Monthly Archives: December 2016

Spice Pirates Patrol: X-Wing Repaint Tutorial

Posted on by tjkopena

I’ve been playing X-Wing miniatures for all but literally a year now, starting just before last year’s X-Mas Wing Tournament @ Redcap’s. That whole time I’ve largely been employing a particular style of build and practicing literally just a couple different squadrons that have turned out to work pretty well. To mix things up, have a slightly less hard-hitting squad for more casual play, and to fly some more off the wall stuff, I put together a new list and then painted up a whole squadron to match. Here I present some glamour photos, but more importantly a tutorial walkthrough of the process in hopes it helps newcomers interested in giving repaints a try.

The Spice Pirates Patrol squadron.

Spice Pirates Patrol

I present the Spice Pirates Patrol:

Is this a great list? It’s ok, but not great or super competitive. I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it. Comparing to my standard rubric: Hull+shields is a bit low, average agility is a bit inferior, and damage output once you factor in the turrets is above average but not amazing. The real weaknesses I’ve found so far though are that the squadron isn’t very maneuverable, the Z-95s die easily, and they have to prioritize blocking over jousting, which is a harder skill. So I’m not planning to take it to any tournaments, but after just a couple games it seems to be competent for casual play, fun to fly, and probably not a setup you’re likely to see another of on the local tables.

All of that’s not really the point though. The design rationale for this squadron was:

  • I’m hosting a beginners’ night next week, what can I fly that’s fun and credible but not overly strong?
  • In a year of playing I’ve never ever used this Z-95 I bought, can I flip it to Scum and use it there?
  • The shop is way overstocked on HWKs, they’re on sale, and I love them, how can I justify another one?
  • Most Wanted is also on sale, what’s a neat list that will use all of that plus another HWK and my Z-95?

And here we are. Obviously I couldn’t have a Rebel Z-95 mixing with some Scum, or two Moldy Crows in my fleet, so in a fit of late night and early morning inspiration I repainted them all to match. Later they got magnetized as well. So far I’ve had a couple fun, close games with the squad, and am happy with the whole project.

Z-95 #4.

Z-95 #24.

Z-95 #44.

Kavil’s Y-Wing, engines spewing ions.

Torkhil Mux’s HWK-290.

Repaint

I’m writing up this repaint because I think it came out well and the local reception has been very positive, but it was really fast and easy. I’m an average miniatures painter in raw skills, but I get what I think are hopefully just-above-average results by being smart about the process and using some basic “tricks.” Anybody can get at least the same quality outcomes, and you should give it a try if you’re interested!

Bases

First up, black out your ship inserts, bases, and pegs. I’ve done this for all my ships, all my tokens and templates, even my damage deck, and it really boosts the visual appeal of any squadron. All the cardboard bits you can do with just a standard Sharpie or similar small-point permanent marker. The bases and pegs I spray paint black. Hit the bases diagonally from one direction, let them dry, rotate them 180 degrees, hit them again, and you’re done. I use alligator clip sticks to hold the pegs for spraying and drying so that the fine paint doesn’t get marred by handling them. I use these similarly for the ships as well, which you’ll see below.

The real trick on the bases though is to spend a minute and paint the front of the peg holder in a color to match the arc on the ship insert (red for Rebel, green for Imperial, yellow for Scum). This makes the base really pop visually, and as a bonus eliminates the hassle of trying to figure out which way is forward (you of course won’t be able to see from above the arrow included on the underside once you paint the base).

Sides of the cardboard pieces have all been blacked out with a Sharpie, while the bases & pegs have been spray painted.

Great small touch: Paint the peg holders to match the arcs on the ship cards.

Primer

Next up is priming the ships. It’s not worth trying to strip off the existing paint jobs. The paint and plastic used makes it very hard to remove, the pieces are delicate and not prone to scrubbing, and it’s all a very thin coat anyway. It’s just not worth it. In many cases you may not even want to prime the ship if you’re just reworking some areas.

However, these ships all had a variety of stock paint jobs. I wanted to be sure the repaint started from a consistent base so they all wound up matching, so they had to get primed. For models with such fine details you want to be very wary of putting on too many coats of paint, so rather than the black or white I use for most miniatures and then painting on colors, I spray primed these directly in the grey base I wanted.

