From RustyP - Bushwacked on Caprica - 48 pts

 "Colonel... Colonel come in.  Can you hear me?  I think the Hutt is not our friend after all... Colonel?" Message from Sgt. Corvis - Scouting Party V7V221.

Meanwhile, back on the Rogue Trader Vessel -  G00F-BA11

"Humbug Rusty, what is the meaning of this interruption?" the Colonel says as he rises in his bed, striped pajamas showing &scratching his bushy unkept hair.

Rusty replies, "Sir, so sorry for the interruption but our scouting party on Caprica seems to be in trouble."

"Trouble? Ah, what kind of trouble?"

"They were ambushed by the Hutt!"

"Ambushed?! OH Nonsense Rusty.  I just spoke to him yesterday. Come now, there must be some sort of mistake." 

 

Droids in service of the Hutt

The assassin droid is an Imperial Assault model from Fantasy Flight while the 4 other models are all 3D printed from resin.  They've been laying around with forgotten good intentions so I used them to get something going quickly.  I am not a fast painter so this was an easy start.

I used several Citadel Contrast and Scale 75 Instant Colors.  Then finished with an assortment of paints.

 

Scoring:

2 ea - 28mm foot = 10 pts

2 ea = 40mm foot (Hutt & IG Assassin) = 14 pts

1 ea = 20mm foot (little fella) = 4 pts

Planet Bonus (outer ring Caprica) = 20 pts

Total = 28 + 20 = 48 pts

The Colonel's story will continue very soon!

We game a bunch of Star Wars RPG as well as SW Legion so these will all come in handy.

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Haha! Great work Rusty. I love how wonderfully lurid you've made the Hutt, great colour that, and that little droid is quite the sweetheart. I must say that Star Wars Legion has certainly benefited from the whole 3D print culture as there are so many great models available for hobbyists to enjoy. I've not tried any Scale 75 paints, but have heard good things - I'll have to give them a try.

I look forward to hearing the continued adventures of Rusty along with his Rogue Trader companions on the good ship G00F-BA11.

- Curt

From Barks: Star Wars Saturday! (51 points)

More Imperial Assault stuff this week. FFG has delved into Star Wars Rebels for characters, which in turn leant on some original concepts from Ralph McQuarrie in the 70s.

Star Wars Rebels

Zeb is based on an early concept for Chewbacca- he could have had a different look!

Zeb Orrelios

McQuarrie art ~1975

Loth-cats are an inquisitive feline species found on the central planet in Rebels, Lothal. Their ears resemble the natural rock formations of the planet- inspired, again, by McQuarrie. I'm claiming these as 8x 15mm figures.

Loth-cats

McQuarrie art ~1980

The Jedi Kanan Jarrus is, well, a little dull. He's not made much more interesting by being blinded.

Kanan Jarrus

His padawan is Ezra Bridger, who at least grows up a little from street rat to Jedi apprentice over the course of the four seasons.

Ezra Bridger

I was always looking forward to getting my painting teeth into Sabine Wren. She's a young Mandalorian who likes art and graffiti. She's always repainting her armour and dying her hair in interesting ways.

Sabine Wren

Hondo is a scoundrel/ pirate/ legitimate businessman with a bit of a comic relief role. He's sculpted bargaining with his blaster behind his back. Unfortunately, he looks like he's wearing lycra and a bike helmet.

Hondo Ohnaka

FFG's own characters are a cybernetic pugilist and a former clone trooper.

Here's the Spectre Cell gang including Hera and Chopper I painted a few years ago.

That's 7x 28mm figures, and 8x 15mm for the Loth-cats. That winds up my Star Wars submissions!

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Terrific entry Barks. I'm a big fan of Star Wars Rebels and really enjoyed seeing your take on them.  Your Zeb Orrelios is excellent, especially his face and eyes. Last summer, as a birthday present to myself, I picked up the deluxe two-volume Ralph McQuarrie 'Star Wars' and was amazed by all the concept art I had never seen before, including the preliminary designs for Chewie. Very cool to see the way they incorporated some of his work into other canon (though the figure for Hondo is less than inspired - the lycra bike helmet description is perfect).

This entry brings you ever closer to your 1200 point target. Well done!

Curt

From Barks: Star Wars Saturday! (25 points)

Now that I've finished Pinkstone Fortress, I'm relieved to move on to my staple Challenge Star Wars diet.

