The Minions of Mark: Dark Age miniatures

 Over the years I've accumulated a lot of random miniatures. Among these models was a blister pack of strange little guys that my local games shop was selling for £5 in a bargain bin. 

They're actually from a game called Dark Age, which I think is now defunct. It was a skirmish wargame based on the pictures of an artist called Bron, and seemed to be about small warbands abandoned on a desert planet. The guys I bought, if I remember rightly, were the followers of someone called Saint Mark.

What they look like, to me, is a cross between the War Boys from Mad Max and the Cenobites from Hellraiser. I put them in a drawer for a long time, and was rather intimidated by the prospect of painting them, especially because they would need a largely monochrome paint scheme, which made me nervous. I don't really enjoy painting black, because the highlights often come out as chalky or too stark. 

Well, I finally dragged these guys out, painted one as a test, found that it worked, and got going on the other four. They're strange designs but really well sculpted, with loads of detail. They seem to be holding guns that fire circular saw blades, as well as truncheon-type weapons that might be electrified. I doubt that they're the good guys of the setting.

Making the skin different to the clothing was quite hard. The clothing is highlighted from black to light grey, by adding more grey and white. The skin started off as light grey, was given a very thin wash of purple, and was then highlighted by adding first bone and then pink to the mix. The skin was eventually given a thin glaze of pink to suggest that it is alive. I'm not sure how well this comes out in the photos.

Here they are.

Weird, aren't they?

Scratch-Built Moon Truck

 

Once again, I've been trying to use up some of the many bits that I've accumulated for excellent projects that never quite came to fruition. 

A little while ago I made an ork battlewagon, which looks like this:

In doing so, I bought a resin battlewagon from Ebay, which I'd intended to use as the basis for the battlewagon itself. I ended up only using the wheels for my version, which left me with a load of resin bits including a body that looked like a massive lump of white chocolate.

Also in the bits box were two, er, side pieces from a Ramshackle Games APC-type vehicle. I have no idea why I own these, especially since I had three of them. Maybe I over-ordered many years ago? I also had no wheels to go with them. Genius. However, I discovered that the side bits fitted the white-chocolate resin bit really well. 

I boxed in the rear of the vehicle with plasticard and then got to work covering it in greebles - that is, bits of interesting, superfluous detail. Many GW human vehicles have plates on them, which sometimes have little gaps between them. I tried to simulate this with different shapes and thicknesses of plasticard. 

The underside shows how the large random lumps of resin went together.

Further greebling occurred.

The bits came from all sorts of places: some Warlord Games turrets from an armoured car; two ventilation units made by TT Combat; a Mantic gun - anything that looked interesting and vaguely industrial, really. My favourite bit is a toolbox from a Gaslands sprue. I considered buying some resin wheels, but I'm cheap, so I got some Lego ones off ebay. And they worked surprisingly well!

The thing I ended up with looked like a cross between a military truck and a moon rover. It clearly needed an industrial paint job. I went with a light grey, because you can do a lot of weathering on that. For the first time, I used an oil wash to simulate dirt and grime: I used burnt umber from Windsor and Newton, watered down with white spirit. To be honest, while this was a bit better than just painting the dirt on, I didn't think that it was amazing.

Headlights, an abandoned toolbox and some kind of tube added a bit of colour to the model. Overall, I think it might be a bit over-weathered, and you can see that the tyres say "Lego" if you look closely, but I think it's come out pretty well given how it started. A weekend well spent!

A Car for Dark Future/Gaslands

I've been painting and converting some toy cars, as used in the old GW game Dark Future and the recent Osprey game Gaslands. I used to play Dark Future - many years ago, given that it came out in 1989.

Dark Future is, to modern eyes, quite an odd game for GW to make. For one thing, it wasn't set in either the Warhammer or Warhammer 40,000 settings (or whatever Blood Bowl is set in). For another, while you could buy a small range of models from GW, you were encouraged to convert Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars to make your own vehicles. As you can imagine, this didn't bring in a huge amount of money for GW, and it disappeared.

(Mainly, anyhow. A load of new Dark Future novels were published by Boxtree in 2005 or so, and the timeline and alternative history of the setting were revised and greatly extended. I started reading one of them, thought it was terrible, and gave up on that.)

Dark Future is rather more grown-up and down-to-earth than the big GW games. It's set in a near-future America, in a land racked by global warming, crippled by corporate greed and threatened by insane cultists. On the other hand, the US hasn't elected a dictator, so perhaps a modernised version would be called Somewhat Optimistic Future. On the highways, Sanctioned Operatives (the law) fight huge gangs (not the law) in armed and armoured cars, like a more gun-heavy version of Mad Max. It's got a fairly real-world look, with the Mafia, biker gangs, Bloods and redneck paramilitary types all being represented. 

