Beastlords faction for Bot War

OK I have really grown to love this stage of a project. This is where the hype builds and my motivation levels go through the roof.  Working out how I want to paint these bots is like a mini project in itself, as I research, I test colour schemes, I identify my paint brands and colours, and once all that is done I am just sooo pumped to get cracking. This is the stage I am at now!

….. but before I apply any paint to the models I want to walk you through my research!

The Beastlords are an ancient species of “bot”, with a raw nature-inspired look of claws, teeth, spikes, and wings. You’d be hard pressed not to see a resemblance to extinct giant reptiles, dinosaurs even. As a child of the 1980s (which the Bot War game is set in) my first thoughts of giant robotic dinosaurs goes straight to the Dinobots from the Transformers toy line and cartoon.  Its obvious these bots took some inspiration from them as well, however they have some very cool differences that make these characters unique and different enough to those toys to have their own identity. Plus there’s 7 of them whereas there were only 5 Dinobots in Transformers.

My last Bot War project was heavily inspired by the original 1980s Transformers cartoon, as a big fan of the show and toys I couldn’t bring myself to not paint the Builder team and their combined form in a neon green paint job to match the toys I have in the attic.  So for these Beastlords I wanted to see if it would be possible to do the same thing again.

Fortunately as you will have seen in the 1st post of this project, there are individual drawings of each of the 7 bots that make up this faction on the Traders Galaxy website, so I was able to save to my iPad and have a play around with some recolouring tools to come up with some initial ideas on taking the original scheme from the toys/cartoon that I have known since my childhood and lay it over the fantastic sculpts that Traders Galaxy have put out.

Whilst these are not direct copies of the original toy scheme I had to adapt it for a few reasons…..

• I wanted coherency in the faction, so having them all the same colour was kind of key to this.  You will see I did actually recolour Dactylous (the one with wings) to be blue as well as a more unified red/gold than his box art, but this just didn’t look right
• The original Transformers had too much steel/metal on the arms and legs which to me would detract from the overall aesthetic I wanted to achieve if I were to paint them in metallics
• As with my Builders I did not want to paint these bots in metallic paints, I wanted them to be cartoon like than that (not a comic-book style though)

I actually liked the red and gold combo, it looks powerful and made them like they are “good guys”

…. I didnt want “good guys”