We Got Big Trouble…

As you might expect, the villains were a little more fun to paint.

I looked at a lot of images of the Three Storms from the film, and it was interesting to note that their colors (especially Rain) are a lot more muted in the movie than in the game’s artwork. I decided to lean closer to the artwork, as it would make them easier to identify on the game board, although they’re pretty distinct models so there’s not much chance of mixing them up.

The game’s stat board for Lo Pan himself is double sided — he begins the game as a ghost, and later transforms into flesh and blood. Originally I was going to paint the miniature to match the artwork on the “ghost” side, since that’s how he spends the majority of the game. But in the end I decided that would make him look too much like Lightning (see above), so I went with a “full color” scheme.

No need to reinvent the wheel for the Wild Man. Needless to say, that one went very quickly — the hardest part was not having a base to hold, but since it was 90% drybrushing it was only an issue when priming and varnishing.

I probably should have saved the fun ones for last, because now I’ve got 29 henchmen to get through. Hopefully they’ll be more fun than they look…

Apparently I’m not happy unless I’m working on at least five projects at a time, so I’ve started painting the minitures from the Big Trouble in Little China board game. It’s an older game (published in 2018 and now out of print), but I just bought it last month so I don’t think it qualifies for the spring clean challenge.

The miniatures are…not particularly good. If memory serves, I looked at the crowdfunder/pre-order for this game when it originally launched, and decided to pass on it for that very reason. But I got a chance to play it at a convention a few months ago and really enjoyed it, so I got an only slightly overpriced copy on eBay and here we are.

With board games I always want to try to match the game’s artwork as much as possible, and luckily I found the online portfolio of Ilya Golitsyn, the game’s primary artist, which was incredibly helpful.

I adopted a “whatever gets it done” approach to painting these. Jack, Gracie and Margo were primed grey, drybrushed white, and painted primarily with speedpaints. Jack’s t-shirt design is actually sculpted on, but it’s raised rather than indented so it wasn’t actually that helpful — if it had been indented it would have been easy to do with a wash, but as it is, it would have been a lot easier to just freehand the design on a blank shirt.

Wang, Eddie and Egg Shen were primed black and then drybrushed in their primary color (dark green, purple, and blue respectively). Then I triad-painted the skin tones and details, and drybrushed some source lighting (most obviously on Egg Shen).

I’m satisfied with the results, they’re definitely good enough for a board game and actually look a lot better than I was expecting. Now it’s on to the villains!