Oota-goota Santa?

My hobby life naturally took a hit last year when I had most of my stuff in storage. Still, I did manage to paint a couple of things. The last thing I completed in 2016 was a figure for our local Secret Santa. I have held off showing it since I wanted to be sure the recipient had received it, however the obligatory "Thank you Santa"-post didn't materialise so I was a bit worried. A couple of eBay buys had gone missing just before Christmas and for a moment I suspected a dishonest postal worker had decided to nick my packages.

In the end I flat out asked if it had arrived, and yes it had. (My eBay buys were refunded by the seller too, so all is well that ends well, as the bard wrote.) But what was it, I hear you ask? Well, the title is a clue, as the figure was Greedo for Imperial Assault.

Oota-Goota Solo?

Two duros and a bothan walk into a bar

I can't be arsed to do a summary of 2015, I suspect I diverged from plan a lot, but the final tally is nevertheless quite impressive, at least by my standards. I painted solely 28mm figures this year, and I focused heavily on WW2. Still, some 40k and a lot of Star Wars models sneaked in there, and I even painted some Gates of Antares figures.

In total I painted seventeen fantasy figures and one monster, 43 WW2 figures, as well as five vehicles, four terrain pieces and two buildings, (I never put the last one up on the blog), and lastly 32 sci/fi figures of various sorts... that's almost a hundred figures. Not bad.

Roll on 2016! I started these figures sometime last year, can't really remember, but they proved a bit more complex to paint than I imagined so I switched to easier figures. But now their time had come.

A couple of rebel saboteurs.

Last Ditch Painting of 2015

...bring on 2016! But first, I had to finish a least some of the figures that I had lying about. These Imperial Assault figures were started months ago but somehow I got bored and painted other stuff. (Story of my life, basically.)

Three Imperial Officers...

...and three Rebel Troopers.

More pictures after the break.

Crimson Empire

Well, as I promised earlier, I have now painted my winning Imperial Assault team. It proved to be quite frustrating.

The winning team, in their winning colours.

I used some different techniques mostly because my GW Mephiston Red had dried in the pot. Damn Games Workshop, I almost think they do it on purpose with their crappy paint cans. I have other paints more than a decade old but GW paints seem to last a year at most.

Champion of the Force

By chance I happened to participate in a local game night tournament of Imperial Assault. I had only played the game with my kids previously and wanted to try it for real. At the last minute I threw a list together consisting of the Royal Guard Champion and two pairs of Royal Guard (one elite). They are all hard hitting close combat troops with the Royal Guard figures able to support each other when defending. I had five points left so I added an elite Probe Droid for some ranged support. Completely oblivious how command cards worked I selected all cards that had the keywords "brawler" and "guardian" as the Royal Guard and the Champion are both.

The furious six in all their unpainted glory... 

At first I was going to take as many painted figures as possible but that would have been a rebel list with many different characters and probably very hard to play. As it was my first proper game I thought it would be better to keep things simple.

WarColours paints review. In other words, I got new paints!!!

Hi gang. I'm in the middle of vacation, which involves dragging the family around Sweden to various tourists traps. When we're home I'm hoping for bad weather to get some hobby time in, because otherwise I have to paint the house... yep, 1:1 scale painting.

Speaking of paints I have been trying out a new manufacturer named WarColours, based in Cyprus.

Don't you just love trying out new paints?

This new range of paints are supplied in dropper bottles with child-proof caps. The consistency is smooth and they should be suitable for airbrushing as well -- the website claims that but I haven't tried it myself.

The Empire's Finest apprehend terrorist scum...

I have finally finished another two characters and three stormtroopers for Imperial Assault. I still haven't got a game in, but I have five weeks of vacation coming up in a few days and have managed to buy all the extra figure supplements released so far. Now let's hope it rains a couple of days.

Our heroic troops have spotted terrorist intruders in a medical facility and take action! 

I had devised a plan for painting the stormtroopers quickly, using a white undercoat and a fine diluted black wash. The wash backfired and turned the white armour into grey dullness however, so I had to manually highlight all the armour back up to white.

The cowardly terrorists are caught and soon surrender,

The stormtroopers had quite a lot of mold lines that I had missed when I trimmed and undercoated them. Since the arm and leg armour pieces had some ridged details already I thought the mold lines were part of the design, but the wash showed all too well my errors, so I had to fix those as well.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh! Roowwrrrr... Grrrrf!

[Translation: Let the wookie win.]

Friends, let me introduce the mighty Chewbacca and Gaarkhan, fierce warrior.

In case you didn't get it. Let. The. Wookie. Win.

Well, it had to happen sooner or later. I finally caved in and bought Imperial Assault, Fantasy Flight Games' dungeon crawling skirmish boardgame with a Star Wars theme. I actually had given in some time ago, and started to buy the expansions a couple a time some months ago. I knew I was only prolonging the inevitable and how hard it would be to catch up with all the expansions later, so why not start buying them in advance?

I'm not going to do a full review, other saying that it's awesome! Go out and get it now! If you don't trust me, watch this review by Tom Vassel and Sam Healey on Miami Dice:

More pictures after the break