6mm Dr Who: Creepy Crawly progress.....

Thought I'd share the progress so far on the 'Green Death' and 'Them!' front, with some shots of how they are all shaping up; still some finishing off to do, but a lot of fun so far!

The plastic, or more accurately, rubbery ants can be seen in varying colours below:

After a quick wash with soapy water, the acrylic colours went on easily enough, but I soon learnt that any handling just as easily sloughed off the dried paint from the rubber surface - so some spray varnish definitely a must here - the larger ant, being a harder, more traditional plastic, was no problem.

I had originally intended a black paint scheme, but found that the large ant came out looking ironically a bit spider-like, so jazzed up the existing red colours with some more banded details on the legs and abdomen. The 'spideriness', however, of the smaller ones when left black with just the eye detailing, led me to try a couple of other colours - a sandy brown and a 'fire ant' red to match the larger one - not entirely sure which scheme I will go with for the balance of the rest - I quite like the exaggerated contrast of the eyes on the black ones, and the reds stand out well -perhaps different colours could denote differing types - soldiers, workers, female drones etc?

These are based on some rectangles of textured plasticard measuring 40x30mm, with the large 'Queen' on a 40x40mm - had to trim the ends of the large ant's legs to fit, but I didn't really want to make the base any bigger - don't think it loses anything in appearance, anyway....... and talking of basing, let's move on to those pesky maggots and the giant fly:

The fly in the original Dr Who episode had bright red eyes and some yellow markings on its back, but I just somehow wanted my irradiated mutant to live up to its name, so went with a wash of green on the wings and the body, with the corresponding eyes - for some reason, the plastic of the eyes wasn't too happy about being painted on, leaving a rather patchy finish, so will have to finesse this somewhat in the near future, and again protect it with some varnish.
The fly had a hole drilled into the bottom to accommodate the standard peg-topped flying stand, but this is looking a little dull, as well as flying a tad too high, I think, so this will also need some more attention.

The maggots themselves were of course in metal, so easy to paint, also with some exaggerated 'greening' to look the part - initially the heads matched the bodies, however at this scale they seemed a little bland that way, so I painted the heads black as a contrast, but again, I think they need something extra just to make them stand out......not quite sure yet what will do the trick.....

The maggots are placed on what is to become my new 6mm Sci-Fi basing standard (more on this in an upcoming post), namely a ubiquitous GW-style round plastic slotta base, mounted on a steel washer to enable magnetic storage.

This can be seen with the recently re-based Time Lord, Companion and Tardis as below:

The ant bases had to be a compromise, as they were too large to really fit more than one insect per slotta base, and I wanted a sort of 'horde' look to them, rather than just being singletons......

A similar treatment to the Doctor's base can be seen here, with the Alien Infestation Squad deployed to deal with some squirming, irradiated chemically enhanced nuisances of the maggot kind:

Finally of course, we have the villains of the piece, namely two intergalactic masterminds in the persons of Kang and Kodos:

These Monopoly pieces are beautifully modelled, even down to some drops of 'slather' falling from their mouths, and have turned out rather well, if I do say so myself....... although the bases still need some attention and tidying up - just was in a rush to show them off and couldn't wait to photograph them!

So, hopefully a suitably creepy, crawly and evil bunch on their way to completion, and if not all strictly 'canon' at least some interesting adversaries to pit against the Doctor and his chums.

6mm Dr Who: The Green Death.........and Them!

Indulging myself in some more 6mm-related plastic madness at the moment, inspired by the 'Pound Shop' find of the instant army of 'creepy' ants seen above. Having done some Dinosaurs for the Dr Who project some time ago, I was casting around for some other monsters that I could add in to the mix when I came up with these - now of course they are not 'canon', although I think an early Doctor did meet some giant ants once (The Zarbi?), but are inspired by one of my favourite 'B' movies, namely the stupendous  "Them!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2PLls02gOU

You've just got to love giant ants taking over the world - I need of course,  to Anglicise it and have U.N.I.T. fighting them instead of the U.S. Army - I added in another plastic insect that came with a job lot of stuff from Ebay, and hey presto - the evil Queen and her minions:

The larger ant is a relatively hard plastic, however the small ones are made from a sort of rubber compound, and a bit squidgey, so not quite sure how well they will hold paint, but to be honest at this scale just a pair of menacing googly eyes should do the trick, rather than any special detailing.