Gaslands is one of those games from Osprey that fits into a gap that GW failed to fill. While Frostgrave is Substitute Mordheim, and Stargrave is to some extent a replacement Necromunda, Gaslands fills the "Mad Max with Matchbox cars" niche. 

*

I was in Tesco recently with a friend, who suggested that I should buy some cheap toy cars and do them up. I thought I'd give it a go, so I purchased a pack of really naff, cheap toy cars. Each car seems to be based on a real-world vehicle, but they're not classy enough to actually say what they are.

One of them was a Chevolet-type truck that looked like this:

I split into its three main bits: the upper chassis, the silver plastic part that contained the interior detailing, and the metal base plate.

I put the upper chassis onto a base made of a bit of carboard, slightly roughed up to represent a crude road surface. I painted it all to look like a ruined, burned-out shell, somewhat overgrown.

That left the silver bit and the metal baseplate. While I couldn't think of anything to do with the baseplate (yet!) the silver bit looked like a crude, stripped-down buggy. 

I ordered the plastic "implements of carnage" sprue from North Star games, which comes with lots of bits of guns, armour and the like to Mad Max-ise your toy cars. I stuck exhausts, a ram and two guns that look like they came off a Flying Fortress onto the silvery shell. I added a driver from the sprue, which took quite a bit of cutting.

Then I painted it.

Oddly, these cheap plastic cars sometimes have some strangely detailed bits, often hidden away. This car had a bottle of extra fuel or nitrous oxide bolted behind the driver's seat, together with a tube that leads into... his bottom? Anyhow, it looked cool.

Well, I certainly got my money's worth out of this thing! It was fun to make and I'm pleased with the results. The other cars will be simpler conversions. 

Of Legs and Shoulder Pads

This week, I'd hoped to do more work on the robot factory, but the parts didn't get to me. Instead, I bought an old Dark Eldar model, from about 1998. I've not been able to find a good picture of this, but basically, it's metal, and from a time when the Dark Eldar range was... well, let's say that they've not aged well. This particular model (a female Archon) was pretty battered, and cursed with shoulder pads that would have embarrassed the cast of Dynasty.

I removed the arms with a hacksaw, and replaced them with a modern plastic Dark Eldar left arm, and a right arm from a Skitarri ranger. The sleeve of the ranger's arm had to be cut down and pretty extensively built up with green stuff. She also got a new, huge, shoulder pad made from the blade of an old elf axe.

I'd originally intended a Tank Girl riot of colours for this model, but as I put it together, it seemed more goth than punk. I went for a more subdued black and green colour scheme, with orange as a contrasting spot colour. She looks like someone from a 1980s science fiction film:

The year is 1997. Atomic war has reduced the Earth to looking like a disused quarry. Radioactivity has inexplicably made animals large and angry. Bandits roam the land, in the service of the deadly Queen Spatula. Only one man can save mankind - Dirk Rockwell, the Freedom Cop!

"We meet again, Dirk Rockwell."

Here's a rear view. I really like the sculpting of the cloth, and I'm pretty pleased with my paint job.

On the subject of dodgy models, Necron warriors are a bloody pain in the arse. These really need a re-sculpt: not so much a redesign as some new poses and the ability to turn their heads without snapping their necks. I like the concept, but they're not easy to make. Anyhow, they do look a lot better walking forwards, rather than the bow-legged standard pose.

Nothing to see

Here are a few more inhabitants of the wastes, going about their daily business.

These two gentlemen have gone for a stroll in the desert in their hazmat suits, as you do, in a set of events completely unrelated to recovering crashed UFOs or producing methamphetamine. They are made by Full Borer Games (I think) and while they're not extremely detailed the folds in the cloth were good to paint. Sometimes you can have too much detail (says the man with a heap of unpainted Carnivale models on his desk).

Here is Hasslefree's version of Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road. Her gun is incredibly delicate so I thought I'd take a picture before the barrel inevitably snaps off. It's a really great model. I didn't try to paint the eyes because the risk of me slipping and covering the side of her face in white paint is too high. Of course that's the sort of thing people do in Mad Max, but still.

Maniacs

Presidential Decree 69784/603/17
Top Secret

Dear science guys,

Listen, I have had the best idea how to solve the prison overcrowding crisis and the recruitment problem at once! We get convicts and fill them with drugs and stuff until they're really big and kind of mutated like that guy in that cartoon. And mad, too. They've got to be mad. Then, we point them at the bad guys and let them loose! Cool, huh?

 Of course, we'd want real crazies to begin with, homicidal maniacs and stuff, otherwise it won't work. And we'd need to give them lots of big weapons. Sometimes, I amaze myself with all the brilliant ideas I have. It's gonna be great, so great. I can't see how this could go wrong.


