A Box of (Past) Delights

 A recent trip down home unearthed a bounty of old playthings and bits of playthings from... oh, over thirty-five years ago. Yikes! They all came in an old, slightly garagy box, near bursting with nostalgia and forget. 

So: what's in the baaahx...?

Ooh. It's densely packed! And everything's individually wrapped. What sort of twisted mind would do such a thing? Oh yeah - that's right. I did that myself.

A plethora of playthings are here. Some of it useful (missing original Kenner line Star Wars Stormtrooper still in pretty good nick! Hello, boy!) And some probably not so much (a Hot Wheels ramp without its struts, some terrain for a WW2 field gun, its parts and crew probably long since tossed to the four winds.) That green Matchbox car might be salvageable. There's even some promising modeling work here, maybe. Like... 

Bits of spaceship models. There are three separate examples here, none of which are or likely ever will be complete. The Space Shuttle is missing its tail fin at least, and was never finished in its day, so it could be.  

This Apollo 11 'Eagle' lunar lander I'm undecided on. It's definitely not complete - and some of the surviving plastic bits are so thin I'd consider replacing them with something sturdier, like brass rod. That said, I do have the plans  - as brief as they look; and allegedly the classic Airfix model above is not known for being entirely accurate. Oh, the astronauts are there, too. A little bit disembodied in the limb department, but might be worth a crack. Unlike... 

...this guy. Who is some more parts of this guy See - I knew I had some more pieces! Beats me where the rest is, though. Even with these bits reunited, the result might have to be... creative.

And some vintage transfers for racing cars and hot rods. I say vintage transfers because I'm pretty sure these days they'd be a download file somewhere, rather than be something you'd actually have to hunt down and buy in your local model shop. Or combination bike shop, fishing gear shop, toy shop and model shop - which is what we had back home, and in my mind it was - and remains, awesome.

So, a few more projects here to add to the pile. And in the mean-time, a bit more clutter to put in the basement.  

I, Monster Maker!

As mentioned earlier, I've been listening to and enjoying James Hollway's podcast Monster Man, a simple idea of one roleplaying fan's reading of the 1977 Monster Manual beastie by beastie. Recetly James set his listeners a challenge I simply couldn't overlook: create an old school D&D monster.

Specifically, create a monster based on a bargain-shop miniature or knick-knack; the way the very first proprietary creatures were made by the likes of Gary Gygax and Tim Kaske from the dime store bags of 'dinosaurs' (loosely referred to as Chinasaurs, although they really originated in Hong Kong), repurposed to become the Carrion Crawler, Rust Monster, Owl Bear and Bullette. James' challenge was as much to do this as make the monster, then to draw up the relevant entry for the Manual.

So I took up the challenge - initially looking around the local Two Dollar shops for inspiration, but I found little outside of some insects and marine animals, made from pretty cheap and nasty-smelling rubbery plastic. Out of desperation I went underground - specifically, under the house to my Bitz Box, and found some loose plastic toys collected from recent school fairs. From that I found this guy:

I've no idea who or what he is. Looks modern, lacked a tail, so I carved up an old Allosaurus and courtesy of the donor dino, the result was near indistinguishable:

 The question then became what to convert my new beastie into? The current paintjob is okay - certainly fine for tabletop play, if a little airbrushed and quite 90s in colour scheme. Was it from a video game or something? Anyway, when I got it I thought it could be an evil tree spirit or something. Cut to the Monster Man contest and I wasn't as drawn to that interpretation. Still stumped, I undercoated it old school style with white acrylic...

...and inspiration struck! One turquoise wash later, with some blenched bone highlights and he's a mountain menace, a white wailer, an Eisengeist... ehh, I'll come up with something.

The next candidate was even simpler and more organic in his creation. take a grasshopper head and a triceratops body (it helps if they're not to scale, obviously) and you get this guy:

Sorta resembles a Rust Monster! But my version, the Flambeau or spit lizard, is a more natural creature in intent. The Flambeau lives deep in damp places where it eats subterranean fungi and rotten or petrified vegetation. Due to intestinal fermentation it has a unique defensive manoeuvre: it spits a noxious substance to deter its attackers. Now, in the natural world this means a tarry, foul-smelling substance to gum up would-be aggressors and maybe provide some random protein for our chimaeric critter here. However, as a trap for the unfortunately adventuring party, the Flambeau's spit also turns out to be highly flammable.

Yeah, he's a natural, walking napalm cannon to anyone sporting a flaming torch, opened lantern, or foolish enough to go in fists blazing with a fireball. Heh heh heh.

Stats to come, though  I missed the Monster Man deadline due to other engagements :/ Oh well.

