Project Tonks: Part 2

Righty week 2, let's see if this can become a pattern.

For the purposes of reference and quicker play if I wanted, I'd cut up some chipboard for use as terrain templates during week 1. I now used these to start making actual terrian. The process here was to make a base of chipboard, layer it up with tinfoil, hot glue whatever terrain piece on top of that, and then use gap filler for the ground. The theme? Junk piles. It's the sort of thing you can easily throw together from your bitz box, although it helps to remember scale. I did think about doing some tonk-traps, before realising I need some seriously tiny girders and I-beams. Thus followed assorted craft paints & washes. As for the colours used? Well, I had an orange which I felt was good for industrial stuff, but then I remembered the colourful nations of the Advance Wars video game series. The art direction in that is fairly Tonks-adjacent, so each terrain piece got a subtle nod to a faction in that game, atop my usual metallics and rust. Overall outcome is good, although the gap filler seems a bit unpredictable when drying.

 

Although, this was during Storm Babet...

Anyways, let's talk about the proto-Tonks a bit. I took them apart to remove the friction motors, something I'm sure I'll find a good use for later, and considered turret rotation. For three of them, I'm fairly confident painting will be easy provided that I mask a few places with blu-tac. The forth, what appears to be a Russian KV-1, needs actual modification. It's turret can't spin 180 without bumping into some die-cast details. As cutting that off would require serious power tools that I don't have, I opted to put in a plastic spacer. It's an ugly job, but it's only temporary, and was a useful intermediate step to learn from. I'll find a better way to do that, be it either turret modifications or a less bulky riser for the turret ring. I was keen to get started on that, but I feel the need to pace myself. There’s no rush.

Up next: Painting and customising the proto-Tonks.