For a while I've been interested in the "Storm of Sigmar" starter set for Warhammer Age of Sigmar: mainly because for £20 you get a lot of pretty decent models. In particular, I think the armoured Khorne chaps are really well sculpted and would make an excellent replacement for the old and lumpy plastic Chaos Space Marines. I've also been tempted to have a go at converting some Sigmarines, and this seemed to be the easiest way to get some on the cheap.

The box comes with five "bloodreavers". These are low ranking Khorne fighters (Khorne seems to be the chaos god of choice in AoS, and now everything Khorneish has "blood" in the title), and to my mind they're a bit too massive to be entirely convincing as normal humans. I thought it would be good to update them to look like post-apocalyptic maniacs, like the War Boys from Mad Max or the Raiders from Fallout.

That involved cutting off their Viking-style helmets and replacing some of their weapons. I also did some minor converting to make the poses a bit more dynamic. I gave them metal gas mask heads from Pig Iron Productions to make them look more sinister.

Painting-wise, I went for orange convict-type trousers and a lot of dirt. I wanted to use a messy style on the torsos, with a lot of washes over a pale undercoat, but it was too messy and I just ended up painting them in the usual way. Oh well: it's pretty messy as it is.

Now, on a different note, you're clearly people of excellent taste (after all, you're reading this...). So why not pre-order my next novel? The Pincers of Death, an exciting tale of war, giant soldier ants and hovering teapots right: HERE. I can promise that the jokes in it are even better than the ones here. Honest.

Wasteland Buggy

Many years ago, I had a plastic toy car. You put batteries in it and it went along the ground until (a) it crashed and you could get it back; (b) the batteries died and you could get it back but had to get some new batteries; or (c) you never saw it again. Cool, eh?

But the time comes to put such childish things aside, or at least stick plasticard to them. So, having lost the roof bit of the car about a decade ago, I got to work on the chassis, as we grownups call the lower half.

The superstructure was made out of a side panel from an ork truck, some plasticard and the mid-section of a 40k land speeder (I never liked those things). Then it got an intake for the engine made from some Dark Eldar bit or other, and detailing with headphone wire, plastic rods and plasticard, not least to stop the tyres from falling apart.

It doesn't really have a function, but I think it will look good as a prop for Necromunda. I can see it driving across the ash wastes - hence the dirty wheels. As time's gone on, I've found that I prefer making these improvised machines and random fighters rather than tanks and uniformed soldiers.

Broom, broom.

In the meantime, I have bought two plastic Khador robots for the game Warmachine. They were cheap and will be a good starting-point for more conversions. That said, they haven't arrived yet and I ordered them ages ago. Where are my plastic robots? I shouldn't have to take this nonsense - I'm a grown man, dammit. I want my plastic robots!

The War Rig

Last year I saw Mad Max: Fury Road in the cinema with an old wargaming friend of mine. Then I went to see it again with another friend who is very into board games. Then I saw it a third time with two other friends. Then I ran out of friends. As I was sitting at home in my endless solitude, I decided to make my own war rig like the one in the film.

I found a toy lorry on Ebay, bought it for £10 and got converting. I chopped off the spoiler and used it to lengthen the wheelbase of the cab. Most of the rest of the work was bits of sprue and plasticard. I made a false new grille out of plasticard and curved bits of sprue and blended it in with green stuff so as to lengthen the bonnet/hood. The air intakes were made from those smoke launchers you get on Games Workshop tanks.

 Then of course I wondered if I had just carved up a priceless Dinky Toy. But it was too late. Time for paint and suitably excessive weathering. Here we go, girls:

And from the side...

Not bad, but it needed a trailer to pull. The model came with a suitable plastic trailer, complete with some kind of buzzer that you could fit batteries into to make a sound, which probably delighted small children circa 1982. I never found out what the sound was. Another voice lost to the Wasteland.

Again, this is just a plasticard job. The car on the right is a Matchbox or Hot Wheels car, so you can see the scale. It's hard to make out in this picture, but there's a plasticard superstructure on the front of the trailer, which is supposed to look like half a VW Beetle, as per the film. I went for a blue-black colour rather than straight black.

Looking back on it, I should have raised the rear of the cab higher, and perhaps put something onto the front of the trailer to stop it being such a blank slab. But I think it's captured the rough look of the war rig. So far it hasn't had an outing in any games, but I'm pleased with the end result.

I added a second plasticard Beetle and some pennants to the back of the trailer. One of these days, I'll use some spare wheels and a ping-pong ball to make the fuel pod that gets pulled along behind the rig at the start of the film. But for now it's ready to strike down the unroadworthy! Do you see me, Toecutter?