The Little Shop - second Hour

Now, I'm not normally a fan of the phrase "dairy conversion" most of the time, but here I'll make an exception.

Here's the latest on my Little Shop of Hours:

It turns out etching in brickwork can be five parts misery and five parts delight when it comes to painting! But on the whole I'm deid chuffed with the colours of the bricks (done somewhat on the fly) and once I'd sorted out a fitting colour for the sills and window frames (good old, though now a little clumpy Catachan Green) things fitted in better. Which is more than can be said for the roof section, which seems to have warped in construction, but we'll get there. Up next: winders and doers!

Bat bricks

Junior and I made a Batcave.  He dictated, and I sourced the bricks and made sure things stayed together and worked.  Come with us for a tour!

The Batcave took six to eight weeks to build, as it filled a number of evenings and wet weekend days, with constant revision, experimentation and checking with the Foreman on whether this was what he had in mind (he slept, mainly.)  We were never going to be able to afford a modern - or even retro set, so we made our own, a combination of what we'd seen in other sets, and what we wanted to have in our own (the toilet was an early addition.)  It took ages, and drove me a little crazy sometimes, but having tried and failed on at least three occasions before, I persevered for the last big push. The breakthrough? When I realised that unlike all the other AMAZING Batcaves across the internet, ours didn't need to be all-black or all-grey,and could use the same '66 Batman hypercolour approach if we wanted. From then on, I realised we could colour code the set for different activity zones, and we were off!

The Batcave is now in repose, back in bits and pieces in the usual Lego boxes. More recently, Jet Jr has expressed his desire for a Lego TARDIS. Hmm... I wonder...

Every Batcave needs a power source, so here's Two Face next to the 66-inspired Atomic Pile

Bat-Toilet! No other Lego Batcave set has one. I checked.

The core of our Batcave is Junior's old Lego Juniors Batcave. One day: batpoles.

In the meantime, Wayne Manor's outside walls make for good climbing practice, old chum!

A Mighty Micros Batcopter pimped out '66-style, with turbos and wings. The helipad rotates, of course!

Batsuits, Batwings and Batarangs in '89 colour scheme. The rungs lead to the helipad

The garage. We made our own '66 Batmobile out of an old Lego Jr Spider-Man car. Take that, Marvel!

Alfred uses his Butler's entrance to the Bat Computer Lab to inform Master Wayne he has a visitor in the kitchen.

The Joker - that Nefarious Knave of Notoriety is loose in the Bat Laboratory!

Gassing Up.

'I've Got to Go to Work...'

...meanwhile, in Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon strikes up the Batsignal

basing some of the Cave on the Lego Batman '66 model, we made out own Manor floor with sliding bookcase.

Bricklite switch for the Bat Toilet!

The sloping roof is hinged for Batpole access.

One of Jr's favourite bits, the non-canonical Moosehead.

Villains' Rock! Another made-up bit on a shelf of stone.

In his study in Stately Wayne Manor Bruce Wayne looks out the window...

The full thing. Pretty moveable, in case you were wondering!

The Little Shop... of Hours

I love a little shop!

Specifically, I love THIS little shop. J Grubb's General Store, located on the outskirts of the Gloucester village of Stockbridge; an unassuming hamlet which by quirk of the space-time continuum has hosted the odd alien incursion and dimensional breach since the 17th of October 1979.

 

As it happens, the Doctor likes this shop, too - or has at least enjoyed its services on at least one occasion. Over the years and since its debut in the first ever Doctor Who Weekly feature strip The Iron Legion, Grubb's Store has been an essential part of Stockbridge, which has now been a location in six comic stories, five Big Finish audio stories, and has been visited by no fewer than five incarnations of the Time Lord in question.

I love this shop so much I decided some time ago to make a model of it to scale with my metal figures. It's actually going to be the first model of a building I've ever made for that scale (it may be my first ever in any scale, come to that), and as usual, I'm making it with as few bought pieces as possible.

The shell is a workplace cast-off - an easy-assemble pencil holder made from sturdy card and rescued from a recycling bin during a clean-out, while its 'skin' of brick, slate and wood is also scrap card. I toyed with the idea of purchasing ready-moulded styrofoam brick walls, but wanted to see if I could make them myself. It took a while, and so far the project has been bested by the usual hurdles: bad measuring, planning on the fly, time. Here's the work so far...

Loo's Wayne

Because even the man who has everything needs a little something more...

Space! (Walt's)

Happy Star Force Day everybody! Look - I'm your Father!

So here's something I made earlier. Nope, it's not a kit, and I just used our own bits and pieces and a photo reference. As far as I can tell there are bits of Batmobile here, some Millennillimum Falcon Microfighter bits and a Lego Friends windscreen and no small number of hours. Probably at least three evenings' worth in front of the TV right there. 

