Tetsujin no Llama

One of the great things about the advent of 3d printing, when it comes to gaming, is that it allows me to take more risks and try stuff I wouldn't do otherwise. Take, for example, experimenting with painting techniques. Maybe I want to see what an unusual color scheme would look like or try doing an odd way of achieving an effect. Factory-made miniatures are expensive. Too expensive for me to risk it. Which, as someone who's not very good at painting minis and needs lots of practice, is one reason I've never gotten into them. I don't feel like I can afford the implied expense of getting better. Enter 3d printing. With the right files, I can print as many minis as I can like and mess around with them to my heart's content. Mess one up? That's fine. Resin isn't cheap , but it doesn't cost nearly as much as pre-made molded plastic. I can take it as a learning experience and move on. Which brings me to messing around with some Car Wars minis. I'd been m...

Still having a go at these, trying out some new ideas. The short version is that having the right tools and materials is still key, but I've got a way to go with some other stuff. I think this one looks better in person than as a picture. A couple of shades of blue here with a blue wash and drybrushed metallic blue on some components. Oh, and purple spikes. I didn't even try to figure out something clever to do with the windshield. I'm finding that it's hard to make yellow work, but this one wasn't too bad. I initially tried masking the area for the blue stripe with tape, but it pulled off the paint instead. Had to do a swipe with a broad brush, which isn't great but worked better than I expected. Another one that looks better in person than on film. Tried to do a few different shades of green, which wasn't entirely successful. Probably my best out of this batch. I credit the red wash, which ended up being kind of glossy and goes well with the copper accents...

They say it's a poor craftsman who blames their tools. Is it a poor craftsman who gives them credit when things work out? If so, I am that craftsman. After my first round of not-great miniature painting, I ran off some more CW minis and tried more painting, this time digging up my well-hidden actually-for-minis paints (as opposed to the standard craft store acrylics I used the first time around), which I had more than I thought I did, and limited myself to my tiniest brushes. I also watched a few more YouTube videos about painting minis just to get a better feel for what it looked like when people did that. How did it come out? Still not great, but better. The first of batch #2 and by a considerable margin the worst. Involved some ill-advised dry brushing and the metallic paint I used for the weapons and I didn't thin the metallic paint I used on the weapons and side windows, losing all the detail in the process. This one...is actually OK. The thinned blue and purple paints gi...

I'm old enough to be a player of Car Wars from Steve Jackson Games from the Pocket Box days. Old enough, even, that I've got a copy of Sunday Drivers (clearly a superior title), not Crash City . But it became much too complicated a game to keep playing after a while, or rather my ability to take the time to deal with complexity declined markedly. But I've been delighted by the new, much faster edition of Car Wars which came out not too long ago. My one problem with the game is that instead of tiny cardboard counters, it uses Matchbox/Hot Wheels-scaled minis...no, that's actually not a problem. That's excellent. They look great and make the game more fun to play. The problem lurks inside of that. They're great minis and they invite painting. Indeed, SJ Games as a series of videos about painting car minis on their Youtube channel. The problem, then, is that I want to paint my car minis, but I suck at painting minis. Like, I'm the worst at it. And while I...

As anybody who ever reads what I write here surely knows, there's a new edition of the classic automotive combat game Car Wars in the offing, with the Kickstarter beginning in about a week as of this writing. I have very fond memories of playing it back in high school, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the new, faster playing version coming out soon. One notable feature of the new version is that it'll contain plastic minis rather than the old cardboard counters we used back in the 80s. That's awesome, but there's an issue. Minis want painting, and my painting sucks. So, then, to get in some practice, I printed out a bunch of cars and weapons I got off Thingiverse. And I also tweaked a watchtower, attached a few TV cameras, and modified it to be a dice tower. Fun! Layers of red and blue metallic paint making an interesting purple. Glamouflage! Of course, what I'm getting out of this is that once the game co...