Here's how they line up against some commonly available 6mm Sci-Fi troops, left to right, a Brigade Models Germy 6mm trooper, a GZG New Israeli, a Brigade 6mm Power Armoured chap, and finally a DRM Pax Arcadia Light Infantryman - the ants look suitably menacing, I think:

Getting back to things more directly Dr Who related, I've also dug out a plastic fly from the same old Ebay job lot - this should make a nice candidate for the one from probably the first adventure I ever remember watching as a child from behind the sofa, namely 'The Green Death' at the close of the John Pertwee era:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRafm_qw_gE

"But Doctor, it's exactly your cup of tea - this fellow's bright green apparently, and.....dead!"

Classic!

Of course, I needed some of the armour plated giant maggots to go along with the fly, and for this I could have done scratch-built ones I suppose, but then remembered that I had some 10mm Dungeon crawlers that used to be available from Pendraken in their Fantasy ranges - I think these have been superceded now by a variety of new sculpts - but these should definitely fit the bill, and scale well alongside the 6mm miniatures:

*Edit: The crawly types have popped up again in the newly re-vamped Pendraken Sci-Fi ranges, see them here:

http://www.pendraken.co.uk/SFB3-p6759/

So, just what calculating and perhaps Alien intelligence could be behind this sudden upsurge in monstrous threats to the peace of the Earth............ I wonder...............?

Just for fun, courtesy of one of the ubiquitous boardgaming spares vendors on Ebay, I am going to add in some Simpson's Monopoly pieces, namely Kang and Kodos - you've got to have some Evil Masterminds behind it all!

So, some slightly left-field but hopefully fun bits and bobs to paint up in the near future - so stay tuned for some Sci-Fi related shenanigans to come!

Plastic Fantastic - Dimestore Spaceships Trial Painting

Just finished putting together some trial paint jobs on a selection of the plastic Dimestore Spaceships - mostly just a bit of fun, with a couple of detailed ones, and others that were little more than dry-brushing with some detailing to see how paint would sit.

Must say, I'm quite pleased - certainly no complaints for what was a quick test run - these ships painted up easily, and I think would support a number of complicated techniques or stages of painting if you were so inclined.

To start off with, I was looking long and hard at the Flying Saucer design, and it reminded me strongly of the semi-mythical late war Nazi design of the Haunebu or H-Gerat:

http://discaircraft.greyfalcon.us/HAUNEBU.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_UFOs

So I went for it in Luftwaffe Green including some hand-daubed iron cross insignia - a bit rough, but I was too excited to bother with time consuming decals - something I will correct at a later date:

The Flying Dart shaped ship I just gave a dry-brush of bronze over the black undercoat, and then did a minimum of detailing - I was thinking that these might be a secret Allied design to combat the German 'Wunderwaffe' - maybe a bit of Luft '46 might be in order employing these - they would go nicely alongside 1/300 aircraft, I should think - throw in a few ME262 and the odd all-white 616 Sqn Gloster Meteor and Bob's your uncle!

Next I went for a simple grey scheme on what I am calling the 6mm Gunship, just with some red detailing - although I realise I forgot to finish the canopy before taking the photos - tut, tut!
The Flying Horseshoe got a sort of alien purple with the odd bit of colour - very quick and rough again - but definitely speaks to the potential they would have as Fleet-Scale Sci-Fi:

I think there was a race in the Babylon 5 universe that it would fit the bill for; was it the Vree?

Talking of on-screen Sci-Fi, the next craft, the ones with the trio of domed protuberances, I did to go alongside my Late Republic / Early Imperial Ships; here with an Irregular Star Destroyer and a Brigade Models' Insidioso:

I think the domes reminded me of the ones on an Interdictor Class, so perhaps these are an early, smaller scale fore-runner.....

Finally, just to show the scratch-building potential - I lopped off the two side sponsons on the ship I have dubbed the Rocket Sled - came away nice and easy with a quick chop of a craft knife - I was thinking fixed upright, they would make good moisture collector towers for 6mm stuff?

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Moisture_vaporator

All in all, then, great fun to throw paint at, no problems to deal with, and a few good ideas as to how to employ the various designs - obviously a couple more to play with yet, so hopefully more to come on these......

Plastic Fantastic: Dimestore Spaceships

More Plastic Fantastic madness, now, not in the shape of the usual strange conversion fodder, but rather these so-called 'Dimestore' Spaceships that I ordered via EBay from the USA.

Yes, rather than doing strange things to bits of plastic to turn them into something resembling Fleet Scale Sci-Fi, we have here seven separate designs of various craft that come in bulk - to whit: 144 of the blighters! I went the whole hog and bought them en masse, although I shared the cost and went halves with a fellow gamer and Blogger who could also see the potential in them.

Of course, not all the designs are immediately obvious as your standard Spaceships, but I feel they are ripe for conversion, and might do duty in a number of scales.
The major positive is that unlike previous incarnations of similar toys, these are neither made from rubber, or from a weak, bendy plastic, but rather from a good, hard styrene-like substance, so once washed with warm soapy water are ready for undercoating.

Made in China, the bulk shipper based in the US sends them out in random samplings and colours - you can't order specifics, but I received pretty much twenty or so of each craft, with a few more of a couple of designs thrown in to make up the total.

The variety can be see below, against a mat with 1cm square grids for size:

Immediate stand-outs are of course the Flying Saucer and the Horseshoe-shaped craft, whilst the Gun-ship type in the bottom left hand corner looks like it wouldn't disgrace a 6mm Aerospace environment; the remainder are somewhat more esoteric - if I was feeling critical, the ship in the upper right corner is a bit of a strange one - sort of a rocket sled with apparent seating for a pilot - although the side pylons look useful for removal and conversion.

All in all, the details are crisp and nicely moulded, plenty of greeblies and ridges apparent on the surface, and also on the underside as you see below:

As ever, not entirely sure how these will be utilised - I bought them cheap before a recent price-hike on delivery by the USPS, so was blinded by the fact that the unit cost had come down to about twelve pence a ship - and therefore didn't worry about such fancy considerations as where they might serve!

That said, I've got some ideas for some sample craft and some hopefully interesting identities that I will be working on soon - I've already undercoated a few, and found it easy to cut away any of the extraneous detailing, tails and guns to give the following:

They take paint well, and also superglue, as you will see with the addition of a circular rare-earth magnet on the base of the dart-like ship seen bottom right above.

The extraneous parts cut away easily and in one piece, so could be saved as further scratch-building material - I'm certainly looking forward to playing around with these, so watch this space for some developments soon!

Plastic Fantastic: Rockets and Spaceships Update

A rush update now, on the latest batch of 'Plastic Fantastic' pieces, mainly due to the great fun I had in painting these up; I say painting these up - actually much more of a splash and dash, as I was so keen to see how they would turn out - with hindsight some corners were definitely cut!

As you can see from the photos, I went with a vaguely Mongo-inspired scarlet and gold scheme for a trio of War-Rocket look-alikes, and thought I'd follow through with a 6mm Shuttle vibe on the other piece:

The Shuttle is actually the fuselage section of the blue rocket seen in the earlier post, with the front opening faired over with plasti-card, and some plastic scrap inserted into the rear as a propulsion unit/retro-rockets....talking of Retro, maybe this could stand in as a sort of 'Ruck Bodgers' Gemini-style 'Ranger 1' space capsule; hence the: "I've been frozen in space for three centuries" dry-brush applications of frosty white.... (For which, read: "I went a bit too heavy there.....oh and forgot to fill in the small hole above the nose....").

The War Rockets are the green and yellow versions, although in separating all the various components for the previous Blogposting's photos, I mixed the wings up somewhat, so actually the Shuttle has the winglets that should be on one of the yellow rockets, and vice versa - I won't tell the Emperor Ming if you don't......

More dry-brushing was in evidence here over a single layer of matt black undercoat - the plastic minis take paint very well, so no more than one was needed, after having washed them in soapy water first.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice further misses - in that did I not paint the inside of the rocket bodies visible through the cockpit spaces - nor did I bother to fill these in or fair them over - just too darn keen to press on without any high-falutin' attention to detail and such like.....

