Painting the components of Alien Frontiers

Recently I’ve become aware of a trend to paint the often gar­ishly-col­oured mini­atures and game com­pon­ents you find in mod­ern board games.

My first attempt was with Mice and Mys­tics, and now I’m work­ing on Ali­en Frontiers.

This time, I decided to pro­to­type my  col­our schemes digit­ally. To do this, pho­to­graphed the com­pon­ents just after prim­ing, so the base col­our has been neutralized.

Then I pro­cessed the images, crop­ping them, mak­ing them black and white, and enhan­cing the con­trast and bright­ness to bring out the detail.

And finally, I load them into Pixel­mat­or on my iPad, and Exper­i­ment with layers.

Hope­fully I can come up with some­thing interesting 🙂

Oh, and one thing I just noticed while look­ing at oth­er people’s designs, the above Field Gen­er­at­or is miss­ing one of it’s towers. I just assumed that gap was a dock­ing bay or port or some­thing. I’ve con­tac­ted the game pub­lish­er about this to see about a replacement.

*** Update *** A replace­ment Field Gen­er­at­or is en-route. More to paint!