Painting Challenge - Star Wars Armada Rebel Freighters

This post originally appeared on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge.

The space battle in the recent Rogue One flick has inflamed my enthusiasm for Star Wars Armada, and reminded me that I have some tiny spaceships that still need to be painted up. I love Fantasy Flight's game pitting Evil Imperial Space Triangles against the noble Fish People Pickles, but the vessels come already painted save for the miniscule starfighters. Still getting the colors and markings on such tiny subjects is a different sort of challenge which is pretty fun.

Han Solo's Millenium Falcon will be recognizable to even casual fans of the Star Wars movies, but the other bugger in the picture is the off-brand knockoff Outrider, created for a story set between "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi"

Just as obscure are the freighters and patrol craft from the animated "Rebels" series. They may not look like much, but the hexagonal ships are able to manipulate the various objective points (sensor buoys, targeting beacons, etc.) within the game while the disc-like vessels are fearsome interceptor bombers.

These were quick paints, and being flying garbage scows they hide mistakes easily. I'm sure these are worth only a pittance in points, but  I was happy to get them painted up in preparation for our upcoming Corellian Campaign Armada battles.

Painting Challenge - Space Marines

This post originally appeared on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge.

Right! For the Armour Theme I knew I wanted to tackle a painting challenge that I'd been putting off for nearly 20 years. I'd always dabbled with Warhammer 40K, but the increasingly grim and humorless turn the game took after Rogue Trader always rubbed me the wrong way. Even in the mid 90's I had an idea to put together a custom chapter to fit in with Games Workshop's Space Wolves and Space Sharks (since renamed to Chapter Charcaradon). A brotherhood of power armored space marines fashioned in the image of the greatest late night talk show host of the mid nineties: Space Ghost.

I'll admit, it's not a great idea. My college roommates and I used to watch Space Ghost religiously, but the show's been off the air for over a decade. And yet, this dumb idea won't leave me alone. Whenever I read a blog post about Oldhammer games, or flip through the latest edition of Warhammer 40K in the game shop, a tiny voice whispers to me, "You should paint some Space Ghosts." Therefore my fellow painters, to exorcise myself of this nagging idea please humor me while I get this out of my system.

I based the paint scheme on the classic Space Ghost uniform, but since I'll likely be putting these on the table against my 8 year old son and he has no idea who or what Space Ghost is, I've tweaked the color scheme a bit closer to something he'll recognizes: Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars.

I'm retaining the overall white scheme and black mask/helmet, but only veterans get the red wrist bands. Space Ghost's flashy yellow cape will be reserved for the chapter master himself.

The Space Ghost emblem wasn't really doing it for me as a chapter symbol, so I cooked up one of my own and printed them on decal paper.

I tested the color scheme on three modern figures, but for the most part these are classic Rogue Trader beakie marines I've cobbled together from eBay collections, stripped, repaired and upgraded with current special weapons when they've been missing.

That's a total of 13 space marines for 65 points I believe. And hopefully just under the deadline... the paint is still wet on a few of these!