Star Wars Skirmish: 'Rebel Scum!' (and more barricades)

    Rebel scum! Six figs from the Stargrave 'Crew' & 'Crew II' boxes that I will use as Star Wars rebels

I'm back from my 10-day vacation in Morocco. It was an amazing time. To read about it, and see lots of photos, check out my Worldwidemike Travellerspoint blog. Which means those of you who were thinking, "Ahh-HA! He finally burnt out a little and slowed down a little..." were wrong...ha, ha! In fact, I had this batch almost done when I left and it only needed a session or two to complete.

I've talked about my upcoming Star Wars themed skirmish games, and this is the final faction to be painted up: the Rebels. Since I didn't really have figures that I felt would work for generic resistance to the Empire forces, at Advance the Colors 2024 I bought two of the Stargrave plastic box sets from Shieldwall Gaming Club. I'd looked through what Jeff Gatlin had available and felt the "Crew" and "Crew II" sets seemed to fit best. In general, I try to "buy local" when I can, and Jeff has been an amazing, loyal vendor at our HMGS Great Lakes and area conventions.

    I envision the gray-haired guy as the leader, but didn't go with a specific color scheme for this cell

I picked out three female and three male figures, matching up the heads and arm/weapon combinations that I liked best. I screwed up on aligning only one of them, though, so I am getting better at putting these plastic figures together! Try as I might, I couldn't get the left arm of one of the men to line up and support the weapon he was holding in the right. I gave up and set it down at his side so that he is firing one-handed, "Rambo-style." It is actually getting to the point that I feel comfortable enough putting these together that I was looking at what else Jeff had on sale when he announced his clearance sale (for restructuring -- thankfully, he doesn't appear to be closing down shop altogether!). My trip ended up coming up too quickly before I made a decision, so I missed out on picking up some more stuff at his reduced prices.

    I like how the lady in the burnt orange jumpsuit came out -- especially the ballcap & sunglasses

I decided not to go with a uniform color scheme for the figures. I mean, by definition, the rebels have to stay hidden from the imperial forces trying to hunt them down, right? Uniforms would make the Empire's job too easy! Of course, the fact the torsos in these two Stargrave sets have similar clothing styles made me go for more variety in my color choices. Otherwise, they would all end up looking too similar. I did try to go with a palette of lighter or paler colors, for the most part.

    The final two figures - I made the Rebels relatively heavily armed with only the leader having a pistol

I think the head choices have a lot of character in these two sets. My favorite is the ball cap wearing woman in sunglasses. One advantage of choosing the heads with sunglasses or helmets -- no eyes to paint, ha, ha! Actually, I was really pleased with the three pairs of eyes I did paint on this batch. Sometimes they come out good, I find, sometimes not nearly as well. Of course, some miniatures make it easier to paint the eyes when there is nothing obstructing your brushtip getting at them. These were all in the "Easy" category, for sure. I like how the Rebels came out. They're not as wild and characterful as the Criminal Syndicate figures that I painted in my previous batch. They're just solid and relatively generic figures that will blend in as they seek to overthrow the Evil Empire.

    The Rebels await the onslaught of Stormtroopers, sheltering behind Star Wars Legion barricades

As you may have noticed, in the background and foreground of some of the pictures are more of the Star Wars Legion barricades. I painted up my second (and final) set of them at the same time. I tried to do them identically to the first batch, so feel free to click on the link if you want to know how I did them.

So, what's next, now that I am back from vacation? I decided to get a little more organized and am now keeping a list on my desk of what I want to get done sooner rather than later for both terrain and miniatures. The other night when the Rebels were finished, I admit I was kind of at a loss what to paint. So, what I pulled out to paint is going to seem kind of random! In addition, yesterday I finally came up with an idea how to construct some scratch-build droids that the craft store parts have been sitting on my desk for weeks and weeks. Now that I have a recipe in mind, they're coming together quickly and may be finished before the minis I was referring to...! True to my commitment, there is also a piece of terrain being worked on simultaneously. Remember the giant, 3-D printed water tower I bought at Historicon 2024 from Bad Goblin Games? It is assembled and primed and looming over everything else on my desk right now. So, stay tuned to see which gets done first...!