Little Tanks & Tiny People

Over the last few of months I repainted both my East Germans and my WW2 Dutch army. Having recently bought a new house and being in the process of selling our current one, I haven't really had the time or energy to take proper pictures. What I do have laying around is this picture of my Ibanez 7-string that I repainted over the summer. It's an 1998 Ibanez RG7621 that I bought second hand probably about 20 years ago. I took it apart, sanded the body, filled some dents, sanded some more and then painted it using spray can automotive lacquers. All in all, I think I gave it about five coats of primer and six coats of a paint called  Porsche RS Miami Blue. As I don't have a painting stand and have to paint the guitar one side at a time, this meant over twenty paint applications with at least one full day of drying time in between.  Like with my Flying V , I encountered some difficulties during the painting process.  I had planned on finishing the guitar with a  2-componen...

A little while back I picked up this cool Indiana Jones figure by Stronghold. It’s metal – which I like – and has a lot of character. While painting I realised that the two Lara Crofts that I painted back in 2020 could probably use an update too. So, here you go, three freshly painted archaeologists! I wonder, are there any other archaeologists that I could add to my collection? Indiana Jones (Stronghold) Classic Lara (Hasslefree) Second reboot Lara (Hasslefree)

Time for another car, only it’s a little bit different than the Gaslands vehicles from my last post. Back in 2000 or 2001, I bought a Tamiya RC kit for the 1999 World Rally Championship season Ford Focus. I had a lot of fun building and upgrading it with better electronics and faster motor. And of course driving it. Over the years, though, the polycarbonate body shell has received quite a few bumps, cuts and scratches. A little while back I decided to buy a new shell for my RC car. I could not find an original Tamiya shell, but Hpi racing makes a very good aftermarket shell with sticker sheet for the 1999 WRC. There are many little differences between the Tamiya and Hpi shells, but the overall appearance is very nice. And most importantly, it fits perfectly on the Tamiya chassis. It does not come with side mirrors, though, so I simply transferred those over from my original Tamiya shell.  Somewhat confusingly, an RC car shell is transparent and you paint the inside rather than t...

I haven’t had much time for painting the last few weeks, but I did manage to build these cars for Gaslands. Gaslands is a set of rules published by Osprey Games for Mad Max/Death Race style vehicular combat.  Gaslands is completely miniature agnostic. You can use whatever cars you have lying around the house or that you can find in a dollar store, making the game very accessible. Most people tend to use Hot Wheels cars or similar, but I picked out some slightly larger vehicles. That way, I can also use them with 28 mm minis, for example my Street Violence figures.

This guitar is the definition of the expressions ‘all’s well that ends well‘ and ‘third time's a charm’. It took three attempts over a period of a year and a half to get this result, but I am really happy with how she turned out.  For the paint scheme I was inspired by the grey-green camouflage used by the Koninklijke Luchtmacht throughout most of the Cold War, which was basically a direct lift from the livery of the RAF. For the final version I used the following enamel spray cans:   MoTip Olive Green Matte RAL 6014 MoTip Basalt Grey Matte RAL 7012 Dupli Aerosol-Art Clear Lacquer Matte I started my first attempt over the Christmas break of 2021. I removed the neck, but kept the pickups, bridge, etc. in place because I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to resolder the electronics properly. So, I carefully masked everything off, gave it a sand and got to painting. After a couple of weeks everything was done. I had ordered some decals from Redbubble and had given th...

I thought I’d do something a little different for my first post of 2023. I picked up this Batman figure second hand about 15 years ago. Back then he wore an all black suit with the Tim Burton yellow logo and a yellow utility belt.   I had repainted him years ago, but never really liked the result, so over the Christmas break I had another crack at it. I sculpted a new bat logo out of Miliput, filled in some of the joints, and repainted Batsy in a cel-shaded style somewhat similar to Mike Mignola’s artwork. I did this by illuminating the figure from the top left and then tracing the shadows. I tried to paint him so that the effect works from all angles, but I think it’s most effective from the front and left. The colour palette is very limited: Vallejo Medium Sea Grey 70.870 and Black 70.950 for the suit, Flat Earth 70.983 and Charred Brown 72.045 for the utility belt and Basic Skin Tone 70.815 for the skin. By the way, it may not come across in the pictures, but at 30 cm Batsy ...

