The Glass Cabinet

For my birthday a few months ago, I was kindly given a glass cabinet by my wife, in another new display of her accepting my hobby and giving it some space to be shown in the house. This is quite a momentous occasion for me too, having not really publicly shown my hobby off before. It is in the downstairs bathroom though..

So here it is now mounted on the wall and starting to be filled with some of my smaller projects:

Blood bowl Orcs and a couple of Fighting Fantasy tributes:

Gaslands at the top, Buried Giant tribute and a human warband

More Fighting Fantasy tributes along the top (characters from the novels and choose your own adventure series) and of course the Freeway Fighter. Wood Elf blood bowl team beneath:

A barbarian warband based on Frank Frazetta's art and some (unfinished) Star Wars miniatures. 

Some 40k Rogue Trader along the top:

Gaslands! part 3

Another day another couple of Gaslanded toy cars. These two are actually old Matchbox cars from when I was a boy, so there's a bit of sentiment here... but not enough from me pulling them apart and rebuilding them with weapons and armour:

I was quite keen to exaggerate the contrast in paint scheme here, from rust bucket to well maintained, race ready, blue. 

In terms of the build, the Corvette was drilled open so a driver could be added (even though you can barely see him on the finished car!), a singular gun mounted on the roof and the white stripe protected by masking tape. 

 I painted the interior and driver and then layered up my blues from dark to light. To add a bit of lustre to the colour I used a Tamiya blue over the top, which worked really well to get a bit of that metallic gleam to the body, however it was quite glossy so I had to finish with a bit of matt varnish:

The tape was taken away (always so satisfying) and the stripe painted from grey to white. 

The Dodge Dakota was built up more substantially with a plough, satelite, roof light, bonnet mounted gun and windshield. On the back I added a harpoon gun with gunner:

And the painting of the rust done in the traditional way with a range of dark browns, to red browns to oranges dabbed on over each other. 

So I'm done for Gaslands for now (apart from playing the game with my kids and on the Hot Wheels track with my son), oh and I want to recreate my Freeway Fighter on this scale too and maybe one of the Mad Max vehicles too. 

Something literacy inspired next... 

Gaslands! Pt. 2

Hi all. I didn't have as much time to hobby as I hoped this week, but I did get these two cars finished for my Gaslands! collection:

This one was a really old Hotwheels car (1975!) Corvette Stingray and already came raised. I thought it needed a bit of a special paint job, so went with one of my favourite cars from my childhood: Face from the A-Teams Corvette.

This one's paint job was inspired by someone else's paint job I found online, I really loved the idea of a replacement door being a different colour. I also used a regular HB pencil to draw in the metallic scratch marks.

Here they are pre-painting, mostly Implements of Carnage bits (the darker grey plastic) but also some bits from an Airfix X-Wing model (the light grey).

And here's the team thus far:

More currently being painted... 

Gaslands! - Day 3

I’ve had another quite productive day, moving onto some Gaslands! cars that I started a while ago and never completed. Tomorrow I will be experiencing “remote teaching” so I won’t have much, if any, time to hobby. But it’s been a good run of three days and I’m sure to do a little more over the coming days, weeks etc.

So here they are, a couple of Hot Wheels cars with bits added (mostly) from the Implements of Carnage sprue (North Star) and painted pretty quickly with a limited palette and lots of washes and weathering :

Here they are before the (initial) nightmare that was painting.

The priming went well, but from there on I decided this would be a good opportunity to experiment with some rusting techniques; both cars were then painted in rust colours and one had salt sprinkled on it the other a Tamiya chipping agent. Both were then given a black spray coat and then when this was dry I used a toothbrush to scratch away the top coat revealing the rust. However I found it way too random, lengthy and unsatisfying, so repainted both to what you now see.

Here are the next two converted up, using the same sprue as mentioned earlier plus some Airfix aircraft kit leftovers, unwanted bits of an X-Wing kit and some plasticard/plastic tubing:

A gypsy caravan - day 2

This was a very quick paint job. Under coated black then doombull brown undercoat and then highlighted up with evil sun red. The yellow trim was based with baalor brown and highlighted with flash glitz yellow. The roof was quickly done in a few brushstrokes (wet-in-wet blending); a base of caliban green and then streaked white added in to blend a highlight.

And here you can see the Djinn and caravan in situ on my board, looking through an old ruined temple:

Staying with vehicles, tomorrow’s task will be to finish off some Gaslands! cars that I started a while ago, where the painting didn’t go very well the first time of asking. 

The conversions of Hot Wheels cars:

Primed:

And then basecoated with rusty colours:

And then I experimented with salt and chipping paint medium. After that had been applied I then sprayed them black and with a toothbrush started off removing the black layer. I found it too random and craved to start again. So that’s what I’ll do tomorrow.

Gaslands!

It was only a matter of time before I started a new project and that may as well be at the beginning of the year. Cheetor's excellent blog introduced me to the game Gaslands! and I particularly liked how he had used the contents of the Hot Wheels advent calendar as a starting point for a load of 1:65 car converting craziness.

So I'm in. Up to my neck. I love converting and kit-bashing and trash-bashing so this is right up my desolate, post-apocalyptic highway. First of all I've already got a couple of 1:43 cars that would work for the game on a larger-than-Hotwheels-scale, namely my Fighting Fantasy Freeway Fighter and Helsreach Arrabella projects:

And for Christmas I received a 1:35 Tamiya half-track:

Which I've built:

And which is now in the process of getting a sci-fi/apocalyptic makeover. This will join the two previous vehicles to make my 28mm Gaslands team.

Of course I'm not stopping there. I found a bunch of my son's Hotwheels cars and I've started building another team in 1:65 scale, using some 40k bits and the excellent Implements of Carnage from NorthStar Figures. My first two cars:

Primed:

And undercoated in rust colours:

Oh and it won't stop there, here's the other cars I've collected to transform into post-apocalyptic Gaslands machines (you may notice a familiar looking orange car there...):

I shall keep you posted....