Ahoy, Hoy? | Cheddarmongers

Submitted by

keeper40k

Fri, 03/07/2008 - 15:30

Well, first of all an apology for the delay in posting another item on this blog - I have been rather consumed with real life, rather than attending to the labours of my hobbies. In addition to which, I have begun a Blood Bowl league at work and this has rather consumed a considerable amount of my hobby time - but some team photos should be forthcoming in the next few weeks (I hope!).

I would have directed this apology to my readers, but since no-one apparantly read my last entry - or at least no-one posted a comment in reply to my request, I can only assume that no-one is reading this, therefore I can say whatever I want!! Mwahahahahaha!! :)

So, I'm going to drone on and on and on about some pretty neat scenary I've just finished painting. Sometime last year (July, in fact) I purchased amongst other things, some particularly neat 28mm scale British telephone boxes from Ian at [url=http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Fenris-Games]Fenris Games[/url]. I don't know if it was the size of my order (which I didn't think too large) or just the fact that Ian felt pity for the sad, pathetic and addicted hobbiest that I am*, but he kindly included a third slightly mis-cast phone box in with the two that I had ordered. Mostly the miscast consisted of an excess of resin on the base that simply needed sanding off.

The telephone boxes are cast in clear resin and came supplied with a sheet of sticky-back pre-cut masks for the purpose of masking out the windows before painting. It took me, with my fat fingers and all, quite some time to place all of the masks on the tiny recessed windows - but after a couple of evening's work sat in front of Star Trek Enterprise playing back on the SKY+, I was all done.

Since they are made of clear resin and I had masked out some areas what would still be clear at the end of the painting process, it was pretty obvious that you would be able to see inside to see the colour that they had been primed with. I considered priming with black spray, but I wanted two of the red and one of them blue (more on that later) and I didn't want to buy spray paint just for these minis as nice as they are, so I decided to brush prime with GW Blood Red and Citadel Ultramarine Blue, accordingly.

Then it was just a simple matter of washing the recesses of the sharp edges of the boxes with a wash made with thinned Citadel Chaos Black, recovering the flat and raised faces of the box once more with GW Blood Red or Citadel Ultramarine Blue, then just picking out the panels around the top of the box with a light mix Citadel Bleached Bone and Citadel Skill White (about 1:4), then highlighting the centre of these panels up to just Citadel Skull White.

Even thought they all have the word TELEPHONE carved into the face of these panels on each side, I didn't have the courage to either pick that out, or to write something else, so I was cowardly and just left it the way it is. My only excuse is that I think it looks neat :)

Painting done, I then got a sharp knife out to lift the masks from the windows. This was the scariest part of the whole process because as I progressed I found that in almost all cases the paint had run behind the masks to a greater or lesser extent. I think that this might have been less of a problem if I had spray-primed (provided I hadn't drenched the minis, of course!) but overally, it didn't turn out too bad. This is because by this point I had looked at quite a few full-sized telephone boxes "in the wild" and I'd already noticed that the frames around the windows are actually really quite badly painted with lots of mess and splodging. I was able to replicate this by using a small craft knife with a the sharp part of the blade about 3/16" in width to gently scrape paint off most of the window, but left it ideally not-neat around the edges.

Finally just some polyurethene varnish - then some Dullcoat and JAGU :D

Now, why did I paint two red and one blue? Well, the two red ones are, as expected, are to be used in British based near future and near past wargaming.

As for the blue one ... for those of you soaked in sci-fi for as long as I have been will probably already figured out that I'm going to be using it as a Tardis - I've already got 20+ cybermen painted, at least as many daleks waiting to be painted, good and evil not-timelords from Heresy and now a Tardis - all I really need now is some assistants, but I've not really put any thought into that, yet, so any suggestions for minis for these that anyone has are more than welcome. And for 28mm UNIT Troops, come to that! :D

Right, I guess I'd better include some linky thumbnails to the pics, hosted right here on Cheddarmongers.

[sub]* I'm long past the denial stage!![/sub]