smaller.
So that's what we're doing here, starting with the shapes in white. As B5 fanatics and people who actually follow links in hypertext probably already noticed, I botched the job as usual. The shapes are all wrong. That's what you get for painting without reference material... Oh, well, let's proceed.
Now the tricky part. Break out the revered number 2 synthetic brush and start doing the
inner black of the patterns. When doing stuff like this, you have to keep the paint
flowing. The tiny speck of paint in the tip of a small brush dries surprisingly fast.
Wash your brush often, but remember to dry it also, or your paint will flow all too
well.
Apart from being tedious, there is nothing really hard in this stage. Even though the CGI models have neat uniform outlines, we're really only shooting for the impression, so it's not major catastrophe that the outlines are not all the same thickness. Even though small mistakes at this stage are relatively easy to fix, strangely I actually did not make any.
Small final details: Yellow and blacklining for the eyes, silver for the guns, some dark grey for some of the exposed piping. Oh, and I forgot to photograph this stage too. Not too much lost, at this point I was getting pretty bored with the figure and just wanted to get it done. Tried to drybrush the flamer nozzle with black but it didn't work out too well.
Rather basic basing, just a base of dark grey paint, then some watered-down
white glue and a dip on some rock dust.
Yes, rock dust. Not sand. Rock dust. The traditional way to make rock dust is as follows:
Or, if you're lazy like me, you can wait until they have a road construction site next to your house, sneak in after they've drilled some holes in the rock to put in the blasting charges and scavenge some dust. I would recommend getting out before the charge goes off, the extra dust is not worth the effort.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Copyright 2003-2021 Mikko Kurki-Suonio
Sucks!
