Doctor Who: Companions, Arch-Villains, and the TARDIS

In addition to getting my church built, I also managed to squeeze out of bit of painting as well.

First up are the second Doctor's companions, Zoe and Jamie:

The paint scheme for Zoe's outfit was taken from this photo:

For Jamie, I couldn't find a reference for him in that exact outfit, but I ended up using this photo for the tartan:

Overall, I have to say I am not a big fan of these Blacktree Design sculpts - I think they look nothing like the real actors.

Next up are the Master and Davros:

The sculpts for these look a bit more like the characters, but I think the torso on Davros is too long and there was a lot of flash under the arm that was difficult to clean out and make look good. For the Master, I decided to forgo his usual black gloves, as I think it would have just been too much black on the figure.

Finally, I picked up a TARDIS from Ainsty Castings:

 This is a very well cast resin model, with very little clean up required. The TARDIS has been several different shades of blue over the course of the program, but I opted for a deep, true blue rather than one of the greyer shades.  For the signage, I opted to paste on signs found online rather than try to do it by hand. My final version isn't really an exact match for any of the television props, but I think it still captures the spirit of the TARDIS.

Doctor Who: Silurians

Well, it's been a bit since my last post.  My long trusted camera for photographing miniatures went belly up earlier this month, and we just recently go a replacement, which I am trying out here with these newly painted Silurians from Doctor Who.

 Sadly, it doesn't seem to be able to focus as well as the last one when it comes to smaller objects (I had hoped to get some close ups), but I'll have to live with it.

OK, enough about the camera.  These Silurians are from the Black Tree Design range, which I go through their American office. I know some people have had hit or miss service from them, but I got my complete order (about 30 figures of various sorts) within about 2 1/2 weeks after placing it. The casting quality was good, and I didn't have to do too much clean up on them.

I went with a mix of the 70's (figures 3 and 4) and 80's (Figures 1,2, and 5) costumes to add a bit of variety.  Looking at photographic references, the 70's versions seemed to be a bit darker and greener than their 80's counterparts:

1970's Silurian. Source: Doctor Who Concordance

1980's Silurian. Source: Doctor Who Concordance

I wanted them to blend together a bit better, so I used something close the the 80's color scheme, but used a bit of khaki to give it a greener tint.  To accentuate the scaly skin, I used a subtle pointillist style with the highlight color, similar to my Pterosaur (sadly it doesn't show well in the photo).   For the third eye, I went with red to mimic the attack color.

EDIT:  I tried to get some better pictures with our video camera.  The pictures are a little grainy compared to the other camera, but can can get a bit closer without it going out of focus:

 I will use the 70's figures for command and the armored 80's versions as the attack troops. In addition to the aforementioned Pterosaur, my Silurians will eventually be joined by a group of Sea Devils as well.

Pterosaur Attack!

I have some Doctor Who figures on the way, including some Silurians, and I decided a Pterosaur would be just the thing to add to their forces:

I found this Copplestone figure several years ago in the discount bin (only $2!) of a hobby shop that was clearing out their miniature inventory, and I figured at that price I could find some use for it.

Current thinking is that the crests were for sexual display, so I've given mine some orange bling to attract the ladies.  I also used a pointillist style on the skin to give it a bit more of an interesting texture.

As you can see below, the figure is quite large, with a wingspan of 11cm.

I think this should be just the thing to put a bit of fear in the U.N.I.T. troops.

Petrol Station and Garage

The second building I completed this weekend was the Garage kit T017 from Scalescenes.com.

This is a very simple kit and easy to build (I did it in an afternoon), but you get a lot of bang for your effort. You have a variety of shop names to choose from, and you can make it a BP, Shell, or Esso station. However, what I really like is the interior detailing.

For the interior of the garage, you almost need to do a double take to make sure you are actually looking at a model; there are even tire mark on the floor.

Finally, the Lledo cars even fit, which is great.

Overall, one of the easiest kits I've build from the series, and I love how good it looks for such minimal work.  Needless to say, control of the fuel will be a major objective of my VBCW games.

Terraced Houses

The kids have been off visiting the in-laws this week, so it's been a good time to knock out some buildings.  First up is Terraced Houses kit T020 from Scalescences.com.

Front of the homes with flowers added to the garden area (flowers not part of the kit)

Rear of the homes

This is the largest of the kits I have built so far.  Scaled up 120% to 1/63 size, it  is about 20cm high and almost 30cm deep. With the exception of the bay windows, which are a bit fiddly, it wasn't too difficult of a build (about a 1 1/2 weeks of evenings).  However, expect your hands to get sore cutting, as there are a lot of pieces.

