First of all there's the whole preparing and basing the miniatures process. I take the casts of the bases, clean them up with a file as necessary, and use a pin vise to drill a hole in the center. I also take some 1/16" wire, cut it in 2" lengths, roll them out straight (with a block of wood on a cement floor), and then clean them. Both of these get spray-painted black and then glued together. The miniatures also need to get a hole drilled in them so we can attach them to the bases.
Here's me midway through the painting process. I'm actually finding this far more satisfying and enjoyable than character figures, because there's just three steps: primer, base coat, and top coat. (As opposed to RPG figures with primer, skin, clothes, hair, armor, belts, boots, hands, helmet, eyeballs, pupils, highlights, buckles, weapons, shield, backpack, charms, threads, base, wash OHMYGOD I have totally sworn off any more of that stuff!!). I'm using a gray primer on both fleets. For UPF (good guys) I do a navy-blue base coat and a metallic-silver top coat. For Sathar (bad guys) I'm doing a greenish-black base coat and a gold top coat. I've always thought that ships really need a shiny metallic paint scheme to represent the standard "reflective hull" shown in the rules.
The UPF ships have a lot more intricate sculptural detail, so the blue base coat gets shown off a lot a more easily, and thus gives more depth, than the rather flatter Sathar ships.Below, a few photos as they're drying off.
A nicely dramatic shot that Isabelle took:
So here are the completed paint schemes of my fleets of opposing frigates. I'm personally really happy with how they came out!
Very nice! Can't wait to see the rest of the fleet.
ReplyDeleteThank you! :-)
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