Bot War - C.O.I.L.S Vengeance

As with every Bot War (Well Traders Galaxy painting challenge these days due to the increased number games and miniature lines available) the idea is to hit the ground running on the 1st of February by having all of the miniatures built and primed so that day 1 is the start of applying colours.

I’ve volunteered to admin the challenge this year so have the extra task of tracking every participants progress each day. It’s fairly straightforward and out of the 29 days this leap year people are allowed 2 free pass days (because life gets in the way some times).

So what am I going to paint?

Looking at the vast amount of models I have available to me (see previous post) I have decided to build all of the resins and a few of the metal promo pieces, extra turrets and if I get to it later in the challenge the Infantry as well.  This gives me 44 models ranging from tiny 20mm based turrets to the 100mm based titan “Conspiracy” (still only counts as 1).

With this plan in mind I set about cleaning, washing, gluing, basing, and for good measure magnetising all of the models. The magnets will come in very handy later for storage and transportation, but during the painting they also nicely hold the mini on my trusty painting handle (a curtain rail finial). I like to give my resin pieces a quick soak and scrub to make sure there’s no grease or release agent in them from production and my handling of them whilst cleaning. This helps to reduce the risk of the primer not adhering properly.

Once the models were built I also made up their bases with AK-Interactive texture pastes, sand, bits of Cork, and various pieces of slate. I usually leave this until the end but because I knew I was going to magnetise the bases for painting it made sense to just get the complete model assembled and primed and not have to worry about basing after they’d been painted… Saves me 2 days based on experience and I’m going to need those days for Conspiracy.

For the primer i went with Vallejo Mecha Black as this is a pretty solid satin coat that works well to protect the metals from a few bumps and gives the fragile resins a bit of armour. This was airbrushed over the whole model and left to dry ready for my challenge to begin.

The last thing I wanted to do before the challenge begins was to review my original paint choices made back in July. Whilst I think most will be fine I recently picked up an AK Interactive 3rd Gen Acrylic Anthracite which looks like it will be the perfect base colour for this project. I really like the AK 3rd Gen paints, they’re nice and opaque and flow really well. Great for base colours and layering, and will be a solid foundation.

I decided to put my paints to the test with a little speed paint of a 30mm scale Rise of The Democracy COILS Crawler bot I had laying around. Although this was primed black with a heavy white zenithal it shouldn’t have too much of a difference to solid black given how dark the anthracite is. I threw in some Darkstar Molten Metals for the metallic parts and went with Vallejo Model Colour Dark Sea Grey for theunder armour  inner frame parts. I then used the vallejo mecha blue to glaze in some contrast over the anthracite and, and then again with a bit of Reaper Foggy Mist. This was a very quick paint so quite rough but it helped me map out a plan of attack to get going with. During the challenge my methods always get more refined so this is just a way to get off the starting block!

And with that, I’m all set for Day 1.