Activate Bat-Skates!

Today we'll be looking at some Royal Guards along with the Royal Guard Champion. Despite his high cost in Imperial Assault Skirmish, the Royal Guard Champion was one of my favorite characters to use for quite a while. I used him as well as a unit of Royal Guards in the first tournament that I ever attended at one of the local gaming shops. I hadn't used the Royal Guards prior to FFG issuing an errata for them, but apparently they were pretty powerful.


The fact that FFG was open to fixing cards that were overpowered, was a breath of fresh air for me. I frequently play Dice Masters and while the game is a lot of fun to play, there are a lot of things that could be fixed to make the game more balanced. But I'm not here to open that can of worms.

As I mentioned above, I used both Royal Guards and the Royal Guard Champion in a tournament and wanted to play with a painted team (one nice thing about playing Imperial Assault Skirmish at a tournament, is that your miniatures do not need to be painted in order to participate.). So I started painting one of the Royal Guards. Before I had stopped painting, I had started getting into wet blending. So I figured that is what I would try to do here.

Then I got frustrated. Which was good. It led me to an awesome youtube site: Sorastro's Painting. He does a lot of painting tutorials for the Imperial Assault miniatures. I can't say that I've watched all of his videos, but I have seen a few. I tried to follow along with his video for the Royal Guards. But felt that the one I painted came out too orange and ended up re-painting him. One great thing about painting miniatures is that you can always strip the paint off of a miniature or paint over it (as long as you don't mind losing some of the details) if you are not happy with how it turned out or feel that you could now do a better job than when you first painted it.

Standing at attention

Because the Royal Guards took up so much of their base, I didn't bother re-basing them (that is not entirely true. I re-based one, just to see how long it would take.). Instead I painted one of the bases grey and put some flocking on the others. One day, I may go back and further highlight their robes. Whenever I watch a tutorial or read an article, the painter always seems to take it a step or two further than I would. I yell at the page and go: Why would you keep going? It already looks good. The answer is usually contrast. A miniature may look good when you're got it up to your face. But a few feet away from you on a gaming board and something is lost in translation. I'm slowly trying to work on that. To take a miniature a step or two further than I normally would to try and make it 'pop'.

Focus on me!

Despite liking the Royal Guard Champions' deployment card (with the exception of his cost), I'm not a big fan of his outfit. It didn't excite me and I had great difficulty painting him as as result. Looking back, I probably could have done a better job. But I've got too many unpainted miniatures to worry about touching up the Royal Guard Champion now. Because of his stance, putting him on a new base was somewhat difficult. As you can see below, his feet don't quite fit on the base. Looking at it now, it kind of looks like he's skating. Ha. If I ever get really, really, bored one day, I might have to put some skates on him and attach him to an icy base. Now that I'm thinking about it, it would be pretty hilarious. I may just do it anyways. Now all I can think about is Batman and Robin and the bat-skates incident.

Activate Bat-Skates!

The nicely photographed pictures were taken by my good friend James. The low quality picture was provided by my phone.