Star Wars Legion Biker Scouts And Speeders

Back to the Tabletop is finally back to the blog posts. It's been a quiet few months of absence on the blog front so I thank you all for sticking with me and not hitting the "unfollow" button 😀

Obviously trying to get any kind of motivation for hobby in over the past three months or so has been difficult but I have found an apartment and have managed to get most of my gaming and hobby supplies moved in.

I think the most frustrating thing for me right now is that my mind is constantly racing with ideas (especially at work) and a real genuine "want" to sit and hobby - paint, build, work on terrain, etc.

I can see in my head a great idea or finished project, but I'm having an incredibly hard time actually doing it when I'm at home on my days off. How to change this is my million dollar question right now. 

WIPs photos are probably my biggest miss in the hobby, I never remember to take pictures of stuff when I'm in the process of building or painting, but I did manage this one as a friend had texted me over the holidays and asked what I was up to.

I have even been chipping away at a couple of things since November as these photos show and I figured why not try to complete one of my favorites units from the original Star Wars trilogy.

I absolutely love the look and design of the scout troopers - the armour, helmet, the small blaster, it's just a brilliant design all around. And this is easily my favorite pose of the entire lot. It has a real "sneaky" James Bond feel to it that is just so cool.

This is another really great pose, again very Bond like.

Overall, I think the entire group has some of the best poses of the entire Legion line.

I decided I really wanted to put the speeder bikes on a sort of gimble to give them a bit more of a movie feel and look, so I used a couple of magnets to achieve this. 

I also cut down the original plastic posts the bikes sit on as I felt they were just way too high off the ground - here is a photo of the height difference with the original post on the left. You can also see how the magnetic gimbal allows for those dramatic and "in motion" poses.

I think it's a huge improvement and will definitely be doing this to my other four speeder bikes. I especially want to get the one with the scout firing behind him completed, as it's another fantastic pose, as well as having a go at a white paint scheme for two of the speeder bikes themselves, like what we saw in the first season of The Mandalorian. So there you go, first blog post in months, fingers crossed I can take some baby steps right now and continue with at least one post a month going forward.

I want to take a moment and thank all of you who reached out through email to send your well wishes and own personal experiences with a divorce and separation. The support was honestly overwhelming and just another reason why I'm incredibly thankful to be a part of this community and hobby.

Finally, thanks to new followers thegreatwhitejb, Michael Blair, and William Stewart - appreciate you guys hitting the follow button 😀

Until next time, thanks for looking!

Ivor

MV Australis Black Site Studios Pt. 1

Here is my first midway entry for Dave Stone's "Paint What You've Got Challenge". Everything in this first photo was done in about a day and a half and I'm certain I could have completed the whole thing in another day.

Honestly this build has unfortunately hit a wall, and I was cruising along nicely too despite some issues with the initial paint job which I ended up re-doing.

It may be hard to see in the photos but the black painted parts had all kinds of odd white splotches all over them. It almost looked like mildew but I can't imagine how that could possibly be.

I cleaned up all the sprues with the black paint the best I could and ended up having to put three coats of the new black paint on to completely cover whatever that white stuff was, but it all worked out thankfully.

I will tell you right off the bat that in hindsight I didn't look closely enough at the photo of the completed ship and just jumped right in with two feet and started building it. I didn't give the kit enough thought about what I wanted to accomplish beyond simply repainting and adding more "ship" details and there is one really big thing I wish I could go back and change. 

I really wish that I would have increased the height of the hull, and this is why I've hit a wall with the build. With this kind of ship I think that the hull needs to higher than it currently is - here's my quick mock up of that height difference, maybe not quite twice the height but definitely at least half that. Again, in hindsight it's a huge oversight on my part and I immediately realized it when I put all the hull pieces together across the table in the first photo.

So, do I just push on with the ship as it is or do I attempt to pull off the water line pieces and increase the height of the hull, and hope that the damage won't be enough to ruin the entire build. I'm not sure because the water line pieces are a thin cardboard like material and I know that they aren't going to come off easily.

But beyond my hold up with the hull height another thing I changed was the overall color of the ship - the hull originally was red with the waterline being black - above on the left. I reversed those to the hull being black and the waterline red. This gives the ship a more traditional painted look. 

So while I stepped away from the ship to decide how I want to proceed I plugged along painting more Star Wars models and Lord of the Rings models. As well as cleaning up and fixing several Lord of the Rings models I picked up off of Ebay for cheap.

I completed over 40 Army of the Dead models from LotR.

That's a pretty big accomplishment for me lol! I don't think I've completed that many models of the same type since some ACW stuff I did probably like six or seven years ago.

Now I just have to decide how I want to base them - do I put them on my favorite thin clear bases or do a traditional base? If I go clear then I will have opened a Pandora's Box of madness because then I'll have to do the same to all my other LotR models.

