Spiff's GSF minis

[Spiff]

I've finished painting a couple of the GSF minis and thought I'd post some pix.



The Bjarlspire was originally going to just be a uniform gunmetal gray with the glowing blue spot on top and bottom, but I couldn't bring myself to do that, so I added a little bit of detail with the silver patterns on the side.  I'm pretty happy with it.


The bomber vexed me big time.  It's just a uniformly gray polygon, how hard can that be?  Turns out it wasn't hard to paint, but it was hard to make something that uninteresting look good.  I ended up with washing it all in a black coat to give it a kind of a stealth bomber look, and I think that, combined with the gold highlights, did the trick.


The Claw was originally going to be metal like in the official pic, but after painting two gray metal ships, I couldn't do it again, so I went for a more organic look.  Getting the blending on the claw right was difficult, and I probably could have spent a lot more time and effort to get it better if I wanted, but I found a place I was satisfied with and moved on.

The other minis are in various states of unfinishedness at the moment.  When I get more completed, I'll post more pix.

[Pydro]

Awesome!

[Donner]

Those look awesome!  Thanks for sharing the pics!

[Rabit]

Wow! Seriously, great stuff!

[Matchstickman]

Nice!

[Ameena]

Wow, that's really cool :D. I like the texturing on the Claw.

[Reckless]

Super boss. I look forward to seeing more of these!

[arenson9]

Fantastic

[grysqrl]

These are excellent. I must learn to paint immediately.

[Braithwhite]

Very, very nice!

[Christopher]

Daaaang! Look at those ships!

Nice work!

[Spiff]

Here's the crew all together, with seven minis completed.

[Spiff]

Got a new batch of ships to show (likely the last batch in a while, as Mrs. Spiff's patience with my painting gear being out all over the place is wearing thin).

As I've come to understand is my most common challenge with these ships, Marot's Folly is basically a steel gray box that I had to make be not boring somehow.  So I painted a couple of the bumps on its sides black to break things up, blinged up its exposed panels with some silver and gold highlights, and gave its underside glowing orange running lights.  Then I added brown highlights to simulate the rust in the official picture.  I'll call this one a moderate success, though nothing to write home about.

Baselios was the one I was most interested to paint because I knew I had a technique to make the purple grape bubbles look good.  For the tentacles, I went with silver fading to dark gray at the base.  I think the mini looks better on the table than it does in the pix (which is true of all the minis, really), and again, I'd call it a success, though only a moderate one.

The elf ships posed a challenge I didn't see coming.  They're smooth and unadorned, which means they have very little for me to work with to make them interesting.  The green one especially flummoxed me - how am I supposed to paint lightning bolts all over it, or those tiny yellow lines which don't actually appear on the mini itself?  In the end, I decided to keep things simple with an undercoat of darker blue/green, with drybrush highlights of lighter blue/green.  I like the blue one better than the green one, but they're both OK.

[Pydro]

Awesome!

[Ameena]

Cool, looking good, Spiff - will be cool if you can get round to painting all the other ones as well :D.

[Acefury.eq]

Alright spiff. You had the time. Let's see the rest of them 

[Christopher]

He's been a bit busy.

*sneaks back to the Playtesting forum*

[Spiff]

As I mentioned, all my paints are put away at the moment and I'm not sure if they're going to get pulled back out to paint minis for a game I'm not actually playing.  Maybe, but it's not high on my to-do list.

[Ameena]

Lol Christopher >:).

[grim88]

Playtesting what?! Do we know what's currently being playtested? Wrath of the Cosmos.... or something else....