Moving on, here's a view of the original Lego Bionicle feet, here in two versions paired back to back to produce a Romulan Dreadnought, and also a Cylon Cruiser - the blunt end of the former had a sort of D'deridex look, and the latter is a Cylon Marauder fighter writ-large, at least to my eyes:

More over-excited puppy renderings of slap-dash painting, so the squeamish should look away now, particularly in these comparison pics when they are matched with more sedate and considered paint-schemes; here some of Irregular Miniatures' DYO13 Blackstar Liner as pre-TNG Romulan ships, and a FASA Citadel original Bird of Prey from the TOS era:

Again, to show the scale, the Bionicle feet ship tops out at around 70mm:

Finally, the Cylon feet alongside one of Drew Bergstrom's excellent Cylon Baseships:

So, it's probably 'hang my head in shame' time for the slapdash approach to these, but definitely Warp-factor Fun in terms of actually putting them together - hopefully future plastic shenanigans will reward a more considered approach - so watch this space.....

Plastic Fantastic: Potential War Rockets

Thought I'd give a closer look at the latest recruits to the 'Plastic Fantastic' project, namely the Kinder Egg spaceships that I think have the potential to become something along the lines of Hydra Miniatures' 'War Rocket', or at the very least some pleasingly rayguns and rockets era vessels that will be fun to paint up....

As far as I can ascertain, these plastic space rockets come in three types, here represented by the green, blue and yellow, and I was lucky enough to score an additional yellow ship from the EBay job lot that I purchased. They have interchangeable fin and tail parts, although further mixing and matching is limited by some of the narrower fuselage designs - the rocket booster at the rear, of course, is common to all three.
There was also a further plastic part that fitted to the bases of the ships to enable them to be fixed 'back to back', as it were, although that is outside of my interpretation, so has been eliminated here.

As you can see, in their constituent parts, at the very least, there are some good candidates for further scratch-building, even if you did not want to follow up on the designs as seen:

The ships obviously come with some of those peel-off adhesive stickers for decoration, although I'll be removing them before painting, I think, as the colours are rather garish.

Apparently, there are keen collectors of the Kinder Toys out there that often mean the prices for these realised on EBay and elsewhere are quite high, so in the true spirit of getting something as cheap as possible, I had to be quite creative in defining the search criteria when finding the lot to bid on - and as ever, where something is mis-labelled or identified, it often gives a better chance of a competition-free auction - 'Kinder Toys Collection, number......' is going to be tougher than, say, 'Plastic Spaceships'...

Scale-wise, these ships are on the large side, I think, if compared to the metal miniatures in the 'War Rocket' line, with either the Galacteer or Imperial factions being perhaps the closest fit in terms of styling:

http://shop.hydraminiatures.com/index.php?cPath=40

In any event, they should at least result in some interesting looking ships, and if not, there are potentially plenty of bits for the bits-box!

A final thought would be that on a slight tangent, the cockpit sections in themselves might make pretty nifty shuttles or similar alongside 6mm miniatures.....Hmmm.....

Plastic Fantastic: Biodome update and Workbench

Thought I'd do a quick follow up on those Lego 'Biodomes', that I was playing around with a month or two back, as part of the series on taking various plastic odds and ends and turning them to wargaming uses.

As you can see in the photo above, the yellow tinted dome has been turned into an agricultural or hydroponic station, complete with airlock tunnel made from a few odds and ends, together with its complement of vegetation inside. The scale/size definitely leans toward the 2mm or small-scale SciFi end of things - seen here against a base of Germy's light hover scouts from GZG.

Unfortunately, the yellow sheen of the dome, whilst without a doubt being absolutely Space-tastic, lends a rather sickening and disorienting visual hue to the woodland scenics inside; this is somewhat apparent in these photos, although in real life the effect is much more mindbending - I would probably use a clear transparent dome in future, so the internals would be more visible and appealing.

