Let's hear it for the band.

A quick post this morning to showcase the band members that formed part of the care package from Dave Stone of ‘Wargames Terrain Workshop’. As with the previous miniatures, I need to stress that these are created for Dave's own personal amusement and are not commercially available due to licensing restrictions. Dave has a hankering to create the many denizens of Jabba’s palace and so it was inevitable that he turned his sculpting skills to the Max Rebo band.

Now as gigs go, being the house band for one of the vilest, most dangerous gangsters in the outer rim, must have been a tough act to pull off!  Jabba the Hutt’s propensity for violence and torture is well documented and still the band played on!

Max and his band first appeared in the Return of the Jedi, as a three piece with Sy Snootles as the vocalist, but with the release of the special edition in 1997 another nine members have been added to the ensemble and Dave looks determined to represent them all!  The resin sculpts that I have are instantly recognisable as Droopy McCool and Sy Snootles from the original line up, with Rappertunie* and Joh Yowza** from the special edition.

* Rappertunie is a stage name, his full name being Rapotwanalantonee Tivtotolon.

**Again another stage name, but hardly surprising that he adopted a non de plume given that his real name is J'ywz'gnk Kchhllbrxcstk Et'nrmdndlcvtbrx!

Unfortunately, Joh Yowza had lost an arm in transit and so one of the first jobs was to stick it back with superglue, which seemed to be a lot harder than it needed to be. Is this peculiar to resin models or just me being impatient I wonder?  After much cursing and swearing I finally got the limb attached only to drop the blasted thing and have his feeler snap off instead – the air was now very blue!  I had considered rebasing the miniatures on to some nice 'stone slab' MDF discs that I have and even asked Dave what was the best way to go about this process.  The answer was with a Dremel, at which point I decided not to push my luck and went with them as they are.

My band members were primed in white, which is a bit of a departure for me, and as I had the trusty air brush to hand gave each one a basic base colour to hopefully speed up the process. First to be tackled were Droopy McCool and Rappertunie. Droopy was relatively straight forward to paint, in fact after his base coat he was given a wash with Agrax Earthshade and then some shorts and that was pretty much it. 

Similarly, Rappertunie was also a case of building on the existing base coat, although I did try to achieve some roundness to his tummy with some highlights.

Buoyed with the success of the first two, I was keen to tackle what I believed would be the more challenging paint jobs.  Sy Snootles with her wonderfully distinctive, mottled skin was great fun to work on, the large protruding lips standing out with their deep red accent.  Finally, Joh Yowza was done, but somehow he ended up with a grey/green pelt!  It seemed to work quite nicely against the rust brown, I had used for his skin and what with his ruddy complexion has actually turned out to be one of my favourites.

So my line up was complete and at this juncture, I discovered another trait of the exceedingly generous Dave Stone Esq. - his unbridled enthusiasm for a project!  Already he has progressed more band members, which can be seen in a post on 'The Game Cupboard' and in a flurry of emails, I found myself swept along by same said enthusiasm and before I knew what I was doing an order was placed with 'Tritex Games' for a couple, or three, Star Wars Miniatures!  

So once again Dave a huge, Thank You , this has been such a fun distraction and I dare say I will sketching out some ideas for a throne room board before too long!