Alien Frontiers — Colony paint complete

Well, I fin­ished paint­ing the colony com­pon­ents. Look­ing at the pho­tos, they kinda look messy. Note to self, don’t rush, even if you have 40 of the little bug­gers to paint.

Ah well, on the game board at nor­mal view­ing dis­tances they look ok.

I did­n’t want to paint the ori­gin­als that came with the game so I had 3 options:

• Order replace­ment parts from the publisher
• Buy the Fac­tions Expansion
• Buy the Upgrade pack

I went for the Upgrade pack, even though my first choice was the Fac­tions Expan­sion. It looks like a neat addi­tion to the game but it’s damn hard to find, either online or loc­ally. Both the Fac­tions Expan­sion and the Upgrade pack include the extra com­pon­ents to allow a five-play­er Ali­en Fron­ti­ers game, using the pub­lish­er­’s expan­ded rules. So on to the painting.

Before I star­ted paint­ing, I looked at a lot of space colony images like these for inspiration.

Then I primed the com­pon­ents — 2 coats, first a dark to fill in the shad­ows, then a white, from above only, to provide highlights.

I wanted to test some col­our schemes first, so I mocked them up using some image edit­ing tools on the iPad. I took pho­tos against a white back­ground, con­ver­ted the images to black and white, then kicked up the contrast.

Then just over­painted the image on the iPad until I found an appeal­ing col­our scheme.

I like this tech­nique. It lets me work any­where, gives reas­on­able res­ults, and does­n’t cost me any paint to tri­al it.

Next up, the Field Gen­er­at­ors. And I’ve got some ideas for the Rock­et Ships too.