Making Gaslands Vehicles I

When Northstar Figures was running its Gaslands Refuelled Nickstarter a couple months back, I pre-ordered the rules, dice, templates, and a couple of sprues kind of on impulse. I have heard about Gaslands previously, but had not looked into the rules; when I googled about the game, I was surprised at the level of enthusiasm and creativity within the Gaslands community.

It was only after I had pre-ordered the stuff that I realised that I in fact already have several post-apocalyptic style vehicles in my collection in the form of the 10mm Dropzone Commander Resistance models, including the school bus. I made a set of scaled down movement templates to go with the vehicles, but decided to go ahead and make some 20mm scale models anyway. In particulat, I wanted to reproduce the school bus in 20mm scale.

Fg managed to find a school bus of the correct scale for me. Fortunately, the metal top of the toy was screwed to the base (instead of riveted), which made it easy to disassemble the toy for paint-stripping and painting.

I also decided to reproduce the a Technical in 20mm scale, using a Hot Wheels Datsun 620 which I bought years ago but never did anything with - I wanted to make a Technical, because that's what all guys want, right? A Technical? I did not have the tools to disassemble the pickup truck, so I removed the wheels and stripped the paint with the plastic base still attached.

I stripped the paint off the toys by soaking them in Dettol. The paint came off nicely, as if they were decals that had been applied to the metal.

Side-by-side of the 10mm Dropzone Commander vehicles and their 20mm cousins

The vehicles are primed with red spray primer. I then applied blotches of orange paint with a piece of sponge to the places where I plan to have rust showing. I did this with two different shades of orange paint. I then repeated the process with a red-brown paint, and then a brown paint. The idea is to give the areas a variegated appearance.

Here I suffered from a bit of poor planning, as I applied the paints to parts of the vehicles which I would eventually cover over with armour plates. Well, no real harm done.

Once that was done I applied masking tape to the insides of the windows.

Now comes the salt-weathering part. It really is as simple as applying water with a brush to the places where you want the rust to show through, and then sprinkling table salt over the blobs of water. The salt will cake up and form irregular lumps over the surface of the model.

The process is quite forgiving, since at this stage you can simply rub the lumps off if you don't like the way they look, and re-apply again.

They look like some sort of junkyard Christmas decorations...

Once the salt has dried, I sprayed the bus yellow. Due to the red primer, the more recessed parts of the vehicle ended up having a darker hue of yellow, which I quite liked. I applied two coats, going  little thick on the second coat, which produced some bubbles/pitting on the surfaces, which added to the look.

The pickup truck is given a coat of black paint.

Once the paint has dried, I rubbed the lumps of salt off under a gently running tap. Then I replaced the windows on the bus, and gave the model a coat of matte varnish, followed by a coat of dulling spray.

As you can see, salt weathering created raised, crusty surfaces in the yellow paint, which coupled with the rust surfaces gave a strong impression of corrosion. The paint on the edges of the corroded portions are somehow paler in colour, which again was a good thing.

The dulling spray fogged up the windows, which was the effect I was after. There were a couple of spots where the primer came off, exposing bare metal. I covered these areas with brush-on black primer, and then painted silver over them to represent exposed metal.

I over-salted the pickup truck, so ended up with more exposed areas than I had wanted. Fortunately, it was easy to remedy with some brush-on black primer and then black paint.

I glued on a bumper from the Northstar Gaslands sprue, a piece of "grille" I cut off a kitchen sieve, and a couple of pieces of textured plasticard. The bits were all sprayed with the red primer and then given the same treatment as the rusted spots on the vehicles.

The bumper looked a little odd being all rusted, so I dabbed on some silver paint, and then some black paint over the silver parts.

I added grilles made from some plastic mesh, and some armour plates made from plasticard. The corrugated plate came from the Northstar Gaslands sprue.