Back in March, I painted the figures for the amazing game Gloomhaven . This time I’ve painted the minis for that game’s little cousin. Tiny Epic Dungeon is, as its name suggests, also a dungeon crawler, but with completely different mechanics. It’s a fun, quick game ideal for when you want to scratch that dungeon crawling itch, but don’t have an entire afternoon or evening to set up and play a Gloomhaven scenario. The almost comically small - tiny, even - box still manages to hold eight pretty decent looking 28 mm scale miniatures.

Back in May, I saw Topgun: Maverick in the cinema and it got me really inspired to make something aviation-related. Rather than building a model kit, I figured it would be fun to scratch build something. After a bit of thinking I decided that that something had to be an ejection seat. I particularly liked the look of the Aces II seat, which is used in many aircraft including the F-15 Eagle, F-16 Viper, F-22 Raptor and A-10 Warthog. I found some really nice technical drawings of the Aces II seat online, which came in very handy for getting the basic shape and placement of the detailing right. T his is by no means a perfect recreation of the schematics, though. I was more concerned with getting the overall ‘feel’ right. I also didn’t build the seat to any particular scale. Instead, I scaled the image so that the side view was exactly the height of a sheet of A4. In other words, this thing was going to be pretty bloody massive!   The basic structure was made out of polystyrene she...

When rummaging through my local boardgame shop I came across this game Unmatched Jurassic Park. I wasn’t familiar with the Unmatched series before, but it’s a series of combat games that asks the important question: who would win in a fight, King Arthur or Medusa, Alice (of Wonderland fame) or a T-Rex? There are several themed boxes available, which can be played standalone or can be mixed with others to create different matchups.  Currently there are two Jurassic Park-themed sets in the line-up: the one I picked up, Dr. Sattler vs. the T-Rex, and Muldoon vs. three velociraptors. To be honest, getting to paint up a massive dinosaur was the main reason for picking up this set. The game is pretty fun, although don’t think it’s something I’ll be coming back to very often. At 36 Euros per box, I also doubt that I’ll be getting the other Jurassic Park set anytime soon, however tempting those velociraptors figures may be... The figures are very high quality, especially for a board game...

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again.  Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario.   Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

  Two posts in a week, that’s a pretty good start to the new year! Even though it’s just a small project, it’s a fun one. I recently rewatched the original 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie (the only one really worth watching in my opinion). And as so often happens to me when watching or reading something, I wondered: does anyone make minis of this? After a quick Google search I found out that, of course, several people do.   I particularly liked the minis made by Brother Vinni , so I picked up the four brothers and their master Splinter. They also have April, Shredder, Bebop and Rocksteady figures and Foot soldiers, if you want some baddies for your Turtles to fight.   The minis are cast resin and come in several very tiny pieces, of which by some miracle I didn’t break or lose a single one! There was a little air bubble in Michelangelo’s elbow, though, which I needed to fill with some putty. In the large macro photo’s below it’s pretty obvious, but in person y...

  One of my first posts on this blog back in May 2020 was an overview of some miniatures I painted about 15 years ago for a modern/near future game called Street Violence. Although the minis looked fine, there were a couple of things that really annoyed me, particularly the glossy varnish and the large aquarium gravel on the bases. So, over the course of about two months I’ve stripped them of their paint, rebased and repainted them. A nice change from all of the grey and green I've been painting lately! Starting with the most annoying part: stripping the paint. I’ve seen many bloggers and Youtubers use isopropyl alcohol to strip their minis, as it can even be used on plastic figures without turning them into goo. I thought these minis would make a good test case, even though they are made of pewter. But I have to say, I’m not that impressed. Perhaps it’s because I used a non-acrylic spray varnish (I’m not sure, it was 15 years ago), but it took a lot of effort to remove the pain...

After the Witcher minis from last week I’ve painted up two more video game characters, this time from the Resident Evil franchise. I picked up these two 3d-printed figures on Ebay and was a bit worried about how clean the prints would be, but they were very crisp with lots of small details that were both easy and a lot of fun to paint. Like the Witcher minis, these are true 28mm scale, so much smaller and less bulky than your average Space Marine. Jill Valentine is wearing her S.T.A.R.S uniform from the first game in the series. S.T.A.R.S, by the way, is a nice and convoluted backronym of Special Tactics and Rescue Service. Chris Redfield is wearing his outfit from Resident Evil 5 and comes with a nice acronym of his own: BSAA, or Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance.