Rediscovering Gates of Antares by Andrés Amián.
On the 12th of October I had the opportunity to participate in a Gates of Antares gaming day at Warlord Games’ HQ. for me it was the perfect opportunity to start playing Antares again (maybe I should say, playing V2 for first time). I invested a lot of time in the studio painting quite a large part of the miniature range for the game, however, have not had much time at home to do my own armies. So, despite my attempts of collecting and painting a force for the game, I only manage to do the collecting part. Despite having two good sized armies (Boromites and Ghar), I ended giving them both away, but recently I got part of the Ghar back.
During the summer of 2020, I painted a Freeborn army for someone else, and that got my motivation for preparing a Beyond the Gates of Antares back. So, I looked through the few figures I had left and started to buy what I needed for my new Freeborn force. I manage to finish a good number of miniatures, enough for a game. Unfortunately, I had to shelf the project for a time so I put everything into a box until I could come back to it.
Maybe (like me) you have some Gate of Antares figures and if so, perhaps now is the time to take them out and prepare a force (even a small one works perfectly fine), see if you have what you need, and start painting. Soon you´ll find yourself diving into the Skytrex website looking for more to complete your army or for a new one. I have found that there are several players quite close to where I live. So, I plan to play as soon as I can.
Now, to the painting. As I mentioned before, I´ve got a painted Freeborn force, but I wanted to try something different. I only had two weeks before the gaming day and I thought that it would be a good idea to get one of the ready-made starter 50 points sets Skytrex put together on their store (here). I always wanted to command an Isorian strike team, and that’s what I ended picking. Once you adjust the points, you can use all the figures (more or less) if you allocate points for extra weapons or some of the other options. This starter set would give me around 20 figures, with a good mix of infantry, some big boys and drones. At that point I didn’t know how would they perform on the battlefield but it certainly looks a well-balanced force, with wood shooting options as well as close combat ones.
With the clock ticking, I needed to find a way of getting everything painted on time and looking as good as possible. I went for the “official” painting job, but using as many Army Painter Speedpaints as possible to make my life a bit easier. In the studio I used to start from a Plate Mail spray primer, but I didn’t have any to hand so I primed them in grey and then applied Warpaints Fanatic Plate Mail by brush, followed by a Wargames Fanatic Shiny Silver drybrush. I gave the figures two glazes using Speedpaints, a first one with Satchel Brown thinned down 50/50 with Speedpaints Medium, and once dried, a second one with Noble Skin, again thinned down 50/50 with the Speedpaints Medium. The result was a dark metallic brown quite similar to the studio version. And with a second coat of Noble Skin straight from the pot I painted the body of the weapons, tentacles and other parts I wanted to have a stronger tone. The Shinning Silver drybrush helped to bring out those edges, but to enhance the raised parts I gave a light drybrush with Plate Mail.
With that, most of the paint job was done. I painted all the vents and details that would be yellow in the armour and weapons with white to act as a foundation for Zealot Yellow Speedpaint (straight from the pot). Once this was well dried, I used Fire Giant Orange Speedpaint to the lower part of every yellow patch to give them depth. And with Warpaints Fanatic Moon Dust I did a highlight on the top.
The orange parts were painted with Warpaints Fanatic Lava Orange, a glaze of Fire Giant Orange Speedpaint, and then highlighted with lighter orange and yellow paints.
The bone parts and masks were painted in white and then I gave them a Pallid bone Speedpaint glaze followed by a couple of highlights with Vallejo Model Color Stone Grey and then Warpaints Fanatic Matt White.
The last thing were those black glassy spheres and gem-like stones on the drones, backs of the armour and Tsan-Ra shoulders. Firstly, these were painted with Warpaints Fanatic Matt Black followed by Warpaints Fanatic Chaotic Red in the centre, and the successive and concentric highlights ranging from red to light yellow to get that light beam effects.
To protect the painted figures, I varnished everything with gloss varnish (this will protect the painting job), followed by a couple of matt varnish to get again the flat finish. All the gems got a coat off gloss varnish.
I left the bases with a basic treatment, with the idea of adding grass or other materials once I got a bigger force, so everything will get the same appearance. Sometimes, with long projects you might find you ran out of that fantastic grass, and you cannot find it anymore, so to avoid that kind of situation I will leave that for the end, once I have added in all the units I want to paint.
And with that, the night before big day, I found myself gluing the drones to their bases and a full 50 points force ready for battle. I was very happy with the final result. And I had a very good time fighting with them. I’ll talk about my gaming experience on a follow up for this article shortly.
The full set of rules for Gates of Antares V.2 is available to download for free from the Antares Nexus (https://antaresnexus.com/).
