STARGUARD
Foreword
Pulp sci-fi has a certain appeal to me, so when I stumbled onto Starguard just had to look into it. Eventually it lead to my own project called Star Gladius.
The 1:72 scale is very interesting. I think I prefer it over the chunky distorted "28mm heroic" (which is actually closer to 30mm and up). A 1:72 human should of course be around 20mm to 27mm, probably 25mm for a swedish male (180cm). The Starguard figures (which I have (mostly robots actually)) are pretty tall, around 27-29mm, but heads and limbs are realistic proportionally. The female Amazons are around 25mm excluding the high heels.
Some artwork
Drawing these guys is a bit like interpreting old game sprites.
Cleaning up and painting the miniatures
An all female army amassing. The Starguard miniatures are 1:72 (a man is 24-25 mm, or an inch, tall at this scale). I've used 20mm and 40mm bases (from Hasslefree miniatures). I prefer to keep the bases somewhat flat, simple and natural without much noise, because the focus should be on the miniature.
The base rim is painted in Citadel Snakebite Leather (brown). I use a brown for the base rim, because black feels unnatural, and green feels like it's failing to be grass. Brown is still an earth color, so it fits in, and stands out just enough, I think. Because the flock and wooden glue is slightly transparent, I prepare the top of the base with various warm greens.
I'm quite happy with my current flock. I never liked static grass much, it feels like a material that rhymes badly with the solid chunky feel of miniatures. Painted sand might work for asphalt and desert terrain, but I wouldn't use it as grass.
Sawdust flock can look terrible, but I was lucky to find some that I really liked. It's quite fine, and it has a warmer tone with some nice hue variations. It gives the grass a nice thin but solid feel, and works with my often warm palettes and toy'ish painting style. It clashes against a more drab, realistically painted miniatures though. I don't know where to find this particular sawdust flock anymore. I think it's GW packaged. If I had enough I'd flock an entire gaming board segment with it.
My decades old 'Green Stuff' (Kneadatite) will be used to secure the miniatures in the base slot and seal up the gaps. I also use GS to attach straws (from an old toothbrush that I use as a splatter paintbrush) and for sculpting alien mushrooms. I painted these in grass greens to avoid cluttering up the bases with colors.
As for the painting of the miniatures themselves... I don't have patience for anything more than "looks OK at a distance". I prefer to just use a base color, then do the panel lines / indents with a darker watered down color (not necessarily a wash), then I do a very thin and relatively bright highlight. Never a gradient building up towards the edge of the highlight, because it's time consuming.
In the case of these Valkyrie Fembots I just washed with a bit of black + brown + window cleaner on top of the metal, then polished some off. The Fembots are almost 30mm tall by the way. This makes them 2.09 - 2-16 meters tall, but this includes high heels.
Byline: Niklas Jansson, 2009-2010. Starguard designs by John McEwan 1974 - 2010