RobinF: Post Apocalyptic Vehicles [85 Points]

This is my first post in any of the challenges and thanks for letting me into the winter event.  This last year has been a drought for me in regard to painting and after a good start last January I rolled through 2022 with 10th Months of zero painting.  I have played games but just not had the willpower to focus on the paint.  So my first issues in the last two weeks were hand eye coordination, painting skill, eyesight quality and a fanatical dedication to the pope.   I dropped my airbrush twice and the first time splashed the recently dicanted paint over the floor and my foot. My airbrush needle had also dried locked into the body of the brush and it serves me right for not having put any lube on the needle when I last used it.   Throughout the airbrushing and painting I could see no detail, even with my strongest painting-specific strength glasses on and had to trust my skill. A visit to the opticians is required because my aging eyes are shriveling up! 

Post-Apocalyptic models were my first choice and I have two quad bikes from Games Workshop in the Orlock Necromunda faction which are plastic kits and one jeep from Crooked dice games which was resin with metal details.  I wanted to really weather these up as a way of avoiding having to do a good paint job and I am relatively happy with the result.  I intend to use these models in both Necromunda and the post apocalyptic game from Crooked Dice games called 7TV. 

Review wise the plastic quads from GW were much better than I expected, the level of fine detail on them is getting close to 1/35th military kits, with tiny hidden details like suspension and connecting areas that surprised me.  For example they add bracket metal (plastic) plates for the spikes on the front and I am sure back in the day they would have just put basic spikes on the model, rather than showing any kind of detail of how the spikes would require a bracket.  The character models on the quads were a little chunky though and I think their legs are actually elephantine in thickness which is a shame but it does match with the rest of their range.  The resin vehicle from 7TV was a little rough cast in areas like the tires (which were easy to disguise) and the actual figure in the driving seat was pretty poor in terms of pose, sculpting and casting quality and I don't think I really salvaged it very well with my basic paint job on it.  Otherwise the resin jeep kit was very nice in regard to looking like it had all the parts it required to drive, with a fan belt, air intake and interesting exhaust setup. 

My technique was a base prime colour airbrushed on all larger surface areas like hull/body, followed by some targeted airbrushing on wheels with a black and the figure bodies.   I weathered with a sponge chipping with a darker brown and then used a brush to add a lighter than base coat chip into a lot of the areas the sponge had touched with the darker brown rusty colour.  I gave the two quad bike riders and gunners the same blue shirt "uniform", which was just to allow them to match the squad I am going to paint for the Orlock faction and will keep them all looking similar.  However, in hindsight I think doing them all in different worn colours would look more post-apocalyptic, rather than just sticking to the GW colour scheme. It did save some time just going for one blue for all the shirts.

I used what is more recently called slap-chop or under shading style on the character models by airbrushing a lighter colour from above and then also dry brushing them white with the excellent new Ammo dio-dry-brush paints.  Where there are lighter shades on the blue cloth and leather trousers, this is typically the under shade showing through because the final coats with made with a glaze style of thin painting with Liquitex acrylic glazing medium being added to colours applied to thin them and allow the undershade to show through. 

Toward the end of the job I used some enamel streaking grime from AK Interactive to weather the hulls/body of the vehicles and that went on really easily with some enamel thinners (perfect over acrylic base coats). Then I also used some AK interactive weathering pencil on the wheels to make it look like sand had dried into the rubber. This did not work as well as I had hoped and in the future I am going to try some buff titanium oil paint which should look a little more subtle on the rubber tires. 

Points wise I read that each vehicle was 20pts each, so 60pts total for the three.   I think they took about 9 hours in total for the three models. 

Airbrush station ready to go. I use Iwata Airbrushes with a Bambi Silent compressor and "Bench" extractor fan. 

Necromunda Orlock Quad Bike. Using a Forgeworld head swap and Forgeworld backpack which are both resin parts glued to the plastic kit.

Just after the main base colour blocked out areas are sprayed on. 

Test use of these new dual exo colours, no primer required and the two shades allow you to do some highlighting of the base colour with the lighter shade. I thought having these browns underneath would help a dusty worn out model because I could leave some showing in some areas. 

After the exo primers have been applied. 

Finished models follow:

   Excellent first post, welcome to the challenge. I love these, we've just started to get into Necromunder and I now want some vehicles. I recomend getting your eyes tested, it's the sports injury that we get. Although these are so good that you shouldn't worry

Can you do a points tally at the end of the post, it helps, and you have miscounted on these. You get 5pts for each of the crew as well.

MartinC