Fusion Taxi Services

Gillette's packaging for it's Fusion razor blades is completely over the top. Each razor blade given it's own little plastic compartment trying to tell the consumer that THIS IS A LUXURY ITEM. Well, Gillette, I've trash-bashed your packaging into something a damn site better than for what you intended, a Rogue Trader hover taxi!

This was inspired by the current competition on The Emporium of Rogue Dreams: Old School Gaming Facebook page, where a skiff-bash challenge is underway. I had the competition in mind as I was about to throw away the aforementioned packaging and it struck me just how interesting the shapes actually were; the curved front, the hollowed out areas with slanting backs... what else could come into my mind except a hover car with lots of seats. And what vehicle needs lots of seats? Well a automated taxi service of course!

So from here I scrounged together a few other pieces, the family craft cardboard is a place I rarely venture in (it's a mess of felt, string, glitter glue and felt tips) but I vaguely recalled the interesting shapes of felt tip pen lids in that they may correspond to a kind of propeller shape. In the big box of shit that holds felt tip pens (many dried up without their lids), I scrambled to the bottom of the box to find those missing lids. I found a perfect one (with a kind of interior compartment shape that looked sexy and propeller like) but of course not a second one. So I just pilfered one from a perfectly healthy felt tip pen which is now dried up and useless. I should have used this as an opportunity to clear out the box, but did not want to disrupt my creative energy and stall my momentum. One of the kids can do it and anyway the referee in our house, doesn't know. The felt tip lids were filed flat on one side (deliberately roughly) and then superglued to the side rear of the hover craft.

I then dug out a few miscast sci-fi bits I was gifted at an event, dual exhausts, double lights and single lights and glued these in the appropriate places (after a bit of playing with their positions) on to the front and rear and was then ready to go and paint. Well not quite, to capture the hover aspect of the vehicle I built a hidden stand out of the end of a pen, inserted a rare earth magnet into the top of it and then drilled a corresponding hole to the underside of the hovercraft to accommodate the other magnet. The craft could now be removed from it's base (which helped for painting and can be removed and replaced by another vehicle if I ever get around to making another). Oh and it makes it look like it hovers too.

The painting stage was relatively straightforward. Black primer for the inside, masked this off and white primer on the outside. I added a few blended, vertical dark grey stripes to the seats to give them a textured fabric feel and then dabbed on a variety of rust colours onto the outside. Around these I added a range of silvers to show scratch marks and the revealed metal of the vehicle where the yellow paint and rust had de-laminated. The yellow layers were then blended in, black taxi details applied and finally I went back to the rust areas and textured them with some weathering pigments and then weathered the entire vehicle with some thinned washes.