Gaslands: Blue Team

 

Well, it seems I'm in this for the long haul, in top gear and no doubt other vehicular metaphors. AKA a hyper fixation, as, at time of writing, I have bits on order and maybe fourteen cars in the boneyard awaiting work. Today's subjects were mainly done over a weekend, and intended to mirror Red Team. As I hadn't had much luck sourcing buggies by this point, so I ended up making two moreregular cars, but with an eye towards different techniques and builds.

The first, "Blue Swede Shoes" was a Hot Wheels Mod Rod toy, which looks a bit like a buggy, but it is a bit on the big side. Maybe call it a Performance Car in game terms? With this, I didn't bother with a ram ,and largely kept the lines of the toy. I managed to squeeze some mesh into the rear window, built up the roof a little, and armoured the wheels with bigger hubcaps made from tokens. I didn't need to do much with the engine block, so I added in a strip of granny grating to add some symmetry, while the gun is scrap plastic wrapped with leftover mesh. I got a bit clever/careless here with the texture though, seeking to exploit the interaction of super glue and baking powder for a rust effect. The end result speaks for itself, but the glue went everywhere, and I had to scrape a lot off. I should just mix up some paint, next time. 

 

The provenance of "Stone-washed Jeen’s" is unknown, this being an unlabelled charity shop find. I think it was meant to be a version of the old Ford GT40 line, but I'm no expert. Here I decided to go for an armoured appearence, but again trying to keep the basic look of the vehicle intact. Its very easy, and fun, to simply layer a car with bits and call it armour, so that's what I did. But also took it a step further with the wire mesh, so the driver could see out of each compass point. The gun meanwhile was integrated into the windscreen with another plate, a touch I'm very happy with, but thinking about it, I seem to have assumed a right-hand drive here. The ram meanwhile was made from the bits on the end of a cable tie, and I used the baking soda on this car too.

While these are both experiments, I'm quite pleased with them, especially in the realms of painting. I hadn't consciously chose to do this, but I realise that blue and rust are on opposite ends of the colour wheel, and that's really helpful to the look of `em. I normally just choose blue because of Deathskulls, but Vallejo Deep Sky Blue and my weathering really pop together. I'll probably stick with that, going forwards.

Up next: ummm, let’s wait for those bits...