This negative effect was compounded in the T.I.E. fighter cockpit piece when employed in a similar role - I'd envisaged it as some sort of power generation facility or processing plant with those chimney-like uprights, but the dark smoked plastic together with the printed-on framework means most of the interior is obscured and hard to see - I'd used all sorts of bits to represent machinery and placed them on a printed circuit board off-cut, trimmed to fit the internal footprint of the dome - all now rather lost under the completed piece:

So, all in all, Biodome '6' on Mars, and the Terraforming Energy Generator on Dantooine are a bit under-powering, but were an interesting experiment that gave me some good ideas to expand upon in the future, and of course were cheap and easy to build - always a plus!

Moving on to what is now on the Workbench, a view of what first got me started on this whole mucking about with plastic bits lark; namely the feet from Lego Bionicle toys:

This small selection shows the obvious potential for building space vessels on a budget, with nice inscribed details and suitably SciFi aesthetics; the only wrinkle, I think, being their large size, although that said, two combined back to back would easily make a pretty impressive Dreadnought type:

Will be playing about with some of these over the Christmas break, and also what has recently caught my eye, via EBay, some Kinder Egg Surprise spaceships...... Buck Rogers meets Hydra Miniatures' 'War Rocket' anyone?

Plastic Fantastic 4: Sci-Fi Bio Domes

My recent dabblings in 6mm Sci-Fi, and the on-again/off-again 2/3mm Sci-Fi project has had me casting around for some ideas regarding scenery, and whilst as the regular reader might have noticed, Hobby activity has been a bit thin on the ground of late, I did manage to source these interesting candidates in Lego via Evilbay....

What could be more futuristic than Bio-Domes, from worlds-in-a-bottle archetypes a la Logan's Run, to the Agri-ships of Silent Running and Battlestar Galactica?

I think these particular examples relate to some sort of undersea diving toy, and most tellingly of course, the cockpit glass of a Lego T.I.E fighter, however when placed on a suitable base, could do duty as protection from the poisonous atmosphere of most Alien worlds.

They're not particularly large, but this example from the outbuildings pack available from Brigade Models looks pretty good ensconced in its 'bubble', I think:

Talking of worlds-in-a-bottle, how about this City base from Mighty Empires - this would certainly go well alongside the 2/3mm Sci-Fi stuff - adds a sort of super-villians lair look to the whole:

The smallest dome, seen here alongside the large MHU from Angel Barracks, with one of those ubiquitous plastic bottle caps for scale, is not going to fit much in the way of habitat, but would look pretty spiffing housing the mutant product of a deranged experiment in a laboratory complex, or maybe a single earth tree specimen the colonists couldn't part with when they travelled off-world:

Given the pocket-money prices these can be picked up for, (or free, of course, if you raid the kid's toy box...) they are never going to be big enough to contain full-on 6mm buildings, but they still scale well alongside some well-known characters from a certain Space Opera:

These are from Irregular Miniatures, and are among a few dozen cool minis I've been inspired into painting up recently, joined as you see below by my version of a unit of Decontamination Troops - Power Armour from Brigade Models, and the excellent Comms set from Michael at Angel Barracks:

Who of course are here to deal with any ugly and troublesome Alien Infestations that they come across - to whit the excellent Drill Worm Nests from Angel Barracks:

I'd like to see any parasitic Alien fauna, or even face-huggers take on these guys, in their hardened Hazmat suits.....

These bases still need finishing off, of course, when time permits, and I keep telling myself that this is all just a sideshow to all the rest of my projects, but I guess only time will tell.....

Plastic Fantastic 3: Star Wars Completed

A quick photo update on the plastic Star Wars items; given that I haven't done much Hobby-wise recently, I at least managed to complete these in a Hoth-style swirl of snow and ice....

I used some medium Renaissance Ink flocking gel, painted silver grey, given a white dry-brush thrashing, a spot of ink for a wash and then some more white over that - I went a bit over the top with the flocking gel material, I think, so much so that we are verging on Christmas ornament territory rather than the ice-encrusted surface of Hoth....

The AT-STs are mounted on UK two pence coins - I left the edges plain, bearing in mind that these are not part of a formal project, I don't mind the slightly 'ornamental' look.

The Snowspeeders are mounted on the ubiquitous plastic flight stands, here liberally daubed with the gel:

Hmmm - puts me in mind of a certain coconut confectionery:

http://blog.omakasebox.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Snowballs.jpg

:-)

Red Flight heads home for a spot of tea: