This is not the post I was planning to publish next, it should have been Bloodbowl related (also posted back in June, but we won’t dwell on that). A chance conversation with a Bloodbowl player (Tim) in the league I am participating in turned into a mad dash to get a playable fleet to have a game of Armada with…and hence the opportunity for an out of the blue article. I wasn’t expecting to post about Armada again*, I did a review when I first received Armada back in November 2020. I had an initial bout of excitement and attempted to play a little intro/test game with my son (a bit young at the time really). I started assembling and converting some models but motivation dwindled and progress stalled.

For the most part assembly was about 3 1/2 years ago, with a few crazy ideas. One of which was to remove the sculpted axes off the Orc fleet ships’ sails and replace it with something different. I have no idea why I decided to do this, can’t even remember what I was going to replace it with (I’m assume freehand painting rather than sculpting something). The other was making the Hammerfist’s fists rotate. I achieved this by simply putting a couple of magnets in the join. Although I must have felt like I needed the clearance on the rotating arm as I sculpted some more hull on the bottom of the boat to lift it up at the front slightly.

There is a second Hammerfist which is partially built, I might turn that into a blog post as it was trying something different.

This is the initially built set of ships, Orcs and Basileans, from over 3 year ago.

One thing I did do while assembling was to sculpt on some waves on to the ship bases with putty. This was fairly easy, roll out a sausage of putty, cut the length to fit the base and squash it down to make a wave or swell. Then with another thinner sausage cut to the length of the boat’s hull. Press the putty along the join between the ship and the base, then shape it into the ships’ wake.

This pic below along with the Hammerfist pic above will hopefully give you a good idea of what I mean. This is a plane based Basilean ship and Orc ship with sculpted waves.

Painting

I wanted to get these painted quickly; life has less and less hobby time these days, and with the opportunity to play rapidly approaching, I really do prefer playing with painted models. So I already knew that the main paint of choice was going to be ‘contrast’ style paints. In my case from the Vallejo Xpress range.

Rattlecan Primer

I did a batch spray undercoating of a few things. The built Orc Fleet, the built Basilean fleet, a Kraken (for scenario 2), and some terrain (rocks). The terrain was sprayed light grey, and the rest were given a spray with TT Combat Strigoi Flesh. The light undercoat specifically chosen for the Xpress paints to work their magic on.

You may have noticed the Orc fleet has increased in size. I assembled the resin Smasher and printed some Rabble squadrons**.

Base Coat Metals

I gave the parts I wanted metal a base coat with either silver (Vallejo Metal Colour Jet Exhaust) or bronze (Pro Acryl Light Bronze). Most metals are silver, the bronze was used to break up large areas of silver to be honest – just to add interest.

Yes, the first paints were not Xpress paints. I could have chosen some dark colours instead of metallics. I just thought the sheen from the metallic paints would end up selling these details better and quicker in the long run.

Deck and Sails

The idea was to paint the fleet quickly with minimal effort, so let’s break out those contrast paints. I painted the deck of the ships with Bag ‘O’ Bones thinned with medium, and I painted the sails Fluid Pink thinned with medium, aiming to have the pink in areas where I want the yellow sails to be shaded (yes I’m
using pink as an undershade for yellow).

Weirdly, I actually like the pink sails, but I the plan want yellow.

Hull and Yellow Sails

The hull was painted with Muddy Ground, I might have thinned this with medium too – can’t remember. Then the sails were painted with Imperial Yellow, this was not diluted.

Masts

I should have painted the masts at the same time as the hull but I forgot. However, maybe this was good fortune, as it forced me to be careful with my brush strokes not to accidentally get paint on the sails. It also allowed me to tidy up little bits here and there with Muddy Ground.

Axe Symbol

The axe was based in a dark grey, Vallejo German Grey, and then painted with Lotus Black. Doing this rather than just painting black gave the symbol some pseudo highlighting. I realise the Hammerfist doesn’t have axes – some idiot removed them – so this will have to do…

**Avast there, what be those tiny ships?

Horns, and a general tidy up

Making things ship shape 😉 OK so I think the Orc ships have some large animal horns used in their construction at various places. They definitely look like horns, most obviously at the end of the yard arms, but also in other places. I don’t have the specific paint colours I used to hand. I just picked up a light brown (possibly P3 Rucksack Tan) to base coat the horn. While painting the horns I also painted the ropes (robands) in that colour too. I then added lines in an off white (possibly Scale75 Mojave White) running along the length of the horn, narrow at the base and wide at the end of the horn. Then a white (Two Thin Coats White Star) was used within the previous lines. Finally a wash with age old favourite Agrax Eartheshade (don’t think its the new glossy one). I also went along the sail/yard arm boundary with Agrax to help define the boundaries between sail and rigging. Then I also used Agrax on the bronze metals to shade those too. The silver metals got a wash of the other age old favourite; Nuln Oil (again not the newest rendition). I went back and highlighted just some of the raised edges of the metal work with a bright silver.

Water

The idea here was to let the sculpting do the work, and so to that end I used Caribbean Turquoise over all the base. Then in the toughs of the waves I used Wagram Blue. Finally I used a white paint (in this case TTC) to highlight the crests of the waves and the boat’s wake. I also painted the edge of the base a dark colour, might be black but I think I found my darkest blue. The painting steps are working from right to left in the image below…wish I thought of putting them the other way round when I took the photo!

I didn’t get my whole fleet painted up in time for gaming session, I got this close…

I had a right laugh trying to wound the Kraken while holding off two other fleets. We had a three player game just to get a few of us trying to learn the rules. I found out that getting set on fire is very dangerous, and the while fighting fires, 1s appear on your dice 7 times out of 6. This led to the explosive demise of half my fleet.

Thanks for reading. As usual the links in the article are affiliate links, and I’ll get a small kick back from your shopping if you use any of them. Please consider using the links if you’re online hobby shopping. If you do use Element Games you can also get double element crystals using code: DAV615

*Why did my initial interest die off? I imagine covid and the lack of regular gaming killed some motivation. But so did the amount of work I found putting in to getting the models together. The resin cast model hulls appeared to from a one part mould with the base of the hull being the open section of mould where the resin was poured in. It looked like Mantic cleaned up the base of the hulls with a belt sander. Some poor soul had the job of sanding the bottom of each hull flat. Unfortunately, they probably got bored, and quality suffered. I had some hulls that were very uneven and had removed too much hull. I attempted to re-sculpt the missing detail, and this proved a little arduous, especially combined with sculpting waves and wake on bases which may or may not have hidden my efforts anyway.

**ManticVault gives access to the Armada STL files, and so the printer has been expanding my fleet(s) ever since. First up was the Rabble Squadrons (MV link). Printer has certainly ‘stepped the mast’ on a few more models since but we’ll save those for a post in another 3 years time (maybe).

Although after testing to see how it looked I decided I much prefer a single ship to a base rather than the two ships. Two ships really does look over crowded in my opinion.

That truly is the end of the post. But seeing as you made it this far I think you deserve to treat yourself nudge nudge link wink.