Death Troopers were one of the cool things to come out of Rogue One- Stormtroopers who were actually menacing again. I thought I'd be able to get away with a bit of drybrushing, but wound up being more satisfied with some edge highlights in light grey. Thankfully, there's only four of them.

I'm a bit of a fan of Grand Admiral Thrawn. A pragmatic thinker, a devestating opponent, an appreciator of art, a commander who cares for his men, a non-Force-user, and a senior officer who has defied the systemic xenophobia in the Empire. He was fun to paint as well.

5 figures, 25 points.
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Well, some more fine work from the Star Wars universe - indeed, as Barks as noted in the appropriate title for his post, this is a "Star Wars Saturday".  

Sadly, I must confess that the force is weak with me - "Death troopers" are a whole new thing to me, although they certainly look menacing. Stormtroopers who are "actually menacing" - that would be terrifying to the universe, wouldn't it?

Thrawn is another character I have heard and seen references to, but never understood or followed closely.  But I quite enjoy your description of him! Some blend of Renaissance Man, Imperial warships and a unique tint...your painting captures your description of him well.  He looks to be contemplating something rather deep, if non-force related.

That is fine, fine brushwork all around. Highlighting something that is mostly black is always tricky, and highlighting a fellow in a crisp white uniform - why, that is even trickier in some ways! 25 points well-earned!

Greg

From MichaelA: Droids? What Droids? (40 points)

Hot on the heels of the Droids from last week, I present the most luckless search party in celluloid history!  I am tinkering away with various bits of terrain for a Tatooine themed board and needed a couple of ‘extras’ to set the scene, as it were.  To that end I have grabbed my Imperial Assault Dewback and five Stormtroopers from the Star Wars: Legion core box to represent the Imperial presence.  Once again I used Sorastro painting tutorials for both, which this time saw me take on wet blending with a matt medium.  I have become so impressed, and perhaps a little bit dependent, on this man’s work that I have decided to become a patron and was pleasantly surprised at the additional PDF guides that this allowed me access to.  There is no doubt in my mind that these guides have seen me change my painting style and I would like to think for the better?

 

Once again the scale discrepancy is notable between the two game systems, but interestingly the backpack on the Dewback rider and that of the Heavy Weapon Trooper are identical in size!  Speaking of the Dewback, I needed to adapt the shock lance using some brass rod.  The Stormtroopers are, of course, not really Sandtroopers, but will suffice although they have clearly only just arrived on the planet judging by their mostly pristine armour!  If the truth be told, I just couldn't bring myself to wash over my carefully painted work!

 

So that is one mounted unit and five foot for an additional 35 points.
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Great work Michael! Ah, the hapless Imperial Stormtroopers...so fun, so pointless, so essential - pop cultural touchstones who cannot hit the broad side of a barn with their shooting.  This particular Stormtrooper party is, as you say, notorious for its incompetence, and has become an infamous  punch line. 

They will be the absolute perfect addition to any Tatooine scene being contemplated, and your brushwork is, as always, outstanding.  I cannot speak to these painting tutorials you mention, but the results certainly speak for themselves - the dewback in particular is top-shelf stuff. 

Having seen the bonkers scale of the "Star Wars: Legion" figures up close, I am impressed at how well they mix in with the "Imperial Assault" lot.  Just great stuff, excellent work. 

And while we find no droids, we find 40 points - yes, a few extra points because that dewback looks so cool, and because I'm getting an opportunity for a day to be a minion, I may as well abuse my power while I can...

Greg

From StefanK: Rebel Troopers for Imperial Assault (15 points)

As some might have noticed, some friends and I have been playing Imperial Assault for a while. For a certain amount of time I had the idea to follow the releases to bring the whole Star Wars universe to live but luckily for my wallet Fantasy Flight Games (and in Germany Heildeberger / Asmodée) were too fast for a slow painter and volatile hobby fellow like me. Thus my efforts ended with those sets which are represented in the Imperial Assault app meaning the first wave at the moment.

Therefore I had a set of three rebel troopers lying around and somehow I felt it was time to splash some paint on them. Rather soon we want to continue with our campaign and we might need those allies to fight the fierde forces of the Galactic Empire.

 

The set contains of three troopers in the well-known uniform featured in the iconic opening sequence of episode IV. They are all nice and clean casts although all three figures are identical.

Colourwise I left the greyish 1970s schene a bit and went for the more colourful blue and khaki scheme wich the computer game Star Wars: Battlefront delivered.