To add variety, the building comes with the usual section of doors and window dressing, and you can rotate the sidewalk 180 degrees if you want the tile/brick work in the back instead of the front. If you so desire, the kit can be attached to the corner shop kit and shopfronts from that kit can be used on this building as well.

Corner Shops

Back with another building from Scalescenes.com.  This is kit T021: Corner Shops.

The kit can be built with the corner shop on either side, and you have the option of adding a second shop or just a rear entrance off to the side.  A small yard off to the side is also included. Advertisements are from kit T005.

The first shop is Ducketts Grocery. There are an impressive array of interior fixtures included, so I was able to add quite a few shelves of goods, along with a counter and fruit/vegetable display.

Next up is the Shaun of the Dead inspired Winchester Tavern. Includes a full bar with food, a table in the back, and darts to keep you busy in case of Fascist occupation or the dawn of the zombie apocalypse.

Between the food supplies and booze, I expect this building will be a major strategic objective during my games.

New High Street Shopfronts

Here are two more shops from scalescenes.com, kit T005 (please excuse the slight fish eye quality of the photos - my wife has the camera with the close-up setting):

These buildings were previously seen under construction here on my blog.  They show the additional two facade types that come with the kit.  The building on the left is also available in white painted brick. As with all the buildings in this kit, they are half depth.

The first shop interior is Sue's Cafe:

This is a default shop that comes with the kit.  I had hoped to add more seating, but this is all that would fit inside.  To get the table placed right next to the window, I inserted the pre-built shopfront (without the window layer glued on to the frame), placed the furniture through the opening, then glued on the plastic window with the paper decorative framing. The shop front didn't fill the the entire space on the facade between the downspouts, so I had to paint some bricks on the wall card prior to gluing to avoid white gaps.

Next up is my Doctor Who inspired clock shop:

I used one of the blank signs available in the kit, adjusting the font and color with Adobe Acrobat software. This storefront was much easier to assemble than the one with the recessed door.

My British Buildings

I've had a few requests to reveal where the buildings came from that have been seen in the background of some of my VBCW and Doctor Who photos.  These are paper railway models produced by scalescenes.com. 

I don't usually like paper buildings for the sturdiness issue, but there didn't seem to be much out there in the way of British buildings for 28mm figures.  Plus, I wanted to have enough buildings for some urban fighting, and I'd go broke trying to buy it all in resin.  I happened to stumble across the scalescenes site, and since they had a free trial warehouse facade available for download (pictured below), I thought I'd try it out.

Note:  The kit didn't come with a back wall, so I cheated with a section of cobblestone street and added some resin boxes

Now the largest size produced is in OO gauge (1/76), but since you buy these as downloadable PDFs from the website, you have the ability to scale up during printing.  Being in the US, the largest size paper I could fit into a standard copier/printer was 11"x17" (28cm x 43cm).  With this I was able to go up to 120%  (1/63) before I started getting alerts that the image was exceeding the paper size. (After printing, I saw there was a bit of white border around the edges, so I might have been able to push it further.  However, by that stage I didn't want to pay for reprints).  With larger European paper, you may be able to get closer to the 138% needed for 28mm figures.

Thant being said, the buildings don't look too bad even for being undersized:

At 120%, door sizes run about 30-32mm, which is just under the height of these Artizan figures.  The thicker bases magnify this a bit more, but when they are off the sidewalk, it is less pronounced.  Based on my initial warehouse assessment, I decided to take the plunge and order more kits.

Most kits come in a few texture finishes (you usually get one texture per purchased PDF), but they come with a variety of finishing details so that no two buildings have to look alike.  The details cover buildings from the start of the 20th Century up until the modern era. 

Various shop signs and interiors

Door variants, along with curtains and interior details

Most of the kits come with about15-30 pages, though some of these are for variant items and may not be used for your individual build.  Depending on the kit, they will either be full buildings or facades that are about 3.5cm deep (I'm using the later on the table edges).  Luckily, the company provides you with fairly decent directions for assembly.

Directions

 

My major worry about the sturdiness of the kits (I have small children in the apartment) turned out to be unfounded.  The paper sheets need to be glued on to various thicknesses of card stock for assembly.  For the light card stock (usually architectural details), I am using manila folders.  Medium and thick card stock proved harder to find, so I got some art board that runs about 1.5mm thick (these were doubled up when thick card was required).  By the time you've assembled your building, many of the main structural elements will be 3-8mm thick.