A wide variety of fancy primers are available specifically for miniatures. The big appeal of these is that they adhere well to models, but are very thin, preserving the detail. The big downside is they’re expensive, and the cans don’t last very long. I just use cheap, everyday matte spray paints found in the hardware store around the corner. I don’t always use paints specifically marked as primers, though in this case I did.

In using standard spray paints, the big thing to keep in mind is the necessity of keeping the paint thin. Spray at a good distance from the model (maybe 12–16″ or so), and in quick but steady passes and just one or two at a time. If you need to hit another angle or need another layer, wait until everything dries and then rotate the model and do another quick, thin pass. I used the alligator clip sticks mentioned above to hold the models for this so I could rotate them while spraying and prime all angles in one go.

If you’re new to all this, or using a new paint, start with the model you care about least. In this case I started with a Z-95 to make sure the paint wouldn’t be too thick, because in event of catastrophe that would be less of a loss than if the Y-Wing or HWK got messed up. In actuality here the first couple shots out of the can did fuzz up a bit on the underside of the model, but not enough to be visible in play even if it were on top.

Spray primed models.

Base Colors

An important “trick” in getting nice, classy miniatures without a ton of work is just to keep it simple and obvious. Use just two high contrast colors as the base, pick out some other details, and call it a day. It’ll look great. Multicolor schemes, complex patterns, etc., should all be saved until you’re sure you know how to make it work.

Here I went with orange as a second color to contrast well with the grey base. Orange is also my favorite color, seems reasonably associated with “spice,” and isn’t strongly associated with either Rebels or Imperials. I basically just went around each ship more or less arbitrarily picking out section of hull, panels, and some details in orange. On the Zees I made a conscious decision to have them be consistent and similar to each other but not precisely matching.

Just like with the spray primer, it’s important with such fine details to keep the paint thin. You generally really need to start with miniatures-specific paint, and even then often need to additionally thin it a little bit with water. I use an eyedropper and an old brush to carefully put in and mix just a few drops of water into the pot. Try your paints on a piece of paper or other scrap material first. If you feel like the paint might be thick and globbing on, then it is and needs to be thinned. Depending on the color it’ll take multiple coats to get it solid but not overwhelm the details. Here the orange bits were generally two coats and three on the larger sections.

Sections of hull, plating, and some details painted orange.

Next I painted some of the other plating, window frames, piping, and other details in brass. The rationale for this choice was that brass would contrast well with the grey base, but complement the orange sections. From a distance the orange and brass blend together, so the ship just looks grey and orange with some subtle texture to the latter. On closer inspection though, the mechanical details pop out in brass.

Details picked out in brass.

Wash

The next big step is just to wash everything. A lot of people default to almost always using a black wash. I encourage you to step back and think about that for a moment though before plunging in. Often a brown or a green will work better. For example, some DX-9 Stormtrooper Transports I also painted up recently for an narrative event came out fantastic after picking out some panels and details and then just doing a heavy brown wash. It gave exactly the worn, battle weary look I wanted, whereas the couple I did in a black wash for variety’s sake are also well shaded but don’t have the same kind of immediate natural, intuitive interpretation.

Note the brown wash on this DX-9 Stormtrooper Transport.

For the Spice Pirates though I went with a black wash. The ships and consequently their surfaces and panels are small so I was mostly going for simple shading rather than wear, corrosion, or some other natural interpretation. I knew the black would look good on the orange and brass but I wasn’t sure a brown would. I also wanted to bring the overall tone down and really darken the grey, which a brown wash wouldn’t do as much. The HWK in particular I wanted to be darker, with a feeling of being a black shadow supporting the squadron. After this photo it got several additional washes to visibly darken it more than the others but not lose the grey/orange scheme.

First black wash on the HWK.

Windows

At this point the ships already look good and are very flyable. But I did just a couple more details, starting with the windows. Here I added just a hint of another color by choosing purple. I thought that would work well because it contrasts with the orange and brass, and is dark enough to fit in with the grey and not create  a jumble of colors.

These I did quickly in three steps. First is a dark purple base. Then I lightened just a couple brushfuls of that by mixing in a white, and painted half the windows. You’re trying to create some vague notion of light on the surface, so apply this lighter color all in a consistent pattern on the different panels as though it were from light hitting from a particular angle. Then I lightened up that paint again with some more white and applied some purple-pinkish highlights in the corners. All of the window panels were then carefully covered with a dark purple wash to bring the colors back down and blend the three layers just a bit (not pictured).

Dark purple window base.

Lighter shade of purple.

Brighter purple window highlights.

Engine Glow

The next big detail is engine glow. Even a half competent job at this can bring a lot to the look of a ship, particularly in photographs. I start with a solid deep blue base over which I sloppily drybrush a brighter blue. I then brighten up a couple drops of that blue with some white and drybrush that in the centers. Finally the engines get washed in a blue to bring the colors back down a bit and re-emphasize any texture depth. You may not want to do that step if you want your engines to burn very brightly.

Starting the engines with a solid blue.

Drybrushing a bright blue.

Adding white-blue highlights.

Washing the engines with a dark blue.

It’s worth noting that I went way overboard, perhaps nonsensically so, with the engine glow on the Y-Wing. My conception, going along with not just Scum in general but the Unhinged Astromech in particular, is that this is a beat up old ship that’s been hot rodded. I assume they’ve got the engines chopped and tuned to get those green 3 maneuvers, prioritizing raw max power over efficiency and safety. So its engines are just spewing ions and magical Star Wars go-juice in a cloud behind the outlets.

Final Details

Wrapping up the painting are just a couple details. As I go through the steps of painting base colors, washing, etc., I make a line of paints on my work area as a to-do list of the different bits to be done and colors to use. For this project I started that while doing the black washes, as I was looking at the whole of each ship, so I wound up with a line of purple for the windows, blues for the engines, and then a few odds and ends. Some of those here are red for the missile heads on the Z-95 wings (I assume that’s what they are), green for the Y-Wing’s astromech, and black for the peg holders.

So far I have not blacked out the magnets. Mostly I just haven’t gotten to it yet, but I also think the paint will grind off very quickly. For the heavier or larger ships—the HWK in this squadron—a layer of paint might also be just enough to impair the attraction sufficiently to make them fall off the stand a bit more easily.

Paint line to-do list.

Everything drying after some additional washes and final touches.

Sealing

Last but not least, I seal everything with a matte spray dull coat. On a plastic miniature there’s not normally a great danger of paint being rubbed off, but in X-Wing the miniatures arguably get more handling than normal so it’s maybe more of a risk. Either way, the dull coat reduces the shinyness that washes in particular tend to create.

However, I also wanted the windows and engine glow to keep more of a sheen. So after the dull coat I used a brush-on gloss coat to make the windows shimmer just a little bit as the light plays across them, and the engines to pop a bit in photographs.

Color List

UPDATE: There was a request for the color list for this repaint, so here goes:

  • Bases & Pegs: Rust-Oleum 2x UltraCover Flat Black Primer (spray)
  • Ship Primer/Base: Rust-Oleum 2x UltraCover Flat Gray Primer (spray)
  • Hulls—
    • Panels: GW/Citadel Macharius Solar Orange
    • Mechanical Details: GW/Citadel Brass Scorpion
    • Wash: Secret Weapon Soft Body Black Wash
  • Windows—
    • Base: GW/Citadel Liche Purple
    • Mid-Layer: Base mixed with GW/Citadel Ceramite White
    • Highlight: Mid-Layer mixed with GW/Citadel Ceramite White
    • Wash: GW/Citadel Leviathan Purple
  • Engines—
    • Base: GW/Citadel Enchanted Blue
    • Mid-Layer: Vallejo Game Air Electric Blue (drybrushed on, despite being airbrush paint)
    • Highlight: Mid-Layer mixed with GW/Citadel Ceramite White
    • Wash: GW/Citadel Drakenhoff Nightshade
  • Details—
    • Missile Seekers: GW/Citadel Mephiston Red washed with GW/Citadel Baal Red
    • Astromech: P3 Ordic Olive washed with GW/Citadel Athonian Camoshade
    • Peg Inserts: GW/Citadel Abaddon Black
  • Sealant—
    • Dull Coat: Krylon Matte Finish
    • Gloss Coat (windows+engines): Some unbranded brush-on stuff from a model kit that’s been kicking around in my paints box for over a decade now—hallelujah it didn’t ruin the models!

