Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Painting Update - All Quiet on the Martian Front

The work on my All Quiet minis continues! Gary's game last week really got me back into painting, and I've finally finished starter set.


Machine guns can be deceptively deadly in All Quiet. Sure, you need a 10 on a d10 to actually hurt a tripod, but a unit of machine guns throws out 3 dice for every stand, so the odds are pretty good. And then every hit scored makes the tripods easier to injure. Plus, they're useful against the hordes of Drones and Lobotons Martians can field, although it may just be easier to target the Slaver tripod that controls them.


While the infantry in the game I had with Gary didn't do much, they're still hard to hit and semi-defensible when they're in trenches or behind fortifications. 

I really like how the blue coats and helmets work with the khaki webbing, masks and backpacks, with the olive drab paints keeping the infantry from looking too much like ACW soldiers. 


And the last of the humans, a unit of MK III Baldwin steam tanks. With three guns apiece, these guys can put out enough shots that are actually capable of injuring tripods at full armor! 

So that's the human forces from the starter box - easy to clean and assemble, and fairly simple to paint. The two units of infantry took the longest, but only because they're much more labor intensive to paint than the tanks. 

In the future, I'd like to get some decals - probably ones from Battlefront for WWII U.S. tanks - to add a little detail to the tanks, in order to break up the somewhat monotonous blue scheme.

Now, onto the Martians!


I decided to go with a bronze/brass color with my Tripods. The one above is a little lighter in the picture than it is on the table. This was also after the very coat of paint, and the brush strokes are still fairly obvious.


I'm happy that the final result looks pretty good. A brown wash and a dullcote spray varnish took a lot of the shininess away from the paint, and made the brush strokes much less obvious.  


One side affect is some 'crackling' of the paint along the upper side of the rim of the tripod's head. It's a little annoying, and I don't know what caused it. but it isn't very noticeable at arm's length. 


I followed some other examples that converted a Black Dust cannon into a Green Gas launcher, and I think it turned out well.


So that's the Martians! Wow, that took a lot less time than the humans. While the tripods are very, very large compared to their opponents, they don't have as much detail as the infantry. I would advise anyone painting tripods to avoid doing what I did - actually painting the main color on over a black primer - and simply chose a colored spray and use that as a base coat.

So now it's on to other projects. I'm working on a Kingdoms of Men army for the newest edition of Kings of War that just released, as its causing a bit of a buzz with the guys at 7th Dimension Games. I've also got some Litko bases coming from Noble Knight Games, and with those in hand I can start working on some Early Imperial Romans and Ancient British for DBA.

2 comments:

  1. The Jersey Blues died well on Sunday....Earthling.

    Gary

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Well," "Screaming in terror" - same thing, really.

      Delete