More Steam, Sir? (4)

As with my previous post on rocketmen, I’m catching up a bit here and posting some minis painted a few months ago. Work continues on the hussars for my 1859/66 Austrian army mentioned in the last couple of posts, and they’re nearly finished, so the minis posted here haven’t interfered with progress on them at all.

The minis shown above are war machines for my 19th Century Victorian Science Fiction Chinese armies, rumoured to be engineered by the warlord and criminal mastermind Fu Manchu! Little is known about them, although they are thought to be steam- and clockwork-powered and crewed by one man jammed inside a very cramped cockpit (in other words, I haven’t really sorted out rules for them yet, although they will be armed with flamethrowers and rockets at least)! Western observers have noted that these war machines do not appear to be controlled by either wireless or an accompanying operator, leading them to surmise that they must be controlled by pilots inside the machines.

The models are from the Spartan Games Dystopian Wars range, sadly no longer available (although Wayland Games have picked up some of the Spartan Games ranges). They are actually 1:1200 scale, but fit in fine with 20mm or 1:72 scale figures. They’re made from resin and nice clean models with no flash or faults on them at all!

My original plan was to paint them red and use an acrylic wash to shade them. In the picture below you can see one of them in its earth primer coat while the other one has been painted red/brass/gunmetal and gloss varnished in preparation for a shade wash.

Well, true to form with me and acrylic washes, the latter were a disaster! I repainted the red and then dropped back to the weathering/shading method I used on some vehicles, a thin black/brown enamel coat wiped off before it dries to leave it shaded and grubby! I then drybrushed with red and added a drybrushed highlight of orange, followed by some layered orange highlights for more specific areas. I also added some extra black/brown shading overall where it was needed, along with some black shading on the undersides (the models are solid to simplify production, so they have large areas filled in on their undersides, which don’t look too bad when shaded in black).

I’ve got four of these models and they come in two poses, so I painted one of each pose. They were actually painted weeks apart and one of them appears slightly lighter as far as colours go, which I think is down to the mixed wash. In the picture above the two completed war machines (I haven’t got a name for them yet) are shown with some of my historical Chinese troops and they fit in well I think!

I’m really pleased with them! I’m planning on using them in units of two machines and I’ve got another two still to paint. I like them in red, but I might change the colour of the next two to fit in with some different Chinese units. Having said that, they might still end up in red, since red goes faster!

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