“Having a Rally Round” (Paint What You Got Challenge):

OK so I still ache (thanks for asking 🤕), so as I still can’t sit comfortably for more than a short period I thought I’d so something that wasn’t too taxing painting wise, and also something that qualified for Dave’s challenge. Now I think I’ve probably mentioned on this blog before that I’ve loved the board game “Robo Rally” ever since I played a few games of it waaaay back in my club days, and had been after a copy of it for the many, many years since, that is until last year when I came across a second hand copy on the “bring and buy” table at the Phalanx wargames show for £25.00. Bargain! It turned out all the years I’d been banging on about how good this game was to my wife and kids was justified as they all loved it too, honestly if you want a good fun game to play with either gamers or family I can’t recommend this highly enough.

Now as is my want, (and my kids will attest to this!), that even though they are described on the box as “8 pre-painted plastic robots”, a very rough dry-brushing with some silver paint is a bit of a stretch to “painted” in my mind (see left), so I had to get the little robot figures out and paint them properly at some point, and as they were thus on my list of things I wanted to get done this year, and qualified as “stuff I’ve got”, and as they were all different and pretty easy to paint in short “stints” they seemed perfect for my purposes.

So without having to mess about assembling or basing them it was just a case of spraying them all black and then dry-brushing them in chainmail (this was actually pretty much as they were out of the box (see above), but I hope I did a slightly better job of it). Then it was onto painting them up in differing colours to make them easier to identify on the board and give them a little personality.

Now I’m not going to go into a long winded description of how I painted each robot, I will however give a general overview of the colours I used, so “Twitch” I decided would be the most “bling” of the lot so I went with shinning gold over bronze for most of his body work, and added the odd panel in copper. “Zoom Bot” on the other hand I thought I’d go with Ruby red with pink burgundy highlights then add some flashes of coffee and cream, on the raised sections to form “go faster” stripes.

“Twonky” I think is supposed to look a little like an old monitor, so I thought beige was the way to go (I’m old enough to remember when computers and the like were this colour!), so after saddle and Eurasian flesh were used on the edges of his casing, I used more Eurasian flesh highlighted with cream on the panels themselves. “Hammer Bot” was simply royal purple with plum highlights on his casing, and the central stripe was lilac with lavender highlights.

“Trundle Bot” was next, and I wanted an industrial look to him so went with citrus orange on his body with lemon yellow highlights, I then added some chevrons in black highlighted with dark grey. “Hulk X90” looks like a toy tank so it was pretty obvious that he had to be green, deep bronze green to be exact, more of the same mixed with some stone green provided the highlights, then I went in with some more saddle again highlighted with Eurasian flesh to do the camouflage stripes.

“Spin Bot”, probably my least favourite figure Spin Bot was firstly painted in metallic blue that I then highlighted/dry-brushed in steel blue, then after I’d considered that he looked too plain I added the ring at the base of his “dome” and the surrounds to his eyes in ruby red with bright red highlights. Lastly we have “Squash Bot”, probably the simplest paintjob of the lot yet one of my favourites, I just painted his bodywork and feet in orange then highlight this in more of the same lightened with a touch of cream. After all of these were dry I lightly re-dry-brushed them in chainmail again to give them a slightly worn look, then added their “eyes” in either porcelain blue, orange or matt lime.

I then gave them all a coat of “Quickshade” light tone to protect their paint as much as for shading them, I then added the highlights to their “eye’lights” in either light green light blue of orange mixed with a little white respectively, their bases I did in mid grey and a final “blow over” with some matt varnish finished them off, strange to think that of all the figures I paint this year, these will probably see the most time in actual “game usage” 😁.

Till next time, Cheers Roger.

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