Oooh, shiny!

It's almost Christmas, and I haven't written anything for more than a month. I had a slight burnout during november because of too many things going on at once, and then there was Star Wars. In order to avoid spoilers I didn't keep as much tabs on the online community as usual, instead I was following John Boyega on Instagram and other sites. I tell you right now, John Boyega seems like a very funny guy to be friends with.

But that's not what I wanted to show you today. Instead I have found some other new shinies.

"Mein Gott, was ist das? Essen mein flammenwerfer!"

Yes, it's a Ghar battlesuit from Beyond the Gates of Antares, Rick Priestley's new sci-fi game. "But what of Frostgrave" I hear you cry. Fear not, I'm plodding along with that one as well as all the WW2 and Star Wars stuff I have. It's just that a couple of my work mates go Gates of Antares crazy recently and I bought the Ghar stuff from the starter box off one of them.

An assault suit on the left with two regular battle suits.

The Ghar are biochanged humans that now only live for war. They are quite pathetic on their own but very dangerous inside their plasma reactor driven battlesuits.

You can just see the reactor vents on the back of the suits.

Apparently they are technologically inferior to the other races in the Gates of Antares universe, relying on thick armour plates instead of a cloud of nano-bots providing shielding.

Close up of the battle suits. I tried to get as much animation in the poses I could get.

The figures are plastic and the only variation is in that you get three different heads with each walker. The assault suit has another set of arms than the regular battle suit of course, but the same legs, torso and head options. You can however pose them as you like, but there is not a lot you can do to vary the poses.

The assault suit. Note my crude attempts at painting a glow effect on the reactor. (Yes, the claw has it's own plasma reactor!)

I wanted to reflect the massive nature of these and decided to paint them bare metal. No time for the combat oriented Ghar to paint their suits in my mind, they suits are of course well taken care of so no rust or other blemishes. The Warcolours Pewter metal colours provided a very convincing bare metal look, so good it looked like an unpainted metal figure. I added a black pinwash and a slight drybrush of GW Mithril Silver to bring out the contrasts. The small domes and the piping were painted Warcolours Copper and highlighted Gold from the same range. (I really like their metals, they are highly recommended.) I have seen some that painted the small domes like lenses or lights, but I wanted them more to look like part of the suit's cooling system. I tried some simple lighting effects on the reactor to make it look like glowing though.

Another size comparison. I really like the metal finish.

I picked out the eye lenses on the heads though, with some simple shading and a white dot as a reflection. The bases are from Anvil Industry, and they do give that high tech look. The Ghar come on 40mm bases, so I ordered the 40mm sculpted bases only to find out they were "base toppers", which means they are designed to be larger than their designated base, and hang out over the edge of the base. Since the Warlord bases are flat but with a small lip that wouldn't work and I ended up using the larger pieces on their own. A couple of the smaller ones were fitted to a standard Warlord base.

Three more bases awaiting their battle suits. The right consists of smaller pieces on a standard Warlord base.

I have three more battlesuits to do, and then I have to decide if I want to invest in Gates of Antares or not. I mean, I don't even have the rules yet, and six battlesuits is like two squads. We'll see after Christmas.

Happy Gaming!