A lot of those are older paints; my Liche Purple and Enchanted Blue pots are over 10 years old. So some of the specific names may not be available anymore. But these are all basic colors, easily found. I also stress that you could easily get by with many many fewer colors. Do the mechanical details in orange instead of brass, do both windows and engines in blue or purple and just mix the engine colors with more white, etc.. You could get great looking ships with just primer, base color, engines, wash.

All of the paint & sealants used in this repaint, many more than are really necessary!

Action

That’s it! It might seem like a bunch of steps, but they’re all small and quick. I did the blacking and priming late one night and then did everything else in the morning before anybody else got up, so it’s not a very time consuming process. Wrapping up, these are a few action shots from a game with my buddy Matt to show how they look on the tabletop. I hope you enjoy the look, and got something out of this tutorial!

2015 Reading Highlights

Posted on by tjkopena

Wrapping up my belated 2015 highlights, we come to books. I didn’t read as much in 2015 as I do some years, but a bunch of what I did was excellent. These are the top highlights, following on from my movie and music entries. As usual, these are by no means necessarily new in 2015, just new to me.

The Wind-Up Girl

First honorable mention goes to The Wind-Up Girl by Bacigalupi. This is a compelling, quick read. It did not at all work out how I thought it would, which is great. None of the story is amazingly novel or super memorable. It’s largely a plot driven book without an especially distinctive plot. But it is a fun read for all that, and it is great to have a sci-fi book intrinsically set in a culture outside western European and Japanese lineage.

Nova Swing

51cbhccj1xl-_sx302_bo1204203200_Next honorable mentions go to Light and Nova Swing, both relatively short novels by Harrison.

Light I’m admittedly at best lukewarm on. It’s super trippy and very stylish, but I think very forgettable despite its forced uniqueness. Tons of the usual post-singularity claptrap of augmented bodies, physical algorithms, changing sexual conventions, and so. Very little actual plot. The story has a whole bunch of new, interesting characters, but none of their development goes anywhere conclusive.

However, that setup pays off a bit in Nova Swing. It follows from and addresses many of the issues of Light by actually having a plot that goes somewhere reasonably concrete. That grounding makes it a lot more interesting, and a number of characters actually start to exist as characters, with an actual rememberable story and at least some depth. The setting here, including post-singularity punk rock pirate mercenaries traipsing off into the unknowable afflicted zone trying to map it out and steal treasures, is compelling and enjoyable to read. Just don’t expect much of that setting to be explained or to make a lot of real world sense.

The Explorer

410bdibnarlThe Explorer, by Smythe, is followed by The Echo, and I gather two other books making up “The Anomaly Quartet” but I have not seen those. These short novels are flawed, but surprisingly good, particularly The Explorer. Don’t read anything about it before giving it a shot! There’s a substantial twist about halfway through. The overall plot didn’t go where I thought it was going, and definitely took a more unique direction than expected. Following that shift are a number of smaller but no less critical, unexpected reveals.

It’s worth noting that these books are considerably flawed. A major problem is that the physics seem to make no sense, and I’m not talking about weird anomaly physics. Just the everyday basic science is often very incorrect, like a spaceship frequently coming to “All stop,” or gross inconsistencies in simple notions of how far away is the anomaly. These kinds of errors are obvious enough to lightly break suspension of disbelief and detract from the story. In The Explorer these can be maybe explained by the narrator being untrained (he’s a journalist) and unreliable, but The Echo is narrated by a highly trained engineer so that rationale doesn’t fly. In addition, both books end on very ambiguous terms. They’re not especially unsatisfying, but you’ll know little more about the surface plot than you did at the start.

All that said, they’re well worthwhile. The Explorer features a solid sci-fi premise that spins into a horror story in the telling. It’s worth giving a chance if you’re interested in some claustrophobic outer space psychological horror with a compelling main character. The Echo is a little less eventful, but features a character with a more interesting backstory and relationships to actual other people. The Explorer especially has stuck in my mind surprisingly well despite its flaws, so I recommend it.