Speaking of LotR here are those Ebay auctions I mentioned above.

I'm going to call them Ebay Rescues, because as you can see they needed quite a bit of help. All of these are the actual photos from Ebay.

Lots of modifications needed for missing and broken parts.

 

And a whole bunch of Simple Green to get all that old paint off.

But miracles do happen lol!

I decided to give Gandalf a sword instead of trying to fashion a new staff and honestly I'm really pleased with the end result.

Still need to make a staff for the foot version of Gandalf though.

And Theoden back with a nice new gray prime.

I also completed some more Legion models - more droids, because you can never have enough.

And a squad of Death Troopers. These proved way more difficult than they should have been. I tried a gloss finish and it looked awful. I then tried a paint on gloss and only did some of the more prominent armor, and that was a train wreck too, so it was straight black and call it a day.

And last, I started working on some Rebel Fleet troopers.

I always liked these uniforms despite those helmets functionality being a real head scratcher.

Until next time, thanks for looking!

Ivor

Cobb Vanth Star Wars Legion

So I went upstairs into the studio last night to continue working on the MV Australis for Dave Stone's "Paint What You Got Challenge" and totally got sidetracked when I moved my Star Wars Legion figure case and saw Cobb Vanth on top.

Even though I didn't touch anything that I originally planned on doing for the evening I did complete Vanth 100% and a couple of Lord of the Rings models (below) which I'm calling a big win, especially for the guy who has a really difficult time completing anything to 100%.

This is another 3D printed model from Skullforge that Jeff did on his resin printer.

It's an awesome sculpt and I absolutely love it, but there is another sculpt out there of Vanth without his helmet and the likeness to Timothy Oliphant is incredible, so I'm going to have to track that one down too and have Jeff print it up.

The only hiccup I had was with the helmet, as there was the targeting rangefinder on the side but I broke it while trying to clean up a support by it. Kind of a bummer but oh well, maybe I'll try to make one out of some spare styrene. 

These couple of photos on the terrain really show why I absolutely love my thin bases, you can hardly even tell it's there.

I made it up to the club last week and was finally able to switch all my Stormtroopers to my thin bases and decided to set up a little scene in our ever growing diorama with Chirrut Imwe. I don't think those Stormtroopers stand a chance lol!

I also wanted to post a couple of pictures on my solution to the cards on the table for initiative order for games like Dead Man's Hand and The Chicago Way. I ordered some children's party favor playing cards from Amazon, used my hole punches for making my bases to cut out the card numbers and then glued them onto old MDF bases. I finished them off by painting the backs black.

So now instead of the cards on the table next to your model you can now have the tokens there, alleviating that bit of an eye sore that is a complaint of some people.

It works a treat and I'm really happy I finally completed that little project, as it's been one that has been sitting for quite a while.

Here are those Lord of the Rings models I painted up rather quickly. Fun models, and even though they have a really simple paint scheme, the effect is great. Now to finish the other 37 and get them on the thin bases.

And finally you may have seen that I've got my new header on the top of the blog, well kind of - I can't for the life of me figure out how to make it fit in the space, which is extremely frustrating.

Many thanks to my brother from another mother Jay White who whipped up these designs in a matter of no time and sent them to me a couple days ago after seeing my rebranding post last week. I'm still waiting on my other designs so I think these will more than likely be what I use going forward. So thanks again Jay!

Until next time, thanks for looking!

Ivor

Jyn Erso And Friends Star Wars Legion

I figured I'd just go ahead and post up all the Star Wars models, terrain, and games I've been working on in one go instead of posting a couple at a time like I had been doing as I've got a pretty big project that I'm going to focus on for January and February as part of Dave Stones "Paint What You've Got Challenge" - if you're a Star Wars fan I highly recommend checking out his blog, he's doing some incredible custom work on everyone (and when I say everyone, I literally mean everyone lol!) from the cantina in A New Hope amongst other great projects.

Jeff and I have been on a wee bit of a Star Wars binge at the club for the last several months now, getting ourselves ready for a campaign game using a variant of the Shadows of Rangers Deep rules but set in a galaxy far, far, away called Rebels of Space Deep - a bit more on those first two games way below.

Here are my two characters for the game, Tarm Jordana (Erso) and Caldicott Ceesay (Andor). I didn't particularly care for the original pose for Jyn so I did some modifications - though I have since got a new 3D file version of Jyn in a different pose which will get some paint on it soon.

I've been on a bit of a kick with painting up droids lately. These two models are from the Legion crashed escape pod set and were purchased well before the wonders of Jeff's resin 3D printer was bought, so it was a pretty expensive purchase for what was essentially only the C-3PO and R2-D2 models .

I decided to go outside the norm with 3PO and paint him red like the droid from the Empire Strikes Back. So here is R-3PO.

Conversely I went with the normal R2 paint scheme we all know and love.