After all those models were truly fun to paint. The details all crisp and clear, the facial expression easy to follow and a simple uniform which allowed a quick painting style.

As usual I used Vallejo paints for most parts of the figures and the Wargames Foundry skin coulours for face and hands.

Only the bases are bit of a problem. Imperial Assault may be set in various surroundings from the wooded areas of Endor to the dark and grimy hangars of an outer rim space port. Therefore I didn't find a good solution for shaped bases and left them greyish. So I applied some dark grey and added a series of lighter splashes.

 

Nevertheless I'm still pondering about changing to clear acrylic bases but I haven't brought myself to re-basing my whole Imperial Assault collection yet.

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Guest minion Byron still here, Wow, what an awesome entry this is.  

I love Star Wars which is a good start, but I love great paint jobs even more!  I really love the colours, the hard highlights and the smooth look of these. It is a style that many of the great painters in this challenge have.  It is also one that even though I can paint well enough, I just can not emulate and am jealous of your ability here.

Great work and keep it up, I want to see more!  I also wouldn't mind seeing a tutorial on how you do your faces as they are top notch and something I always struggle with.

15 well earned points!

From PaulS: Random selection of work part 1 - 65 points

This week has been a bit... bitty with the first bonus round coming up, running out of undercoat for terrain and running out of basing materials.

The first selection finished are 10 anti-walker bollard-things. These were collected from multiple sets of DUST tactics and were one of the few things I kept when I sold it all on as they are useful bits of terrain for any game that involves big tanks. You can see the Strawbear ably demonstrating scale once again.

After those, I decided to revisit Imperial Assault. Inspired by Samuli's excellent work on his Vader, here's mine. Not quite as neat, but not bad for 10 minutes work. The 4 guards were also pretty quick, taking another 20 minutes to complete. I forgot to cut them off their bases before painting though, so they are still on their original solid bases. At some point I may go back and try to cut them off, but for now they are on concrete.

Lastly is a little worm from Shadows of Brimstone, which should be useful in a number of different games, especially things like Strange Aeons where Cthulhu monsters are everywhere. The Burrower is a simple little kit with about 5 pieces, including the rockery base that it comes with.Sadly this leads to the typical problem of some of the earlier Brimstone kits in that the detail is a bit soft and there are some obvious joins in there that can't really be covered up without obscuring the detail that *is* there.

To give you a sense of scale on this little worm, the Strawbear had offered to kindly act as a scale point again. This thing is terrifyingly big... I have no idea where I'm going to store it... but should cause carnage whenever it appears in the mines!

The terrain takes up just under one box, s is 20 points. Vader and his minions should be another 25 points... the Burrower? I have no idea! I leave that up to the minions to decide as it is a 28mm monstrous creature about 3.5 times the height of the Strawbear!

From DaveD, stand in grognard minion..or is grognard minion standing in... who knows

A nicely eclectic mix. I do like Vader and his guards , and as for your Burrower , that looks like the stuff of nightmares ... I have done this a 40mm vehicle at 20 points - so a grand total of 65!

From: JeremyM - More Imperial Assault Imperials (50 points)

Hi Everyone,

So I've been carrying on painting stuff from the core set of Imperial Assault. In this case the other AT-ST, the probe droids and the Imperial Guard.

I had actually painted the AT-ST the same time as the other one (submitted for BFG), but went with the classic grey rather than the green-grey combo for the more unique one. I also primarily used the airbrush and am pretty happy with how the greys blended with it. I also used weathering pigments to add some detail but as with the other one feel I overdid it a bit with the feet.

For the probe droids I was honestly getting a bit tired of these simple monochromatic paint schemes and so decided to give each different colored eyes (lenses). Gives them a bit of a stop light feel but will help differentiate each of them on the table, something I haven't quite figured out how to resolve with some of the other figures on the table with these clear bases (I might paint the rim or look into 3d printed base rings perhaps). I also created these flight stands using clear acrylic rod as I didn't like the knuckle dragging design of the originals.

I tried to paint the imperial guard using the airbrush but found that the blending it produced was a bit too subtle for the minis. But it was worth a try and at least base coated them. So I switched to an actual brush and also tried a red glaze for the first time. I'm pretty happy with how the ended up, and am totally using glazes to help with blending in the future. Game them some gloss varnish on the helmets to help make them look more like leather than the cloth robe.

