Not the Contrast Paints Post

So it seems that Games Workshop's new range of "Contrast paints" are the most exciting thing since something really quite exciting.  OK but I'll not be rushing out to buy them.

I first encountered the idea that thin "stains" of watered down paint over a white undercoat could give an impressive result with little investment of time in rules box for the RPG Traveller: The New Era.

The recommended approach was to apply "stains" of thinned-down paint over a white undercoat before finishing with a brown wash to outline the details. A stain is diluted paint but not as diluted as a wash.

As it happens, when I bought the rules in 1993, I tried out the approach using some actual Traveller miniatures - 15mm Aslan from the original GW/Martian Metals range.

They are a bit worn as they've been in storage for 26 years but I think you can see that the stain gives highlight and shadow to cloth and fur particularly well.

This civilian is a Traveller figure too...

As are these guys in vacc suits...

I've not really stuck with the technique for whole figures, though it is quite quick to use, but I do use it for parts of figures from time to time.  An exception is this recent spirit, which uses an all-over stain technique.

So my advice is buy GW Contrast Paints if you like but bear in mind you may get just as good an effect with conventional acrylics and water.

Money out, money in

The hard drive of my iMac has been filling up steadily and this morning it finally started announcing that it would no longer co-operate until I removed some of the crap filling it up.  So before lunch I headed off to PC World and bought myself a new external hard drive (a 2 Terabyte Seagate GoFlex as it happens) for ninety quid.

After lunch, however, a bunch of my eBay sales reached their climax and I was able to recoup more than half the cost of the drive.  It seems there is some value in old Traveller supplements after all.  The Darrians book cleared £12 and Grand Census made over thirteen!

  

No Longer a Traveller

Well, I've finally decided to sell off my old Traveller RPG collection.  I bought a lot of Traveller material in the 1980s and early 90s and held onto it with the vague idea that I might run a Traveller campaign at some point in the future.

I've now come to the conclusion that I never will and that I'm better off clearing some space on the shelves and maybe acquiring a little cash that might just buy me a few more useful figures.

Of course the stuff I have might turn out to be worthless.  I don't know how much of it is already available in pdf form somewhere on the interweb.

Anyway, item number one is Knightfall - a campaign set in the Massilia Sector.