Oryx and Crake

Arguably more meaty, and certainly well known among sci-fi readers, is the Oryx & Crake or MadAddam trilogy by Atwood, comprised of the titular Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAdam. The first novel is dystopian flashbacks and post-apocalyptic current day in a near-future driven by corporations and biology. Given the hype it’s unsurprising, but this is a great novel. It’s framed well to drive you forward with the basic mysteries of the plot. There’s really only two characters, only one of which has any substantive depth at all until the very end when suddenly there’s a lot of questions to be had about the other. Women in particular are non-existent except as props. Much of the world building is also fairly standard. But the story works well and is not belabored. It’s an excellent read.

The second book parallels that story from another perspective, and the third backs up to fill in important history while also wrapping up the conclusion. There are more characters in these and all three storylines intertwine well, though these books are understandably a bit less memorable than the debut novel. However, they are also good reads and the trilogy as a whole very good science fiction with a biology bent.

addam4

 

Lonesome Dove

51648g4eeql-_sx327_bo1204203200_The final fiction entry for 2015 is the incredible Lonesome Dove by McMurtry. I note that I have never seen the small collection of TV miniseries and movies based on and extending this novel that are well known though probably mostly by the generation just before mine. It is interesting though that the book started life as a screenplay treatment for a Stewart, Wayne, Fonda blockbuster that never got made. The author eventually bought the screenplay back, turned it into a novel, and then when that became very successful it was re-converted back into several shows. I have also not read the couple related books which lead up to and follow Lonesome Dove chronologically, although it was the first authored by some years.

All of the characterizations here are really distinct, the conversations and dialogue appropriately Postbellum, and the plot pretty good. A number of the characters and their interactions are really interesting and illuminating. The story also breaks from cliches and predictable plot line in several key places. It meanders and wanders and doesn’t really ever wind up where you might reasonably expect it would. Great read for fans of a good Western, I didn’t want it to end. There’s just so much going on with the characters, and so much between them all. The book also ends on several softly heartbreaking notes. It’s solidly in that class of Westerns and related stories that come to an end where and how life drives them, and that typically doesn’t line up with how a Hollywood blockbuster would end. True Grit is another example of this. Not all heroes make it, not every couple pulling at fans’ heartstrings gets together, and after all the drama, if you made it through, somehow life has to just keep going on.

This is a somewhat long, fairly dense novel, but Lonesome Dove is well worth luxuriating in for as long as you can.

Postwar

515ruu4inkl-_sx311_bo1204203200_My final reading highlight for 2015 is the non-fiction Postwar by Judt. It’s a thorough factual recounting of Europe from the end of World War II to just about the end of the 20th century. Refreshingly, much attention is paid to the Eastern European nations. This is both a history of Europe, and a history of “Europe,” the concept. A good amount of time is therefore spent on the question of dividing lines and Western Europe and Eastern Europe and what is “Europe.”

This is far and away the best writing I have come across as an American to really start to understand “Europe” and the European Union and a lot of the dynamics in play in that sphere of the world. Having spent a non-trivial amount of time in Europe (including one summer traveling there, another living in the Czech Republic, and a number of other trips), this was an extremely informative read to fill in both a lot of the surface history and the meaning behind it. I can’t recommend the book enough if you’re going to spend any time in some of the critical locations. It’s one (great) thing to go or have been to Prague. It’s another to stand in Wenceslas Square and know the history large and small. The experience becomes deeply meaningful.

To that, finally finishing this review in late 2016, knowing that history and dynamics is both more important as we enter squarely into what seems to promise to be a very perilous age, and more tragic as so much of what was built over the course of this history now seems so near to unraveling. Closely related, these were my thoughts immediately following the UK referendum to reject EU membership:

Of course it could play out a lot of ways from here, and there is even a plausible argument that today’s events will counter-intuitively foster the opposite outcome, but the unraveling of the EU would be deeply sad beyond even the immediate, considerable additional human misery likely to result.

I don’t live there and don’t have to deal first hand with the many flaws and shortcomings it absolutely has. One of the bits of personal mental imagery even I associate with the EU is a collection of Magritte-esque bureaucrats in bowlers striding furiously in circles every which way. But I also find its plain, ugly little flag surprisingly cheery and encouraging. There are three or four artifacts that I value as the most inspiring and hopeful examples of modern human invention and imagination. The EU is actually one of them.