Low relief shop under construction. Floors and interior details can be altered. The vintage advertising on the side was added from images that come with the kit.



The back of the above model, giving you some indication of the layers of 1.5mm art board used during assembly.

 With the introduction out of the way, let's take a look at a couple of the kits.

First up is TO22, Small Terraced Houses:

Fronts

Backs

 In these builds, I used additional building textures from add on kit T022a, and I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that the shop fronts from kit T023 could also be fitted to these homes.  The chimney stacks were made out of small drinking straws, but I found these to break easily and switched to plastic tubing on my later buildings.

Next up is kit T005, Low Relief High Street:

Three of the five fronts in the kit

As you can see, these are half buildings

Close up of the shop details - the kit even came with the newspapers to put on the table

The kit even gives you a few blank signs where you can type in a custom shop name.  If you have Adobe Acrobat, you can further adjust the fonts and font colors of the signs.  For this shop, I've named it after my grandfather, who taught woodworking.

This kit gives you quite a bit a variety with which to work.  There are five different facades, two of which give you two different brick/stone textures to choose from. For the lower shops, there are two large and two smalls styles, available in a few different colors, complete with fixtures.  You also have about 30 shop signs from various eras to select from, along with advertising.  Since I started building this kit, scalescenes has released kit T005a, which is the back sides of these shops.  From the website, it appears this second kit can be combined with the first to form complete buildings.

 The kits were fun to build, but quite a bit of work.  I used a medium hobby blade (you will burn through a lot) and metal ruler for cutting, so hand fatigue became a problem after a while.  With manual cutting I also had trouble keeping the blade perpendicular, so ended up with unintentional angles on my pieces that required trimming for a decent fit (I cannot recommend dry fitting pieces prior to gluing highly enough).  Luckily, you glue a lot of the textures to the card after cutting, so that helped hide some of my errors.  If you have the budget and storage space, it may be worth investing in a mat board cutter jig for these kits.

Another thing that you'll have to watch out for is that, depending on the thickness of your card stock, your pieces may be thicker than what is is allowed for on the printed images.  A common example I ran into was with the interior floors; using the guides in the building, the sides of the floor sections were sometimes visible behind the windows below (luckily the board was white, and I had white window frames, so t wasn't completely obvious).  Again, dry fit before gluing.  Also, be sure to have a fair amount of clamps to hold things together while they dry and some touch up paint.

Overall, I have very happy with the kits, but they do have their pros and cons:

Pros:

• Not too expensive
• High quality images/textures
• Can get a good variety of buildings
• Fairly sturdy

Cons:

• Couldn't quite print them large enough for 28mm figures (may not be a problem for others)
• Take a long time to build and cutting is fatiguing for your hands (and hobby blades)
• No easy way to make them so that figures can be placed in the buildings

I still have a stack more to build, so will add those to the blog when they are complete.

Doctor Who

Another set of older figures - this time from another favorite series of mine, Doctor Who.

First up, the original five Doctors:

These are from the FASA range (I believe originally released by Citadel in the UK, but converted from slotta to integrated bases for the US market). They have the big heads common for 80's miniatures, but overall I think they have good character and I like them.

Next up are my favorite villains, the Cybermen:

These are produced by Black Tree and are still on the market.  Though I like the Tomb and Invasion era Cybermen the best, I think the sculpts of the Earthshock era figures look better (at least from the catalog).  Sadly, there are only two poses for the standard Cybermen, and the molds seem to be showing a bit of wear, as they had a bit of flash built up under the guns that required some hacking and filing.  The one odd figure is the Cybercontroller - he is a bit shorter than the other figures, so he looks a bit stumpy compared to his followers.

Daleks:

Another set of Black Tree figures. These are a bit wonky:  they're asymmetrical and just look a bit lopsided. But when they are the only thing ocurrently on the market, I guess yo have to live with it. I like the chrome look of the earlier Daleks rather than the drab grey I grew up with, so they've been painted up in 60's  livery.  For the scientist Dalek, I used Doctor Who movie colors for a bit of variety.

My final villains are the Ice Warriors of Mars:

The original three figures I had were from the FASA line in the 80's.  Overall, very nice sculpts that are well proportioned for the time. These have been filled out with two figures from Black Tree, who hulk over the others with their chunky sculpts.

Finally, to help out the Doctors are the Brigadier, Sargent Benton, and some of their U.N.I.T. blokes:

Again, more big-headed 80's figures from FASA. For some reason Sgt. Benton is a bit bigger than the others, but what are you going to do.