I was actually quite pleased with how he turned out - those little details can be difficult to paint.

Something I absolutely wanted was a mouse droid, and thankfully there was a 3D file for one. Lots more of those little guys to come.

One of several Grogu models we bought as well - this is the easiest way to get yourself put on "the list", don't you dare point your blaster at that baby!

Our nanny droid.

As I'm pretty well obsessed with almost every character from 'Rogue One' I had to get Chirrut Imwe - Baze Malbus is also primed but yet to see any other paint.

Orson Krennic and my favorite droid, C1-10P, better know as Chopper from Star Wars Rebels - voice babbling done by none other than sir Dave Filoni himself (yes, that man deserves a knighthood!).

I like this pose much better than the official Legion release.

I absolutely love the twisting of the black leather gloves.

And I really like those caps too - for Imperials I'd much rather have my models wearing caps as opposed to nothing on their heads like the official Krennic release.

The file for Chopper came with three different poses so there be some more of him coming in the future.

A couple of generic Rebels, all painted with Citadels new Contrast paint line, from the specialists Legion release.

Pretty happy with the results, especially considering how quickly they were completed. I had initially thought that this would be one of my two characters for the game, but after customizing Jyn I went with her instead.

Medical droid, first seen in The Empire Strikes Back.

And the grandest of them all, Grand Admiral Thrawn.

Hands down there is no character I am personally looking forward to seeing more than Grand Admiral Thrawn in the live action Ashoka series coming to Disney+. Rumors of Benedict Cumberbatch possibly playing Thrawn has me grinning ear to ear.

I grabbed a couple of Dew Backs off of Amazon for cheap as they were always a really neat creature in my eyes, especially with a Stormtrooper as a rider.

Now we have Two-Backs. 

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The scale details on these models is amazing, and the contrast paints really make them pop with very little effort.

What's nice about the Legion models is they usually give you options for making the model itself.

Like here, even though it's the same exact box I was able to make each model different with the weapons the Stormtroopers were outfitted with.

Another project finally finished was this huge lot of unbuilt MDF. This was a Kickstarter I backed from Battle Kiwi, like two or three years ago. 

Lots of paint still needs applied to all the exposed cut edges - an unfortunate part of any MDF kit.

This is an absolute beast of a kit, and this angle really shows that. There is much more that I forgot to take pictures of, like the Endor bunker and the shield generator - but at least everything is all built.

Jeff also printed up a Legion scaled Lambda Class Imperial shuttle for our game - another beast of a model.

The idea and main story focus for our game was that this was going to be the shuttle that the Rebels stole for the attack on Endor in Return of the Jedi, and our game was going to tell exactly how the Rebels obtained *wink wink* that shuttle. What was great was that the idea just developed organically out of Jeff and I talking Star Wars in our weekly meet ups at the club and about gaming something really fun and narrative that wound itself into the greater Star Wars story.

This was really fun was as well - as Jeff and I each completed models we would to add them to our hanger in the display case at the club, another 3D printed piece, though this one I purchased pre-printed from LV427 Designs

We were soon to learn you can never have enough casualty markers though.

As you can see, things got out of hand quickly as we continued to add the the diorama weekly.

Especially with the Imperial side 🤣

And last but not least the following are some photos from the first two games of Rebels of  Space Deep, different from what Jeff and I have planned for our own game as explained above.

These games are taken right from the Space Deep fan made campaign rules.  

We just wanted to get a feel for how these rules played and if there was going to anything we might want to change.

The first game had our team searching a Tatooine scrape yard for a missing droid that had plans in it needed by the Rebellion.

There were six droids hidden throughout the scrape yard that possibly held the plans and we had to locate the right one - there was a lot of "these aren't the droids you're looking for" moments 🤣

Lots of Stormtroopers fell during the game and it was then that Jeff and I quickly realized we were going to need to print lots more of those casualty markers based on their stats lol

It was a successful end to the game as our team found the missing droid and the plans it held.

The second game of the campaign had our team attempting to get both the plans and ourselves off Tatooine from our ship located in a hanger in Mos Eisley.

Our Jedi of the group got way too confident and got himself surrounded by a squad of Stormtroopers. 

A couple of bad rolls by the Jedi and a couple of great rolls by the bucketheads and no more Jedi lol!

This was Tarm getting around the last Stormtrooper to make it inside the hanger and safely to the ship with the plans. Apologies there aren't more photos from the games but that is something I always forget to do, and since I had so few I figured I'd just throw them onto the end of this post as opposed to making a seperate one - and many thanks to Jeff for running these first two games.

Wow! That was probably my biggest photo dump ever since I started this blog, so if you're still here all the way down here at the end, thanks!

I'd also like to welcome two new followers, Brutorz Bill and Billy Longino, really appreciate you guys hitting the 'follow' button.

Until next time, thanks for looking!

Ivor