From DallasE: Lunar Astronaut, Cosmonaut, Shuttle Pod, Terrain and Squats! (59 Points)

OK so I've got a little bit of painting done this week - mostly on the new hotness here which is Black Site Studio's Lunar. Today I've got my last two models (astronaut and cosmonaut) plus some craters, and a vehicle from an unexpected source!

Here are the two spacefarers. They're from the "Heroes and Icons Vol.1" pack from Black Site, but each has been converted... the cosmonaut (left) originally carried two geology hammers, and the astronaut (right) had two pistols... that didn't make much sense to me, so I did a bit of converting to give 'em a pistol and hammer each. I also had to replace the shafts on the geology hammers as they were twisted resin that manfully resisted all attempts at straightening. Worked out well I think.

I used the last small CCCP decal from the sheet on this model, I like the look of the tan suits with white helmets and boots. I used GW Rakarth Flesh as a basecoat, highlighted with Pallid Wych Flesh, washed with Agrax Earthshade. The helmet is Corax White with Vallejo pure white on top.  

The NASA astronaut is painted just the same as his colleagues too - basecoat Celestra Grey, highlighted Corax White and Vallejo pure white. 

The stars-and-stripes flags on the sleeves are done by hand. It's easy - paint a few long parallel stripes in Mephiston Red and then the canton over top in dark blue. Even in this larger scale, I call that done.

Recognize this? It's the Escape Pod from the Star Wars: Legion "Crashed Escape Pod" Battlefield Expansion. I couldn't imagine when I'd be using this in a Star Wars game but the style and scale seemed perfect for Lunar, so that's how it got painted!

The model was basecoated Celestra Grey then Corax White...

...then the Vallejo pure white over top. The Soviet flags are Mephiston Red highlighted Evil Sunz Scarlet.

The decals are from the Lunar decal sheet and really finish off the model well. I reckon this space pod looks a bit cobbled-together and janky so that means Soviet to me. I did some sponge chipping with German Camo Black-Brown, despite some misgivings... if this pod is going straight from the Earth to the Moon, how does it get weathered in a vacuum? I suppose there will be some bits of space dust to chip away at the paint, but I imagine that the Soviets with their sense of economy may get these things back down to Earth and reuse them.

 

Here are all the models I've painted for the game so far. You can see on the Soviets that I've repainted to give white helmets and added the CCCP decals, I think they look much better with that contrast.

I've also painted some craters this week. These are all vacuum-formed plastic items that have been kicking around for years, but they did take a bit of work. The vac-formed plastic is pretty thin and tends to warp at the edges - remember that these were all originally cut from a sheet, there was no 3D printing back then! So I cut some plasticard to shape and superglued the craters down to it before painting them. I reckon that's half a cube, the ruler is 6" long.

Lastly here's a couple of models that have been around awhile - they're Squats in Exo-Armour, metal models from the old days of 40K.

I wanted to get these dudes painted to round out a squad of five - I had already painted three "Termineggs" from Wereweevil for my Squat army and these guys fit that bunch to perfection. They'd been sitting primed on the painting desk for ages so it is good to get them up in the cabinet.

Now for the scoring:

2x 40mm Astronauts/Cosmonauts        14 points

1x 40mm space pod vehicle                  25 points

2x 28mm Squats in Exo-Armour          10 points
0.5 terrain cube                                     10 points

Total                                                       59 points

See you next week! 

Nice to see this growing, and expanding across the moon there! Those decals really hit the mark on the helmet. 

Easy 59 pts for you there
Kyle

From DallasE: Norman Infantry and Squats (!) (75 points)

Getting back here to a period I haven't visited in a long time indeed... Dark Age (can we call it that?) Early Feudal Normans. I have a pretty sizeable army (mostly early Gripping Beast, as seen here, but a few Crusader models sprinkled through) that I painted probably 12 years ago or more. In fact, their first appearance on our Fawcett blog was back in 2012, in a battle report from a game where we used the Lord of the Rings rules! (of course)

So why revisit this army now, more than 10 years after I painted its last model? Well, GregB of Challenge fame is coming to visit in a couple weeks and wanted to have a game at my place. "Sounds great," I said, "what do you want to play?" He replied that he wanted to bring his (gorgeous) Byzantine army for a battle against my Normans. I thought this was a superb idea and asked if he had any more figures to paint - he said he had some Varangians. I looked in a Plano case here and found a dozen more Normans, so we challenged each other to paint 'em for the upcoming game. So here are my Normans!

