“A roll of the die” (week 5)

Well after the excitement of the last three weeks (perhaps excitement is a strong word), with a bit sculpting going on, I’ve now returned to my dice determined painting regime, and the first chance to use my new lists. I say lists as there are now two pages with thirty items on each, which list I use will be determined by the flip of a coin (heads Lancelot, tails Galahad like the lottery!) and then a roll of the old faithful d30 to pick the actual figure/s that get their comeuppance, this has been slightly hampered by my wife sticking post-it notes to my lists with messages like “This is soo sad!” and “King of the nerds!”. But if I could put up with twenty plus years of my father asking me if I was “Still playing with toy soldiers?” Then I can put up with this.

Time has been in very short supply this week due to forces outside of my control so it was Tuesday before I even looked at what I was going to paint up this week so when box 25 on Lancelot’s sheet came up I was tempted to just paint the two 15mm? Sci-fi tanks this equated to, but as there are only four in total (the other two were in box 30 on the other sheet) I thought four shouldn’t take much more to do than two, so pulled them all out and crossed off both boxes.

Now I bought these from Marbeth Designs (now Travelling Man) a while back but then decided for some reason not to do anything with them, I think they were designed to go with 15mm figures but in my opinion are way to small, so I’m going to use them with the Pendraken 10mm Marines I painted up a few weeks back, Their high-tech hover design means that I wont be using them in our “Aliens” games but they would be ideal for open table games against more technologically advanced opponents. It also means I can do another “camo” design as they won’t be used with the APC that came with the fig’s.

Now as time was short I decided to get as much done as possible on the Tuesday so once the models were cleaned up I drilled a deep hole in the bottom of all of them and took some old GW flying bases, cut them down and “tetrioned” their base discs, then to spice up the rather plain sides of the tanks glued on some plastic “bits and bobs” (mainly GW figure accessories), now two of the tanks had laser? Type guns to fit into the recesses on the main body tops, but as these appeared to be missing from the smaller two I cut down some old “Imperial guard” rifles and added the barrels here instead. By this time the “Tetrion” was dry enough to give them a coat of chocolate brown, and while that dried the tanks were given a spray over with matt black. The bases were then dry-brushed coffee and partially flocked with “moor land mix”, and the finished bases were put to one side.

The tanks were then dry-brushed with chainmail over the metal bits, and then the main bodies were painted dark grey. I then painted Olive green stripes diagonally across the bodies and turrets, once dry I highlighted these stripes with a lighter shade and then did the same with the grey.  This just left me to paint the baggage in Khaki and apply some transfer decals from one of Myles’s GW boxes (now normally I wouldn’t use transfers as I prefer to paint on any insignia, but for speed’s sake I relented this time). A coat of “Quickshade” and some slight dry-brushing along the bottom to represent some dirt and dust and we were ready for a coat on matt varnish. Once again I varnished the bases separately with rolls of paper round the clear “poles” to stop them clouding up. Not my most productive week, but it’s nice to see these finally finished after all this time, I doubt I would have ever got round to them if not for this random painting generator scheme, and I must thank “Blaxcleric” for giving me the idea from his excellent blog.

Till next week, cheers Roger.