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Painting My Chaos Fleet I recently decided to build a Chaos fleet, mainly to serve as a training fleet for people I am teaching the game to. The Chaos and Imperial fleets are the simplest of all the BFG races to play in my opinion, because they have the fewest special rules, are both tactically very flexible, and are also quite forgiving of mistakes when compared to other races in the game. Since I already have the Imperial fleet pretty much nailed down, I was left to come up with the Chaos part of it. The ships I settled on were a Repulsive-class Grand Cruiser and 4 cruisers. I decided to make the cruisers "modular," in that their weapons parts would not be permanently glued down. This would allow me to reconfigure the ships to make different cruisers for different situations. The only exception is that my Heavy Cruiser would have to be a designated hull, since I decided to glue the dorsal lance turrets to the model. That means that particular ship will always have to represent a Heavy Cruiser, either a Styx, Hades, or Acheron. For a color scheme, I decided to go with an overall blue scheme, as blue is my favorite color. The Repulsive was actually painted first, as a sort of test for the 4 smaller ships. I started by painting the ships and their weapons bitz flat black. I then dry brushed them in several steps, starting with Regal Blue and adding a little Enchanted Blue to each successive coat. Straight Enchanted Blue was brushed on last, as a final highlight coat. Once the blue was on and looking good, I used Boltgun Metal on the various guns and antennas of the ships, Dwarf Bronze for the engines, and a little bit of Shinning Gold here and there for final highlighting. I actually decided to dry brush the forward bracing of the Heavy Cruiser hull in Shining Gold, just to show its elevated status relative to the other ships. All in all, this fleet took me an afternoon to paint, and I'm happy with the results. It looks pretty sharp on the tabletop, about as good as I was hoping it would. After I painted it, I did a little reading and realized that my new Chaos fleets look rather Tzeenchian, so I guess I can use that angle when I get around to coming up with names and a back-story for this fleet. As for future expansion, I'm thinking of picking up some Infidel class escorts and a Desolator Battleship. For now though, here are some in-progress pictures of my fledgling Chaos fleet.
Here is a picture of the cruiser hulls and their weapons parts, all primered in black. I decided to prime the weapons while they were sitll on the their sprues, so I had a little touching up to do with a brush once I cut them off. Still, I think this method is preferable to dealing with 16+ little pieces getting blown around by a spray can!
The shot above and below show the dry brushing up through the Enchanted Blue. I was really happy with the depth the multi-stage dry brushing gave the ships. In the shot below, the lower ship is actually the Heavy Cruiser (note the dorsal turrets). I have gone back and re-painted the bracing black, in preparation for the Shining Gold.
This is how the bow of the Heavy Cruiser looked after the first dry brushed coat of Gold. I decided that I wanted a little more pronounced affect after this shot was taken, and went back and put another coat on this area.
Here is my fleet with the weapons attached (with a little Poster Tac). Like I said above, I'm really happy with how the fleet looks on the table. I think it will make a suitable opponent for my Imperial Fleet in battle! By Andy Rucker |
