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:

Bandai Y-Wing 1:72

I'm having building work done on my house which means that I've had to lose my hobby space. I wasn't in the best run of form anyway, so this has really hampered my productivity. To get out of the dust zone, my kids and I went to my parents for the weekend and as is customary, I had a rummage around my old bedroom in the hope of finding a few nuggets of nostalgia and hopefully old models! Well I found one! A boxed Bandai Y-Wing (1:72) that I received for Christmas a few years ago. Joy. With my parents taking the kids out for the day, I set to work on constructing the tiny, detailed model.

Having worked on some quite difficult Airfix models with my son (small fiddly bits that need lots of gluing and don't fit particularly well) I was amazed that I did not need any glue to make successfully build this and the level of detail and quality was pretty astounding. I would definitely recommend these kits to any serious model-maker.

I wish I had the larger scale version to fit in with my Star Wars Imperial Assault minis, but I can imagine creating a diorama where this hangs in the sky, it's smaller scale lost in the perspective of distance.

Once the kit was built the yellows were painted on (rather than use the rubbish decals) and then the weathering which was done very quickly. Without applying a primer, I washed a dirty brown, very dilute oil paint mixture over the entire model and when dry applied a further range of acrylic washes over this including blacks for the burnt effect near the engines and browns over some of the pipes. A few of the details, including the pilot, droid and lights were then picked out with acrylic paint.

Overall it was a very enjoyable day making and painting this. Back home, I've established a temporary site for my hobby exploits, so (fingers crossed) expect a few more posts in the near future of a variety of different projects.

Star Wars: Mos Eisley Scratchbuilt Scenery

Having painted up Greedo in his traditional colours, I quickly set off to pursue my favoured aspect of the hobby; scratch-built scenery.

I didn't need to do much image research to find inspiration on the Internet as the films settings are ingrained in my memory, but a bit of a refresher of re-watching the movies over the wet weekend with my kids didn't hurt. Re-visiting A New Hope set my mind on recreating some buildings from Mos Eisley on Tattoine as I particularly like the desert setting, the combination of rectangular and spherical shaped buildings and of course it being a "wretched hive of scum and villainy". And where Greedo hangs out.

I used a combination of foamcard, polystyrene balls, yoghurt pots and some resin doors and accessories that I picked up years ago:

Here you can see me experimenting with some self-cracking paint to create a weathered look on this door.

The second one, of course, was more successful!

Here he is to show the scale

And a few WIP shots to show you the build. I haven't got around to painting up the tall generator yet.

A small tip for maintaining a rectangular shape whilst the gluing of the 4 walls dry:

And using my trusty circular cutter for those awkward archways:

Next up, some generators made up pretty much entirely of recycled materials...

Star Wars: Greedo

I realised that one of the reasons I never really got into 40K was not because I had a preference for fantasy but because the sci-fi vision served up by GW in the 80's just wasn't Star Wars (although I realise there are references to it). For me Star Wars is the Ultimate Science Fiction Universe and Space Marines and the other various 40k factions, quite simply, weren't. 

Living a slightly blinkered life these days, I didn't even know that there was a Star Wars game and models and that these models were fucking cool and totally represented my love of the original films. So lets start another new project; Star Wars Legions. Well I happened to be passing my (not so) local games store and inside found a Greedo model which looked just the ticket (turns out I've actually picked up one from Star Wars Imperial Assault game, which is a board game rather than the tabletop game and that these are also, annoyingly, a different scale). However the scale of these matches some of my other, very limited, selection of 40k based models (for example; here, here, here and here)

So I just had to paint him up in his traditional colours and base him the same way as my others, which just happens to be a sandy equivalent to Mos Eisley.

I will attempt to put together a squad of Bounty Hunters from the films and then locate them all in my own scum-ridden corner of Mos Eisely (cue for some scratch-building of scenery...)