The Road to Adepticon!

Here at ++Chronicles Eternal++, quite a few of us are putting the last touches of paint on models and packing up all the gear, because Adepticon is on the way – and with it, the first of what will hopefully be many Eternal Champions Tournaments! Let’s see how everyone is progressing…

Cormac

I’m by no means a professional mini painter, but I wanted to share how I painted my Razide from Warzone Eternal.

I started with a brush-on black primer, followed by a dry brush of purple to bring out the details.

Next, I added a layer of highlights to emphasize the muscle fibers and those cool vein-like pipes. I even highlighted the eyes early on so it could watch me as I worked.

For the more bulgyer muscles, I applied some yellow tones to give them a warm glow when covered with a red speed paint from Army Painter. The red transitions into a brushed-on blue as you move down the body, creating an ombre effect that lets the purple underpaint subtly show through.

Using the same pale blue that I used for the feet, I highlighted details on the brows, pipes, tubes, and veins while adding extra highlights to the muscle fibers and abs.

Look at that booty, I need to touch that up too.

I also experimented with light effects on the gun and bracelets. Since I don’t have an airbrush, I used stippling and light dry brushing to create a subtle green glow reflecting off the body.

I’ll be finishing things up with a custom 3D-printed base to complete the look.

Thanks for checking it out!

Haiiro

Time is a real motivator for me so I created a countdown to Adepticon for myself. This helped me schedule my painting and keep me motivated. I also calculated that by the time I got serious, I had roughly three days to paint per model. Not a terrible pace, but for someone like me that likes to paint at a higher than tabletop standard this was a crunch! I even started keeping track of the hours I spent on the project, although the final count will be inaccurate, as I routinely forget to “clock-in.” Still, it gives me a baseline for any one model, allowing me to more accurately predict how long an army will take. By now I have one model left, so I actually was able to outpace my calculations.

For my Bauhaus army, I decided to 3D print my bases, and went with a forest theme. This served a couple of purposes.

1. I didn’t have to build anything or rely on texture/pastes/sand
2. Being a forest, the bases could be painted in a variety of colors, depending on what my paint scheme ultimately was.

I typically don’t paint based on “box art” but I did decide to go with a fairly conventional Bauhaus scheme, with blues and whites. This had the benefit of being able to focus solely on the painting itself, without worrying about color choice as much. I ended up painting my bases like a forest in the fall, to contrast the blue and make the red cloaks act more like camouflage for my army.

A real benefit to this project was being able to practice my white armor and red cloaks a lot. I’m now more confident in painting them, but my speed has increased, which bodes well for the future. The rest of my Venusian Rangers need to be painted after the con, and they are essentially just white and red. I’ll need to get through them quick, so I can get started on my next army!

Lexington

So, how’s my Adepticon prep going, you ask? Well, I’m a slow hand at painting, and pickier about color choice than my generally mediocre skills might warrant. Still, I yam what I am and etc. So, with that and the impending Adepticon deadline in mind, I carefully cleaned my Bauhaus of imperfections, did a quick little conversion to distinguish my Venusian Ranger Medic (more on that below), and, on an uncharacteristically warn March day down here in St. Louis, got to priming and zenithal-ing

There were, uh, technical difficulties.

Well, poop. At least I got a cool conversion done for the Venusian Ranger Medic with a 40K Guard bit.

So with painting on delay or maybe out of the picture for me this Adepticon, here’s a couple of other non-miniature accoutrements that’ll help out at the tables

Magentized Tokens

A TableWar Mini Case accompanies me to more or less any miniatures game or event anymore. It’s tough, it fits under a plane seat and it’s got magnetized trays for all the minis and tokens that come with the skirmish game life. For tokens, I use 1/4″ x 1/32″ N48 rare earth magnets. To make sure all the tokens were magnetized at around the center, I first carefully positioned one of the magnets in the center on the side of the token with the printing and used regular superglue to set it in place. Make sure you’re using the printed-on side, as putting it on the opposite side will leave an ugly frost on the transparent material. After the glue has dried, you can use this first token as a sort of jig, placing another token on the bottle, setting a dot of glue in the center and using the magnet on the finished piece to automatically center the new magnet. You can keep this going until all of your tokens are magnetized, and you’ll be able to stack them for easy access.

One note here is that you should not leave the magnets stacked while the glue is drying, or it’ll leave a frosted imprint on the transparent material. I let all of mine dry for about a full day before stacking them up for storage. Another thing with the official Warzone Eternal tokens is that, by doing this, you’re sort of robbing yourself of half the use of your Wound tokens, as they have a “2 Wounds” back side. This is a decision I kind of made by mistake, not noticing the different sides of the Wound tokens before gluing about half of them in place (I have twelve Wound tokens total, so it seemed fine anyway), but fair warning to anyone else who’s magnetizing!

Card Sleeves

Years of Warmachine in its pre-app form left me with a habit of sleeving any card that’s part of a miniatures game. We can leave markers out of this, thank goodness, but we’re still playing a game where dice roll, miniatures fall and sometimes a stray dash of Diet Coke ends up in places where it was not meant to go. Card sleeves are cheap, and keep that kind of nightmare at bay, so it seems like a pretty reasonable investment. I ended up with some 66 x 91mm sleeves from GameGenic, which fit the cards perfectly, and ended up being that perfect blend of tough but not awkward to handle.*

_{* Neither I nor ++ Chronicles Eternal++ receive any proceeds from these links, but would like to ensure interested parties that both entities remain absurdly open to bribes in general}

Rentner65

I’m still in the process to finish a second possible faction for the tournament. My plan was to paint 2 troops first and later decide on an actual list. First faction I worked on was Bauhaus where I picked the Rangers and Blitzers (my favorite unit back from second Edition).

After finishing Bauhaus I started with Capitol. Here I picked Free Marines and Martian Banshees as troops. Back in first edition I had picked Mishima as my first faction and therefore the Sunset Strikers never where my favorites. That was the only reason I decided against them (for now).

My plan is also to get at least 1-2 online games in before I leave for the convention and hopefully 2+ games on Friday or Saturday morning so I’m not complete cannon fodder. However, whenever I get into a new game, I will not do good – it has been like that since I was a kid. Therefore, my plan is to meet and connect with lots of people and not win the tournament.

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That’s that, everyone! We’ll have live coverage of Adepticon and the Eternal Champion tournament right here at ++Chronicles Eternal++, so stay tuned to watch the fun. See you at the show!