So in making my own I saved myself, let's see... Oh. "Retired Product". Heh. Not in this house, George.

Not in this house.

Thunderchild 1: Totally Tubular

Thunderbirds is big in the Monkeyhouse these days; both versions, and mostly with Jet Jr, who has a small version of his favourite International Rescue vehicle, plus a not-to-scale Scott Tracy to loom over it threateningly. Recently a Glad Wrap tube was co-opted into playing the part of a slightly larger Thunderbird 1,so in a foolhardy fit of paternal involvement I suggested we work together on a pimp-up project.

Plans were drawn, coloured in, internets consulted and dismissed, and measuring was done and everything. I'd like to say it took a few hours, but I can't. I can't even say it took a couple of weekends! Nevertheless, a month or so on of stolen moments between Real Life Distractions, we got the job done.

Apart from some replacement paints, nothing was purchased in the making of this model, and aside from some printed lettering (done by Jet Jr's Mum to hurry things along - not unlike other more pressing projects) everything was done by hand. Cardboard tubes, tape, PVA glue, acrylic paint and some Mod Podge and muttered swears to seal the deal. Most of the model is double-thickness card - including the nose cone which spent an hour or so wedged on a broomstick tip to hold its shape. And it has some heft!

And yes, a request has been put in for a follow-up!

A Change of Base

A year or so ago, when this blog was still optimistically concerned with modelling and the works of Tolkien, Guanolad asked me whether my in-process Mirkwood Elves would be mounted in a diorama. At the time I hadn’t thought they would, as I had plans for individual bases and a little height adjustment in the offing – two birds with one stone. Mr G’s question stuck with me, however, because ‘til then I hadn’t given a great amount of thought to the group aspects of these miniatures. They’re not the same as my Company of Oakenshield who have names, recognisable features and (hopefully) personalities imbued in my conversions. These Elves, as much as I’ve worked on them, aren’t the same deal at all.

I don’t play miniatures games (or at least am unlikely to with these guys), so individual bases aren’t really necessary; and while I’m not yet ready to go the whole hog with a dynamic battle scene, I quickly came round to thinking that there could be fun in trying something more elaborate this time around, and planting my new minis in a terrain together. I considered my Balin’s Tomb model a success, but it’s just sort of there as a feature and little more, which is funny because its inspiration was the BGiME subscriber giveaway intended to fit the Fellowship minis free with particular issues. So, why not make a bigger stage for my guys indeed? So I did.

Here are the original bases, which will be re-purposed in time – it seems fitting.

And here’s the scenery stage for my Mirkwood Elves!

The base is from an electric jug – the terminal point in the middle has been sawn away and sanded down, with the hole patched with light card. Atop this is more card, pine bark for stones, sand, and various forest litter made from bark shavings, birch seeds, string (for the roots) green stuff mushrooms, and as a centrepiece, a log made from a scrap of branch found in the back yard, dried and tunnelled by various insects along the way. Thanks, guys!

In fact, nearly everything except the sand, the seeds and the jug base was sourced from under ten metres from the front door – even the scrubby plants are lichens plucked from our tree and dyed with some rather unused GW dyes. I’m really happy with it. I only hope there’s going to be enough room for all twelve Elves...

This Is The Day The World Ends

In the summer of 1982 the Stockholm Scientific Institute prepared an analysis of the aftermath of a theoretical nuclear holocaust set a few years into the new decade. The work caught the attention of Vatican Radio, who made much mileage over its doom-laden forecast of human annihilation and a planet reduced to desert and scavenging rodent survivors. As mention of the study was also made in this book, it also caught the attention of me and my friends mid-1984. After all, the fateful date in question for the study was the slightly more imminent June 15, 1985.

Today marks the 800th anniversary of a much happier milestone event, King John's signing of the Magna Carta, but the aforementioned date held our juvenile attentions much more, I should think. For a while, at least. A year after reading this tid-bit the thought really only occurred to me at a local youth group social, when I realised on the dance floor, awkwardly twitching to something ephemeral and of the moment, that that date had actually arrived - as in, right now. With somewhat nervous laughter I informed one of my friends, and, well, we danced on, a little more reassured - or not.

Thirty years on and the world has not collapsed into a radiated wilderness - yet. I don't recall why this anniversary popped into my head over the past weekend, but here we are, upright (or vaguely so) and here I am grown up, schooled up, mortgaged up and looking for work in all the wrong places. My adolescent anxiety/enthusiasm over nuclear Armageddon seems hopelessly quaint now, almost enviable. The stuff of nostalgia - and long may it remain so.