I also tried out some different brushes for these minis. I had supported two games and gears brush kickstarters. The first ones (double-ended) were absolute garbage, useful for drybrushing at best. I liked the second set (ichiban pro line) but was encountering issues. The set I used for these were from the WAMP brush kickstarter and they were noticeably better than the games and gears mediocre ones. It really helped wamp contracted with an actual brush company (Rosemary & Co). Now, however, it has me thinking of looking into the highly touted Series 7 or Rapheal brushes. If they make painting this simple and fun will totally be worth the added cost.

7 x 28mm figures and one vehicle = 50 points

A nice kick-off for the Tuesday crew Jeremy! These Imperials are a fine bunch if ever there was one. Hard to pick a favourite with so much goodies in one entry, but if I had to I would opt for the AT-ST. I simply love those Imperial Walkers and the painting and weathering on yours is superb. The Imperial Guards with their dashing red uniforms are splendid too and your use of varnish to differentiate between textures is an inspired choice as well. Very nice! 50 points will be awarded tonight.

From Barks: Star Wars heroes (20 points)

You may be relieved to hear this is currently my last planned Star Wars Post this Challenge! I’m finishing with the latest bunch of heroes from Imperial Assault, and I quite like them.

Firstest with the mostest is fan favourite Ahsoka Tano. She first appeared as an annoying young teen and Anakin Skywalker’s protégée in the Clone Wars animated series. She (and the series) later improved and matured, culminating in her breaking with the Jedi path having been accused of a crime she didn’t commit. She returned in the Rebels series as a grown woman, and it is this aspect of her that I have painted. She senses something familiar about Darth Vader...

She was great fun to paint. She’s got an interesting colour palette, and some fine details on her front armour. Her head tails look better than they do in the blown-up images. She carries white lightsabers (in that distinctive but questionable dual backhand grip), which I painted a very pale glowing grey and I think came out OK. I decided not to do any significant OSL, as I struggle with just white and paler surfaces.

I didn’t feel so enthused by the next hero, Jarrod Kelvin. He strikes me as an impractical Wolverine-wannabe.

In contrast, I do like Ko-Tun Feralo. She seems an eminently practical Rebel.

Finally, I love Drokkatta. Consensus is that she’s female, and I’m not going to question a Wookie demolitions expert. With her wacky goggles, grenade launcher and thermal detonators, I can’t wait to get her into battle.

4x 28mm figures

From Ray

I for one am gutted this is possibly your last Star Wars entry into the Challenge. Get that fat wallet out and buy more please!!!
I think your right about the back-handed grip of Ahsoka Tano, looks a little dangerous to me, you don't wanna get that lightsabre too close to your own butt when trying to fight. Jarred Kelvin is a tad brown after the colour explosion on Tano, I have to admit. I wouldn't wanna meet Ko-Tun Feralo in a dark alley either!
But I think everyone's favourite will be Drokkatta the female (?) Wookie! Top brushwork ol' boy!

4 x 28mm figures gives you a total of 20 points!

From JeremyM - A Bunch 'o Stormtroopers (95 points)

Hi All,

So I've actually had these done for a bit but just haven't photographed them. I've been away from the hobby for the past two years finishing up a Masters and then getting Married. It surprised me when I picked up a brush again how much I had forgotten (or thought I knew).

I followed a youtube channel, Sorastor's Painting Guide, to help ease me into the process. Its a really helpful guide for the minis from Imperial Assault and I painted the first three pretty much exactly like he did but found it taking a ton of time. I modified the process when I realized I shouldn't just glop the black wash all over the mini, and applied it more selectively. Even better I recalled having a lighter coloured black from Seperate Weapon Minis, soft-body black. I found things improved and it was taking me a more reasonable amount of time right around when I was done the two scout troopers at the end.

Why on earth I chose to start back into the hobby by painting a whole wack of white mini's I'll never know. But I'm glad they are done and it inspired me to paint a whole lot of grey, and black minis (god star wars has some boring painting options). But I told myself this year my goal was to try and get Imperial Assault done and I'll stick with it. 

19 x 28mm Star Wars Imperial Assault minis

Cheers,

JeremyM

Jeremy, everyone who has ever tried to paint a stormtrooper knows it is not that easy as it looks. It is not just a load of white armor there's a lot of detail there and you've done a brilliant job of them! You can now move onto the more juicy characters of the SW universe, I for one can't waitnwhat you will make of them!