Traders Galaxy 2024 Painting Challenge – Botwar, Beat Em Up and Rise of the Democracy miniatures

And then the evening just felt frustrating as I moved onto Gorg. The idea for his base was to have a corn field so Gorg would be creating a crop circle. I had 3 soldiers fighting Gorg, one firing a rocket at him. Then I mad one tiny civilian with his hands up in the air running away. The other 3 civilians I put a blue halo over there heads and put them under a cone of light emenating from Gorg like the vintage UFOs. The halos were to represent Gorg taking control of them (I know he doesn’t have mind control but theatrical license was needed). This proved to be both hard and frustrating. I got the civilians with their halos on then I put some fibre optic around the cone, which was crazy hard to get to stick. When I eventually got it to work I put the cone in place and while fiddling I knocked a halo of one of the civilians, but now I coudn’t get back in to fix that. You can’t really see through the cone anyway, so that was probably all wated effort. So finally I stuck Gorg on top, and built in to the bottom of Gorg I have wired a tiny LED to give out light into the cone. I’m not sure it is powerful enough to give the effect I wanted, but I’ll take some test shots tomorrow. So I’m happy with Gorg as the concept, but maybe I was a little too ambitious.

Finally I got the first coat on my castle walls.

And finally some castle walls that will be needed for operation David and Goliath, a really big base!

And as always, rather than finishing off what I started, I finally got the explosion I wanted from my 3D prints, so that got a quick prime, ready for the weekend task (I hope).

And during my lunch I collected so prints off the resin printer. I’m still trying to get to grips with it. I have realised now I was definitely over exposing my prints, so I have dialed that back and getting slightly better prints, now I’m just dialling in the fineness of detail. The 2 light tanks picture shows the one on the top was over exposed, the one on the right was less exposed but printed faster. I also printed off a couple of the exclusive Beat Em Up thugs, so might try and get them painted this month too. And some missile trails that I’ll be needing for various bases.

Next up, he was hot off the 3D printer this morning. It’s one of those obscure miniatures that I found while trawling Traders Galaxy – The Adventurer. This guy has to make it into Beat Em Up! I’ve slapped the first coat on him. I apologise if the figure isn’t great but Resin printing is new to me and still struggling to get things to print, let alone deal with the software putting supports in the most annoying places like right on his face.

On to Gorg, well not much has happened to him as I needed to get the human victim painted first so I could then make a tentacle out of Green Stuff and stick it to his tentacle. While painting the victim I chose blue for his trousers, but when I looked, suddenly it was obvious who the victim was.. so yellow boots, a yellow hard hat and beige shirt and the victim became Spike Witwicky! I’ve attached the tentacle and started painting a few more converted Democracy civilians and finally I had one last thing to do.

The last photo shows that I painted up a 10mm Carl Weathers in his Dillon gear from Predator in tribute of his great performances. R.I.P. He will naturally be standing against Gorg in the final miniature.