Miniature a Day 3

Well I finished up the two I started yesterday. Might get another done by midnight but I need to do some assembly and stuff so I might put the brushes down for tonight.

This guy turned out alright but I rushed his eyes a bit and you can tell.

Both of these are from Copplestone Castings Future Wars line. They are civilian militia and I intend to use them as Alliance Militia for my Serenity RPG game.

Miniature a Day 2

Well I got cocky. Got home a bit early from work, went to the store and picked up a few things and still got to sit down at my table much earlier than normal. So I decided to paint three minis tonight instead of just one. Unfortunately I only finished one and he's a bit dodgy even for a speed paint. Oh well I think he's still tabletop and the other guys are 85% done so I sort of have a good start on tomorrow. Front and back pics this time because his back is more interesting than his front.

Most of these mini a day figures will be for my Serenity game. This is a GW Van Saar fig but he'll be an Alliance sniper in my Serenity RPG.

Miniature a day 1.5

Well today turned out to be one of those "or more" days. This guy is about a 3.5 hour job and he's an NPC for my Serenity game. Guess which side he fought on during the Unification War.

Miniature or more a day project!

Ok well my last couple months production have been kinda lackluster so I decided to try and see how many days I can manage to complete at least one miniature. I'm shooting for a month and I'm going to give myself three strikes which will be day's I don't finish a miniature before I count myself out. At the end of the month if I'm feeling burnt out I'm going to go back to just painting at my leasure. These will be speed paints of course 2-4 hours maximum. I'm working full time again so I won't have a whole lot time to go for a longer paintjob. Right now I have pleanty of models primed for this type of thing so it's a good time to try it. Please feel free to join me if you like. Don't count any strikes until you get your first mini posted.

Here's my day one entry. July 1st 2008

Serenity: a WIP shot and a new vehical.

Still doing work on Serenity stuff. My campaign will be called "Midnight Rider". I have a blog set up for it. You can find it in my profile. I'll probably only show mostly finished projects there though. The meaty WIPs will remain here.

The blond with the gun is a player character for the game named Kate. The green John Deer thing will get re painted and converted into a pretty battered looking utility truck.

More Serenity Miniature Work

Got some more work done on my Serenity project. Unfortunately I thought I would have until at least the end of the month to work on projects but due to a really botched Shadow Run job our group decided to take a break from Shadowrun and run Serenity now so I will be working on things as the game is in progress.
Got a little further on the Fed Squad. All 10 of the troopers have highlighted jumpsuits and I started on the webbing gear and purple markings. So far I've just got these two at that stage but I don't think it will take long to finish up from here.

I also started working on the PC minis. This is a miniature from Urban Mamoths Urban War line. The character's name is Ben and he's the groups pilot and face man.

The player who is going to be playing Ben sent me this render of his character. The thing about minis is that you can't always match your mini to exactly what the character looks like. I think I made a pretty good match for this character. The hair is different and the render doesn't have facial hair but the basic elements of the character are the same and I tried to make my paintjob match his concept as best I could.
This is Toni the crew's mechanic. It's my wife's character and she did the paintjob on this one. I think it turned out real nice.

I expect to do a lot more Serenity projects in the next few months. Watch this spot.

Alliance Fedrals for Serenity

An update a real update. Well we've almost finished the move and we now have our phone and Internet service up at our new place. As I said in the reorganization post my new game group wants me to run the Serenity RPG in July. I already had a box of Starship Troopers Light Armoured Troopers from Mongoose Publishings Starship Trooper game that I picked up for the last Serenity campaign I ran. I never got the point where I needed them last time so I never painted any of them up. The costume designers for the Firefly TV show used the armor and helmets from the Starship Troopers movies for the Alliance federals in "The Train Job", "Bushwhacked", and "Safe" episodes. The miniatures were not the best sculpts and definitely not the best cast and they are on the large side for the 28-30mm scale of miniatures but they are the best match to the troops from the show available.

I decided to speed paint these guys in the same fashion I've been doing my speed paints recently. First I blocked in the colors on the whole squad and even the base on these troops. The box set came with 20 troopers but my experience with the Serenity rules left me feeling the rules didn't support really large combat encounters very well so I decided to pick only 10 troopers to paint. I decided on pretty much just troops with regular weapons though I did pick the sniper and communications officer as well.

After I block in the colors I washed the whole squad with a wash mixed from burnt umber, dark blue, and a drop or future floor wash diluted with water until I got the consistency I liked. I then start my highlighting with the color I used as a base and two additional layers of lighter highlights. As you can see I'm highlighting pretty loosely. These are definitely table top paint jobs and I'm trying to keep the time down on these. I hope they will end up looking nice but they are in no way display models.

So far I've been able to get the jumpsuits highlighted on five of the troops. I've only got about 3-4 hours painting this squad so that's not bad. I usually work from large area to small when doing this stage of highlights. It makes each stage go faster than the previous stage which is a great help when doing larger squads.