Gaslands is Osprey Wargames‘s foray into post apocalyptic vehicle combat. Think Car Wars and Mad Max. We’ve covered it a few other times in the blog and we do play games every couple of weeks or so. The game gives grown men an opportunity to play with Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars again. Scaled at 1:64, which is odd for a wargame, but exactly the scale of toy die-cast cars for kids.
A long while back we picked up ~100 pre-loved matchbox cars for about $50 and split them alongst a bunch of us. That often means just glueing a couple of guns on and calling it a day, but I decided to go a little bit further. I picked out 4 fairly standard looking 60s-70s sedan vehicles (and a Mustang, because …). First step was to completely disassemble them, which required me to grind the rivets underneath and then everything pops apart nicely. I stripped the old paint, stuck a couple of guns on the front and then got to work repainting them. One of the vehicles also got a nice rusty ram and one of the others a rack of rockets.
I’m using some more of Scale Modellers Supply enamels as they’re perfect for this type of project. I’m also going for a traditional car look, so it’s a gloss paint job and metallics. The main body is a gloss black over which I added some flames painted in a couple of colour shift colours. I used adhesive flexible masking cut-outs produced by Anarchy Models to produce the flames. Which you get a good look at in the picture below.
The pictures don’t really show the colour shift off, but the first goes from a metallic purple to pinkish orange, while the other goes from metallic green to blue. The angled shot below gives the best look at the colour shift effect, but it’s still not great
This was my first time trying to repaint these die-cast toys and there were a couple of things I learnt. The first is the importance of surface preparation; this isn’t a lesson I should really need to learn as it’s pretty core to getting good painting results. But with gloss and true metallic surfaces any flaws in the surface are a lot more apparent. So I need to lift my game smoothing and surfacing the models. I also had some paint lift during masking. I used a metal-etch primer which was clear and was keen to get it out of my airbrush (lest it start to etch that). However, these two factors meant I don’t think I applied it enough. The airbrush was fine so I just need to apply 3-4 good coats and make sure I have a pattern to make sure I cover it all.
Colours I used were mainly SMS enamels:
- Base: SMS Premium Jet Black (PL30)
- Flame 1: SMS Colour Shift Sunset (CN03)
- Flame 2: SMS Colour Shift Acid Rain (CN05)
- Bumpers & Grills: AK Xtreme Metal Chrome (AK 477)
- Window trim (hand painted): Vallejo Model Air Silver (71.062)
- Rims (hand painted): Scale 75 Pure Copper (SC-91)
- Gun barrels (hand painted): Vallejo Model Air Steel (71.065)
Yes, I missed one of the angle on this one, my bad…