So in the spirit of thermonuclear nostalgia and misplaced plans, here's my get-through list for Post-Apocalyptic modelling, post-Mirky Dozen, of course. I've stuck to a short, easily-manageable list this time, even though with a new Mad Max movie out and Fallout 4 having just been released, PostApoc gaming and modelling has never been busier! 

My dreams of conquest (ruined):

1 irradiated roadside diner

1 battlecar-ready 1:75 modded 'Doc'

1 battlejeep

1 scavenger dune buggy

and maybe,

1 Battletruck(tm) should I ever want to drop down a scale and join the kids kit-bashing Matchbox toys. Looks like fun!

Should that all fall into place then maybe I'll branch out into a Cursed Earth model and go full-Helltrekker. But that might have to wait for a few Dredd models first.

Winter is y-comen in

Winter has arrived, and with it 2015 is halfway through. Funny old year. Some triumphs, some upsets; by early next week I may well be on the hunt for a new job, my present one quickly running out, but with this turn of fortunes perhaps an opportunity for some reinvention. A change would be nice.

Outside the workplace there's been some quiet shifting of priorities for me: I'm gradually coming around to the quite-settled realisation that I'm robably no longer a fan of Doctor Who. The old series has been in my life for over thirty years,and it's the old series I still love, but the new stuff? Ehhh. Really like Capaldi, Jenna Coleman's good, too. But the rest just doesn't grab me, and that's okay.

Besides, there's still heaps of stuff to get excited about: two of my favourite bands have put out albums this year, and two more are expected to before the year's over. Four albums is nearly three more than I usually buy in twelve months! TV's been pretty decent, and there are some witty, fun, informative and just really interesting podcasts out there forthe listening. Before I got into a regular cycle of CV updating and cover letter writing I was working on a Mirkwood-themed model (yeah - remember those guys?) and I'm thinking of returning to study. Haven't done that for a few years, but I do remember I got a lot better at it the older I got.

So perhaps the second half of the year will be a busy one, and hopefully a productive one. I'll keep the blog up, anyway.

Two Cars, One Night

A quick and dirty post tonight, I reckon.

Lately I've been hitting the charity shops, a habit I've picked up from Mrs Simian (whose thing is Crown Lynn earthenware but is open to all sorts of stuff), and one I share with Jamas. The hospice shop in town has been occasionally fruitful, uncovering small treasures both minor (some Fighting Fantasy rulebooks) and really cool (a MINT condition Moldvay-era Basic Dungeons and Dragons set with Erol Otus-illustrated box and plastic geo dice (crayon-ready, but sans crayon.)

It's also a good spot for kitbashing gear, namely old toys. From two expeditions I managed to grab these guys:

This is a 1903 Peugot made in 1969 by Lesney, one of the classic Matchbox manufacturers. Well, that's what the Internet tells me, but any Dr Who fan will be able to tell you what it could double as. Corgi were the original makers of the Third and Fourth Doctor's 'roadster' Bessie, and a few of these are still to be found online, particularly as replicas were released ten or so years back with a reissued DVD of The Three Doctors. Black Tree also made a version in white metal which is now out of stock and goes for crazy prices online. I don't have either, so this will do thankyou very much.

 It's in rather good condition, and were it not for the fact that these are not uncommon and go for much higher prices in immaculate condition with their old canvas tops and boxes, I'd baulk at drilling out the rivets, cutting out the back doors and windscreen, removing the spare tyre and back brackets and rearranging the lights and lamps. But don't convince me otherwise because I'm really happy with it and think it'll work out fine. A shame to paint over the brass, but there you go.

There's also this guy:

I thought this might have been a Happy Meal toy, and it was, but it was only when I spotted the Pixar name on the underside that I realised what - or rather who, I was looking at. What's up, Doc? Not a lot, because he's been much-loved by some kid. His crazy random-direction third wheel mechanism doesn't really work very well and his winder's lost its get up and go, but that's okay. The cardboard windscreen will go and some serious kitbashing will go on here. Doc may not ever resemble the 1952 Hudson Hornet he was based on again, but I think he'll look fine, if not a little mean and road-rashed. Oh yes, I have a very interesting future planned for this old boy...

Ruby and Ferris: Done!

So yeah - I done gone and finished basing Ruby and Ferris, put Ruby's helmet on, and now they're done and good for quarantine display - whatever that is.

Not much to report, although this is the first time I've used my matte varnish - Testors Dullcote for those of you playing at home, and I'm pretty happy with it! Rather cynically (for reasons mentioned in the linked post) these guys were my first try-out on the spray, and as the result is no overt shininess or yellowed finish, I'm sold. Legions of lovingly-painted miniatures will soon be ready for their close-up!