I’ve had a change of pace for this week. No gaming at all for you but from my point of view that’s not all bad as one of my other passions has filled the void with the start of the Tour de France this week. Not to everyone’s taste but I’m quite happy to have the live coverage on all day whilst I’m getting in a bit of hobby time. Which is exactly what I have been doing this week.
I’ve put the grot bomb-er to one side for a while as I’ve started to go a bit kit bash crazy and I’m now concentrating on getting some painting in. But not just any painting and no it’s not me actually getting round to finishing off my Esher girls. What I’ve done is started a new project in the form of a 75mm model from the Nuts Planet Tiger series. I’ve been looking at these for some time but just haven’t got round to doing anything about it. But needing something new I’ve taken the plunge and picked up Stranger JD.
What we have here is something that fits somewhere between post-apocalyptic and sci-fi. A lot of the range fits into the post-apocalyptic feel but I think this one is a little different with the addition of the servo harness. It also provides a bit of contrast which is why I picked this one first. The idea is to use it as a way of trying to improve my painting so I get the challenge of trying to get smooth blends on the clothing, painting yellow which is always a joy and then trying to make it all fit together. I have a good idea of what I want to do and I’m going to use the same colour scheme as that on the box art so that I have something to judge the finish model against. Out of everything I think the biggest challenge will be doing the weathering on the servo harness as I currently have no idea where to start with it.
I’m planning on doing a painting guide for this once it’s finished but to start off the model comes in a nice sturdy box with some nice artwork on the outside. Inside there is lots of foam so all of the parts are well protected and there was no damage when I opened it up. The model itself has twelve parts if you included the base and all are nice and crisp with just a few mould lines that need to be removed. Although you need to take your time with this as they are not all that obvious so it’s worth going over things a couple of times to make sure you get them all.
With everything cleaned up I did a dry fit to see how everything would go together and to see how tricky it would be to paint if it was fully assembled. The outcome of this step was I decided to go with four sub-assemblies to make life a little bit easier for myself. These were the base, head with gasmask pipe attached, the servo harness and then everything else. I’ll need to be careful when I come to putting it all together at the end but I think it will be easier this way in the long run.
All of this prep took quite a while but I’m hoping it will be worth it in the end. For priming I went with a coat of black Vallejo surface primer which I left of a full twenty four hours to cure properly before do a zenith with grey Vallejo surface primer. This is a bit of cheat but it gives me a bit of a reference as to where the highlights should be.
With everything primed I decided to start things off by painting up the base, my idea was I like painting bases so thought it would be a quick win. I used some Citadel Typhus technical paint to give a bit of texture and then simply used a mid grey for the concrete. By adding some black and then white to the mix and using a scrap of form I managed to get what I think is a nice concrete effect. I used metallics for the grating and then use a series of different washes to give it a more grungy effect. I’ll put the full details in a set by step guide once everything is finished but I’m happy with how it turned out.
Then it was time for the first bit hurdle what was going to be the yellow. I did this with the airbrush using a combination of yellow browns and highlighting then with white. To me this gives a nice industrial feel to things and because I’ve mixed up the colours I can go back over things to add shading and highlights that should give it a more rounded feel. As I wanted to do the hand at the same time I used an old lens cloth to wrap around the rest of the body to keep the paint off which seemed to work quite well.
Next steps are going to be to finish off the servo harness before turning my attention to the main body. When it comes to the body I’m not sure if I’m going to work on one colour at a time if I’m going to block all the base colours in and then go from there. Think I’ll just have to see how I’m feeling when I get to that bit.
That’s it for this week. With a bit of look we’ll get to finish off the Necromunda game next week and might even get another D&D session in. That’s something I’m looking forward to because if I can survive the next couple of sessions I might just manage to complete my first quest of the adventure. Which in turn will mean that I can take a bit of step back and let someone else drive where we are going. So until next week have a good week and I’ll see you all again next week.
