Carnivàle Truck 2

Over the last week I've made some good progress on the Carnivàle truck, completing pretty much all the building work and getting ready for the painting stage.
The first picture shows the ZiS-5 cab components that need altering, mostly just removing details and squaring off the window frames, then adding plasticard detailing to make it more in line with the screen vehicle.

After sorting out the cab components, I lengthened the wheel base of the truck with some scrap styrene, and then built up the trailer from sheet styrene and rivets cut from 0.5mm rod.

 I really need to start documenting these things a bit better- I've jumped from bits to almost finished build with nothing in between. Must try harder next time folks.

Carnivàle Truck 1

My all-time favourite tv series is HBO's brilliant Carnivàle. Conceived by Daniel Knauf, its about a travelling freakshow/circus in Dust Bowl America, but it has a huge mythology built into it focussing on the battle between good and evil, freewill and destiny.  It was cancelled two series in, but those two series contain some of the most well styled and well mapped-out drama that I've seen.

The vehicles in the series are some of its most striking and memorable elements, and were greatly praised for their authenticity and accuracy, and while most of them have been identified by fans over the net, the main 'Lead Truck' has remained a bit of a mystery apart from that it was made by Relay Motor Trucks.  For some reason I got it into my head that I wanted to make a model of this particular truck and make it as screen accurate as possible.  So, when after a few hours of googling got me nowhere, I realised that I was going to have to improvise and kitbash the truck from a number of sources.  The closest two kits that I could find were the Miniart 1:35 Gaz AA (which appeared to be a Russian built version of a Ford truck) and an Ark Models 1:32 Zis-5 (which appeared to be a copy of an Autocar truck, who were direct competitors of Relay, a pretty good base for my build)

After selecting my two kits to use, I spent the next three or four hours wading through all 24 episodes, taking screen dumps of every time the truck appears on screen.  Not having any real interest or understanding of motor vehicles, these screen dumps would be my main source of information and help me to understand this project as it progressed.

The Zis-5 would provide the main cab and chassis for my truck with a few alterations;
-The wheel-base of the truck would need extending by a little over 30mm (which in turn meant extending a lot of levers and axles and mechanical doohickies)
- The windscreen area would need to be completely rebuilt .
- The panel detailing on the doors and cab would need removing and rebuilding.
- The wheels from the Gaz-AA would replace the ones from the Zis-5, the bumper, steering wheel, headlights and some small detailing parts would be used from the Gaz too.
- The radiator grill would need a new emblem sculpting for it.
While a lot of these changes and parts wouldn't give me a 100% accurate representation of the truck, they would get me a whole lot closer to it than the Zis-5 would on its own.

Then the hard work would begin, scratchbuilding the main storage area of the truck.

Sengoku Jidai Diorama

Back in early June i purchased a copy of the Ronin rulebook from Osprey's wargames division.  It's a ruleset for fighting skirmish battles between samurai, warrior monks, bandits and so on in feudal Japan.  After reading through the book it quickly dawned on me that nobody I knew would want to play the game with me, as a self-confessed Nipponophile this just wasn't acceptable.  To remedy this, I decided to build a little diorama set in the world of Ronin.  As always, it turned into a much bigger task than I had originally imagined, it absorbed about 2 months of my spare time and it taught me a lot of new techniques that I'd not tried before.

So here it is in all its glory:

This little project presented me with a lot of firsts; it was the first time i've made a tree (in this case, made from the roots of a felled oak tree), the first time i've made snow and icicles, the first time painting historical minis, and perhaps biggest hurdle of all- the first time I'd made a diorama.

I'm pretty pleased with how the whole thing turned out, and learned a lot of new skills to bring into my modelling in future.  Of course there are things that I would change in hindsight, but for a first diorama i'm chuffed.

The samurai themselves are converted Perry Miniatures samurai, the wall is from Oshiro Model Terrain with a few little alterations as are the sake containers and water butt (check them out, a brilliant little company run by a fantastic guy called James) the lantern and sign are built from pieces of wood veneer and the warriors' katana are cut from sheet brass to replace the original ones.

For the photos of the diorama I decided to place the whole thing on a snowy Ukiyo-e scene, The print, if anyone wants to know, is Meguro taikobashi Yūhi no oka, part of Ando Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo series.  Which incidentally, is one of my favourite books.

Welcome to Senex Puerilis: The Scrots of The Terra Damnata...

I've been following other people's blogs and reading them obsessively for a few years now, many times I've thought to myself that I should start a blog of my own to encourage me to get more modelling done and finish projects that I've started.  The obvious thing to do? Start writing Senex Puerilis of course!

About this time last year I started what I thought at the time would be a small Warhammer 40,000 project, a little allied force for my main army which would take a month or so to build.  Drawing inspiration from everyone's favourite nomadic droid dealers- the Jawa, I settled upon a force of robotic orks, cobbled together from the scrap and wreckages that litter the periphery of the Terra Damnata.  Not content with just a few clunky robots i knew i had to have some tanks too to add a bit of fire power and mobility, and maybe even a few larger robotic constructions further down the line.  I mulled it over for a while, and came up with a concept that would work and a set of official rules which would match the models so i didn't have the less than enviable task of writing up an army list that everyone thought was fair and balance.  The rules would come from Imperial Armour volume 8, and with some careful unit selection i was able to ensure that no green flesh would be visible within this 'ork' dread mob list.

 

 And thus was born the start of my Scrot army.  Over the next 3 or 4 months i slowly built up a full squad of 10 robotic orks (ok, so full squad is a bit of an over statement, i went for the bare minimum legal size unit) along with a full squadron of 6 Scrot Tanks, The Boss Scrot and his dogsbody assistants- the Lesser Scrots.

 

 

Admittedly, none of these are the best photographs ever but they serve to illustrate the ideas and army in question.  The models themselves are a real mixture of bits- Kromlech, Forgeworld, Games Workshop and a whole heap of scratchbuilt elements too.  All 3 of the Lesser Scrots were completely scratch built from plasticard, and large parts of the Scrot Tanks were scratch built too.

 

 In terms of in-game use, the Boss Scrot is a Painboss with cybork body, boss pole, powerklaw and 3 grot orderlies.  He leads a squad of Spannaboyz who also have cybork bodies, and they are backed up by a squadron or Grot Tanks.  This makes it all very easy for opponents to keep track of and it's a relatively beefy little force.
Since getting to this stage i've suffered a little bit of robot burn-out, but they will get more additions as and when the motivation sets in...