Laserburn project WIP11 - finished buildings, started buildings.

These astoundingly cheap Amera buildings have been a joy to paint.

In this post, I'll run you through how I did them, start to finish:

1: Purchase buildings. These are vac-formed, £1.50 for the small ones, £1.75 for the larger.

2: Raid your bitz boxes for suitable add-ons. Halford's grey primer.

3: Drybrush white all over, then follow that with a yellow ochre wash (Americana yellow ochre, thinned)

4: Brown ink wash. (Vallejo Game Color Smokey ink). Black inks pin washed into the windows and painted into shadowy areas (Chromacryl Black).

5: Highlight/drybrush with a mix of yellow ochre and unbleached titanium (Liquitex Heavy Body unbleached titanium)

6: More brown washing with smokey ink. Further highlighting with unbleached titanium

Paints I used in this process so far

7: Yet more inking

8: And here's the selection of paint markers I used to finish off the detail. I also scoured my decal envelope and added a selection of further details. Most of the decals are from old 1:100 Macross kits, the numerals by each door are from an original land raider.

Here's Building 1. The doorway effect is black and two brown tones. The paving slabs are all done with markers. The water effects is clear granular gel with an ink wash. The aircon (?) unit is from an old USS Grissom miniature

Building 3. I wanted the buildings 'the same but different'. Turning into a bit of a motto for me, that.

This building sports an alternative roof protrusion, and an odd solar panel thing with branding in an alien script. The alien decals are from Macross Zentraedi models.

Building 5 has something industrial going on at the top of their steps. The 'No step' decal is from some aircraft kit.

Building 7 is fairly bog-standard apart from that massive unit strapped on the side. It's an old Klingon d18 that got cannibalised at some point. The rear stairs feature a raised fin for some reason.

A view of the home improvements

Compare the stairs, the hilarious new game show.

Side walls

That's the finished buildings, now for the one I've started, you saw it flat packed in the second photo.

Phase one, make it, and stick more bits on.

Not sure about the green cap. I haven't stuck it yet, and I may mount something else there.

Phase 2: grey undercoat, ready for a similar treatment to the others.

Whilst we're on a Laserburn tip, some of the decals I got to complete my vehicles

So, four things off the painting table, which is looking a bit crowded at the moment.

More soon, lilliputian aficionados.

Laserburn project WIP10 - terrain and more

So I've done some work on the terrain pieces I bought at Salute. A quick raid on my bits boxes and the four cheap Amera buildings got some tech.

They've been undercoated with Halford's grey primer and then dry-brushed with white in this picture. Next, I used a cheap Americana (read folk art) yellow ochre to provide the basic imperial khaki base colour...

You can also see the matchbox imperial ground attack aerodyne getting the same treatment in the corner there. Here's how that one got to that state too.

Other recent acquisitions have been some transports for the redemptionist forces in the form of republic gunships:

They're 1:172, which is more 10mm than 15mm, but I think they will work. A snip @ £4.99 from The Works (a UK based retailer that sells off bankrupt stock). More on those later. 

I'm still looking for the right decals for my other vehicles, but I'll update you all when they get sorted.

It's Sheffield Triples in a couple of weeks, so I'm hoping to find something suitable there.

Laserburn project WIP08 - the story so far

Here are my nice new figures in comfort trays with what's happened so far on the miniatures side.

Here is the 'Painted' tray

And here is the 'Unpainted' tray. 

I still have a largish bag of unprimed stuff that can wait for now.

These were my Salute 2014 purchases. A Governance of Technology Skorpion tank from Atenociti's workshop

And a village encounter in the form of four cheap Amera buildings, a couple of objectives from Critical Mass, and a pair of laser cut MDF buildings from Warbases.

Here's the HQ assembled.

More soon

Bits and bobs

It's been tricky getting things done, first myself ill for over a week, then my daughter. So nothing's been finished since my last update.

Here's what's on the table, though:

Here are the Amera islands set, partially undercoated. I'll be doing a step-by-step when I can find a spare hour or so...

My 'activated' Callimachus orbs, still a Work in Progress

This is more WIP on my CoA dreadnought

These are some of the lovely Langton 1:1200 napoleonic buildings. Splendid detail



and   here's a shot showing them against the Covenant Battleship for scale

Work continues on the Imperium sky fortress

A souvenir of London? Perfect for a 1:1200 church/cathedral.

The material they're made from is tenacious though, you can see how little a circular saw has done to this beastie.



Finally, I thought I'd show you this. It's not my own work (I wish it was). It's a display game of dystopian wars from a show called Tactica in Hamburg. A team of dedicated German modellers took two months to build this beast, Very impressive.The blog's in German, but you can follow the progress of how they built it at http://www.hamburger-tactica.de/newsblog/?p=813

In other news, this blog now has over 2000 views, so I'll be making some small changes to it.

More about the Covenant of Antarctica fleet...