Osprey Pete asked me if I wanted to get involved in their “chop shop challenge” and having spent the last three months painting nothing but tiny spaceships, I was well up for a rapid-fire build and paint to celebrate the imminent release of Gaslands: Refuelled. I also knew exactly what I wanted to build, as I’ve been champing at the bit to build a Rusty team since playtesting finished.
I gave Pete the short version of this blog post, in keeping with their format, but seeing as a took a bunch of work in progress photos, I thought I’d share a longer version here as a Gaslands painting tutorial, which might be of use to newbies wondering how to get starting kitbashing Gaslands cars.
Rusty’s Bootleggers
I may have written the rules for them, but I’ve never got round to building and painting a Rusty team, even though they became pretty much my favourite during playtesting. (So if they turn out to be OP, now you know why ).
They are a bunch of new illustrations in the expanded rulebook, and the one for Rusty is really awesome. I love building cars in homage to David Austin Nash’s artwork, and – as fate would have it – I had stumbled across just the right car for the job. (I say “stumbled”. I, in fact, mean “stole from a nephew”.)
This orange truck really is a good match. The wheels need to be bigger though, and it really needs an engine block too. However, I didn’t want to replicate it exactly, I wanted to add a trailer, to show off what is really cool about Rusty: building mini-rigs!
Vehicles in Rusty teams can purchase trailers, which turn them into a sort of mini-war-rig. The trailers get loaded with cargo, each with a different game effect, and so this sponsor provides a very unique hobby challenge for those that are interested in building a fleet of country-and-western-blaring trailer-trash moonshine bootleggers. Of the trailer cargos, I am particularly fond of the “Sourmash Jet Booster” so I roughed out a build for a truck with a ram and a middleweight trailer and two perks, Drive Angry and In For A Penny, to give myself a drink-driving kamikaze bottle-rocket.
Here’s my starting point: one orange jeep, a couple of options for trailers, and my bits box of weapons and upgrades, collected from various awesome Friends of Gaslands. Time to roll up my sleeves, stick some Clutch on, and get chopping. You can see at this stage I’m not quite decided on which of the two trailers to use.
Into the Shop
I went hunting in my box of toy cars for some wheels to scavenge, finding a totally out-of-scale dumper truck I’m unlikely to use for anything but terrain. Off with the wheels!
I picked out a few other bits and pieces, including a ram, a box of molotovs (as the crew have some in the illustration) and some pipes to see if I can create a jet booster looking trailer.
After the first round of chopping, snipping, and sticking, I had the basic shape in place.
As the little fuel cap on the trailer opens and shuts, I decided to put a magnet underneath it, and give myself a couple of magnetised weapon options for the trailer, (as middleweight and heavyweight trailers give you extra build slots).
Here you can see the final build, before paint:
The Cheater’s Paint Job
As the orange jeep is starting from was already so weirdly similar to the illustration, and my trailer was also an acceptably matching shade of orange, I decided to keep the original paint jobs, and just weather them, rather than starting from scratch.
Weathering existing paint jobs, rather than stripping (which I can never be bothering with) and then priming (which starts you from scratch), can be a really fast and fun way to get a really awesome-looking post-apocalyptic team on the table.
I first painted most of the bits and pieces I’d stuck on with black. I then both stippled and sponged black paint across the whole vehicle, focusing on the bottom, in order to rough up the paint job and start to put some detail in. I tore a bit of sponge up and dabbed the car gently to get random little specks and splotches of black, looking like dirt and chipped paint.
Here’s how it looked by the end of this first stage (post-apocalyptic Salute 2019 mug for scale).
Metals & Wash
I then grabbed some dark silver paint (GW Leadbelcher) and splashed it on quickly to areas that wanted to be metallic. I did something between a heavy dry-brush and a scrappy highlight layer. Fast and messy! I then washed the whole thing with GW’s Agrax Earth, and we already looked pretty legit:
Once the wash had dried, she’s looking suitably grubby, but the details are getting a bit lost when viewed at a distance. I used to get really disheartened at this point in my paint jobs, think that the wash had kind of ruined it, but this is the dark before the dawn, just a small amount of extra work can make this really pop. The trick with the next stage is to “describe” the shape of the vehicle by picking out the key lines with a lighter shade of paint.
The High Life
I’ve been furiously practising my edge highlighting recently, inspired by this fantastic video. Although the truck and trailer are slightly different base colours, I choose to use a single very bright orange (GW Lugganath (nope, no idea either) Orange) for the highlights on both, in the hope that it would bring the two halves together. Then the same for the metallics, giving them a sharp edge of bright silver (Vallejo Model Air Chrome)
The final step was a blast of Testers Dullcoat, which is even more important when weathering over existing paint jobs, rather than a primed model, as it sort of draws all the different materials together and makes light react more similarly across the different parts of the model. It fools the eye into thinking all this superglued crud belongs together.
So there she blows. One mini-rig ready for the table!
I hope you enjoyed this Gaslands hobby tutorial. If you want to find out how Rusty and his trailers work, be sure to order your copy of Gaslands: Refuelled today!