I mean that in exactly the same fashion I would list the space shuttle, which was a deeply dubious idea in practical terms that was questionably implemented, never met expectations, and should have been canceled long before it was. But what the space shuttle fundamentally represented was the simple idea that spaceflight should be an everyday occurrence, a bus into orbit. And that was a beautiful, worthwhile dream to follow—not only despite the failings, but even beside the many actual accomplishments.

The EU has innumerable shortcomings. But it explicitly represents the basic idea that Europe had been in a near constant state of direct warfare for millenia, that entire generations were lost in the past two open conflicts, that the next one is quite likely to lead to the literal end of humanity, and, critically, not only the recognition that we should do something to prevent that, but the belief that we can. There’s Europe the continent, Europe the organizations, and “Europe” the concept, a colossal communal exercise in striving to rise above our history and our worst selves.

Unfortunately it increasingly seems that these are not the kinds of ideals most people hold important. We’ve come so low that it’s not just that most people don’t believe in a better future, but that they aren’t even prioritizing safeguarding that we have any future at all. Sadly it is all too likely that America as well will soon coronate and enshrine this same nihilism.

Five months later it would indeed turn out that an empowered minority in America would choose for it to embrace ugliness and a lack of vision.

Much of my understanding of what the EU means and what it represents, why and how it is so much more than bureaucrats in Brussels driving up gas prices, comes from reading Postwar. It’s important to recognize that the title is a play on words: It’s a history of postwar Europe, but also a history of the dream and the attempt to make the world truly post-war. This is to a very large extent the history of the greater project of enlightened Western civilization, of which so so many people seem to have lost sight or never knew. The book is dense, there are several less important digressions, but I emphatically recommend that everyone make the effort.

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2015 Music Highlights

Posted on by tjkopena

Continuing from the movie & TV entries in my long lost highlights from 2015, this is the music I acquired and listened to the most in 2015. Again, these aren’t necessarily new to the world, and in some cases very much not so. The twelve entries here are in increasing order by play count. There’s some concern there about normalizing for when in the year the music was acquired and thus how much opportunity it had to be played. But that’s both taking this too seriously, and for the most part the counts are dominated by the first couple months or so after acquisition anyway.

Honorable mentions here go to Hey Mama by David Guetta and Nicki Minaj, probably the raunchiest song on the radio last year, and Trap Queen by Fetty Wap.

#12: Wherever is Your Heart /Brandi Carlisle

#11: Awake /Tycho

#10: Please Don’t Say You Love Me (piano version) /Gabrielle Alpin

Note that this is quite specifically the quieter, slower, more broken piano recording, not the more pop-tuned mix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGr6Nj2sG8c

#9: Intro /The XX

#8: All This Could Be Yours /Cold War Kids

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyCHkGMlLCo

#7: Mess Is Mine /Vance Joy

#6: 9 Crimes /Damien Rice

#5: Lean On /Major Lazer

The “official video” for this is super awkward, so let’s stick with the lyric video.

#4: Where Is My Mind (instrumental piano) /Maxence Cyrin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnIE171XkIY

#3: Bad Intentions (original, without Migos) /Niykhee Heaton

Recently another version of this came out with an interlude of some dumbass rapping. Everything else is basically the same, but that extra bit makes it much worse. Stick to the original recording.

#2: Unstead /X Ambassadors

Renegades is the song that got all the airplay from this album, and it is also very good. But Unsteady is excellent, focusing more on ache. An important note about this is that the album, VHS, is that rarity of the streaming age: Somewhat of a concept album. The whole thing is framed and intermixed with clips of the band ostensibly watching old camcorder tapes. Nothing too lofty, but it’s really good, they’re interesting in their own right. I recommend the whole album. There’s a good range of songs, many of them are solid, and the VHS clips really bring more depth to the standout tracks.

#1: You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive /Patty Loveless

There are of course many many versions of this song. Not only do I like this audio the best, but this one is worth watching on YouTube. The stills stitched together here to go along with the song add quite a bit of oomph to an already terrific recording.