Far Corfe: Battle Bus

"Bring out your Remoaners!" - the call went out to the wasteland settlements, with no one knowung what it meant, save for it being related to Boareez the Dishevelled, a chieftan of the ancient, pre-apocalyptic Britons...

A little while back, a friend of mine showed me pictures of a model someone had made for Gaslands of the now infamous "Brexit Battle Bus". You know the one - it had a certain statement written on the side of it and sort of divided opinion right down the middle?

Well, he was adamant that I should make one in 28mm scale, and I agreed on the proviso that I could find a coach that would work in 1:43 scale, which I find works best with most companies miniatures and table-top terrain.

The problem is that coaches in that scale are both scarce and expensive if you're buying them in pristine condition. So I had to wait until one popped up on eBay that was cheap on account of being screwed up, but yet not too ruined for my purposes.

Scraped and cleaned

The basic coach turned up missing a door and other small bits, none of which were a concern to me. And so it got a wash, the decals removed with lighter fluid and then a second more intense wash before it was time for turning the thing into something worthy of the wasteland highways.

All white now...

I went into the build with only the vaguest idea of what I wanted the thing to look like, being more inspired by the parts that I was able to find in the bits box and where they seemed to fit. Once I was happy with the look, I gave it a cheap rattle-can prime with black and then a heavy zenithal white.

Red and blotchy, like a politician's complexion...

All it took was a couple of coats of red acrylic craft paint to get the basic colour down, and then a tour around the bus with other colours to define the details a little better. Being rough at this stage helped to add to the ruined feel of the bus, and I knew that there was some heavy weathering and washing to come in the next stages.

Politics, Cthulu Mythos style

I needed something to write on the side of the bus, but recreating the original slogan seemed to be pretty unimaginative and likely to fly up the arses of people that were on both sides of the Brexit debate, and so I settled on something more in keeping with the post-apocalyptic style of the thing:

"We sacrifice 350 million souls to Cthulu every day. Why not Ai! Shub Niggurath instead?"

For the record, this is supposed to be a bit of fun - not a political statement!

I finished the bus off by weathering it with a dark brown and then a metallic, followed by washing with diluted brown and black acrylic paints and a final dry-brushing with an ivory to bring out the finer details and give the impression of dust.

Let me know what you think, either here or on social media.

Far Corfe: Whacky Races

After eating their complimentary buffet from Rat Burger, the official sponsors of the event, the competitors in the annual Windy 500 tear through downtown Far Corfe...

Vehicles always help to make a gameboard pop and add to the effect of the buildings and minis that you use them, and when Axiom over at Magpie & Old Lead posted a wasteland trader with a large saurian carrying his wares, it made me get off my arse and finish my own, as well as realise just how many different vehicles I've worked on over the past couple of years.

eBay Rescue: £3 'Zerker/Chem Brute

A security patrol walks into the middle of a private discussion, and things suddenly take a turn for the worse...

I'm sure we all have things that we're constantly searching eBay for, and at the moment it seems to be the larger minis that are capturing my own interest. I also keep looking at the miniatures for the game Guildball, which I have no interest in playing for its own sake, but does have an interesting range of models available.

Trash Terrain: Cyberpunk Nightclub - "The Chibified Assassin"

Andre & Engels were known to moonlight as bouncers in the downtown sprawl when tag matches were scarce...

A little while back I dropped a quite popular blog post about some Hostile Environment Hab Pods that proved quite popular (and which you can read here) and so, as I'd always intended to do more builds in a similar vein, I kept my eyes open for something similar the next time I was in the shop where I found the original materials.

Trash Terrain: Garage/Lockup/Hideout...

 

Cops mount a night raid on the Punks at what they thought was a secure location...

A while back I posted about a garage that I made from a Star Wars Micro Machines Action Fleet pod-racer playset, which seemed to be quite well received. Even at the time I was on the lookout for more stuff from the same range in order to make similar terrain pieces. I landed a couple, but for some reason they sat on the to do pile for a couple of months before I found the time and motivation to finish one of them off.

Far Corfe: Old School Chaos Warband

 

One thing I've always had the urge to do is create a bunch of chaotic rabble and unleash them on a gaming table somewhere. I think it comes from having one of the old Realms of Chaos books when I was younger and messing around with the Byzantine charts supposed to enable the reader to roll up a unique warband.

Far Corfe: Chthonian Horror

Even though they outnumbered it six to one, the Punks couldn't help thinking this was not going to go their way...

Whenever you get a new film dropping for a major franchise, you can guarantee that there's going to be a raft of merchandise released on its heels in order for the biggest possible cash-in. And you can also guarantee that a certain amount of that stuff is going to end up being sold off at a discount too.

Recently the three inch scale Rathtar (the squidgy thing that Han Solo has aboard his ship at the start of The Force Awakens) started turning up on the cheap in some stores, and seeing as how some people hasd already used it in 28mm to 32mm builds, I picked one up to do the same myself.

Trash Terrain: Hostile Environment Hab-Pods

A tense mercenary band scopes out an abandoned scientific outpost...

I'm always seeing really nice stuff that other people are building on their blogs and social media posts, often out of the most unlikely and ingenious things that they find lying around the place. And to be honest, it makes me jealous and gives me the kind of itchy palms that can only be relived by doing the same thing myself.

Far Corfe: "The Junkfood Dogs" - or a Bevvy of Beautiful Bikers

Copplestone's original Bikers

Whenever you're getting into collecting and painting minis with a near future, post apocalyptic or survival horror theme, there are some classics of those genres that you can't avoid wanting to get your hands on sooner or later. Alongside punks, mutants and the crazed followers of Elder Gods, the biker gang is one of those staples that always look good shooting it out with cops, zombies and crazies of every possible description.

Far Corfe: Underhive Nomads

The Nomads stalk through the alleyways and backstreets of the Underhive...

 

I've been picking up the random minis from GW's past on eBay that nobody else seems to want for a while now, and one of these was a ganger from House Cawdor that had been hacked about to an almost ridiculous degree by its previous owner.

I think the thing had lost both it's hands and perhaps even its legs too, but I was determined to make something out of it, and so I raided the bits box for replacement parts and ended up liking the results so much that I was soon back on eBay looking for more minis from the same range.

The Ungrateful Dead

An unsuspecting group of urban explorers are stalked by the Ungrateful Dead...

I'm a terrible one for buying stuff off of eBay or a magazine for the sake of a sprue that's stuck to the front cover, all because I think that the bits "might come in useful" one day. And having been doing this for around thirty years now, my collection is getting to be quite large and diverse, as you can well imagine.

Needless to say, when the Age of Sigmar: Mortal Realms piecework appeared on the shelves of newsagents everywhere, I was more than eager to get my hands on a copy. The 40K one had been an insane steal for the price of the first issue, with miniatures, paints and a brush for a fraction of the cost of the same stuff from a GW store.

Far Corfe: Confrontation Elite Gang

The Elite Gang fan out to protect their employer's assets...

I don't know about anyone else, but ever since I saw the page of them that survived into the Citadel blue catalogue in the early 90s, the miniatures from the Confrontation range (the predecessor of what we now know as Necromunda) always manage to make my palms sweat.