 

Again, models are from Gripping Beast's ancient metal stock. Nice enough models but I really dislike the separate weapons, as I can never seem to get them to look like the models are holding them naturally. About half of these 12 needed greenstuff work on the hands to "wrap" the fingers around the grips.

All Hand-Painted Shields (tm) of course...

These lads will do nicely as a unit of 12 foot knights in our game. We'll be using Warhammer Ancient Battles, which we also haven't rolled out in 10 years or more. It's gonna be a blast from the past all around!

The other few models I painted this week are some more plastic Squats. I'd initially done the army with three squads of 9 infantry but thought I would use the couple of parts left in the box to round the squads out to 10 Squats each. There was just enough parts left to do that.

 

Of course I've complained before that the "Space Dwarfs" box only came with three head variants, and all that were left in my box were bald heads. So as I'd done before, I got out the greenstuff and went to town. I particularly like the blond mullet in the middle of the pic above, it's a "look".

And here are the three (now 10-Squat) squads.

As for points:

    12 x 28mm Norman infantry              60 points

    3 x 28mm Squat infantry                    15 points

    TOTAL:                                              75 points

Thanks for looking, see you next time and have a great week!

Love the shield work, bonus points accrued. How cool are squats - very.

From DallasE: More Squat Bikers! (70 points)

More Squats! These are some resin bikers from Curtis Fell of Ramshackle Games. 

I like these models much better than the old GW bikes, for a few reasons. Not only are they much less expensive to buy (especially if you can take advantage of a Ramshackle sale - these were literally only a couple pounds each), but mostly I like 'em better because they look better! I really dislike the "Harley custom chopper" styling of the GW Squat bikers. If your army is gonna have bikers, much better that they're reasonable looking "kettenkrad" style half-tracked bikes that look like they can support a heavy weapon and gunner.

I selected a variety of weapons for these models, including a couple wicked-looking heavy flamers.

Here's a big gun of some kind, autocannon maybe?

Lascannon here for sure.

The second heavy flamer.

And lastly, a heavy stubber.

The models are all really good and scale decently to the old GW Squats. Sometimes Ramshackle's resin doesn't play well with superglue so a helping hand from some greenstuff or two-part epoxy is required, but they're nice models with very little flash. Arms and heads are separate so you can mix and match.

Here they are with the rest of my Squat army. I have a ton more bikers (just on regular cycles, not half-tracked ones) and a couple more metal models and exo-armour suits to paint, but what I'm working on now is bigger, much bigger... stay tuned :-) 

Scoring: Well there are a few options for these that I can see. They could be considered 28mm vehicles with two crew, that would be 25 points. Or you could say that they're "cavalry" with an extra crewman and weapon, I would count that as 15 points, or 10 for the lascannon bike. Or if you went really points squeezy you could say they are a 28mm vehicle with two crew and a crew-served weapon. Now THAT would score a bonkers 35 points each!

But I will be reasonable and count them as 28mm cav with an extra full crewman.

4x bikes with extra weapon and crew-Squat (4x 15 points) = 60 points

1x bike with lascannon (10 points) = 10 points

TOTAL: 70 points

Have a good week everybody!

Lovely work on these, although those guns defy the laws of physics and common sense. Top job

From DallasE: Commissar Snow White and Six Squats (55 points)

Back from a week in Florida and back to the Challenge! Here are some models I've just finished for my "vintage" Warhammer 40K Squat army. If you like, you can read all about the origins of this crazy project here. 

Anyway even though I painted a Squat Commissar, I felt like a human female commissar would be a great addition to this army, kind of a Disney vibe right?

The model is a 3D print I got off eBay... I really like the "Anneka Sage" model from Victoria Miniatures, as well as the "Severina Raine" GW model, but they are both crazy expensive. Maybe someday.

I also painted six "command-type" Squats for the army - these are (Lto R) Grom Atchison, Vollmer Adams, and Lisle Sterling, all from the ancient GW metal range.

They're Perry sculpts if I recall correctly, and really nicely detailed. I added a moustache to Lisle with greenstuff as I didn't care for the neckbeard look.

The giant power fist and packs are great too.

The other three are Colt Stoner, Roth Bergmann, and Mauser von Dreyse.

Strangely, Roth (centre) had a stud in the middle of his back, like there was supposed to be a backpack there. So I added one from the bits box.

Sooo... I score this as seven 28mm figures (35 points) plus 20 points for a sneaky ride in Lady Sarah's Limo for Commissar White.

Till next time!  

Love these and there is a positive Disney vibe going on here. Great work