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So!

About... I'll guess, maybe, two weeks ago, I was poking around The Waaagh's trade forum, and I saw that a forumer named Stuart was selling a looted wagon. The wagon had originally been made by another Waaagh'er, MTD, and Stuart had picked it up off him a while back, but was looking to downsize his own ork force.

I figured having a looted wagon wouldn't hurt, and I did like the general shape of the tank, so Stuart and I haggled for a bit, and not long after, a tank shows up on my doorstep.

This is what it looked like around the time I bought it; these pictures were taken by Stuart.



No offense to whoever painted the thing, but I really do not like the patchwork squares ork camo scheme. Fortunately, I had the foresight to make my giant jar of stripping solution, well, giant, in case I ever needed to toss something like a whole tank in there. So, into the Warp it went, where it had a nice, relaxing soak in Simple Green overnight.

I pulled the tank out, and started scrubbing the paint off, only to find that I couldn't quite defeat the patchwork patterns. The areas of color on the tank came off easily enough, but the black primer seems to have been masked from these areas, and bonded really well to the plastic, so I can't get it off very easily. I resolved instead to just leave it looking a little patchwork in the hopes that one good coat of primer overtop the whole thing'll fix it all right up.

With that addressed, I had to make a couple modifications to the tank to suit my liking. Pictures first!













I popped off the top hatch, and added my own version with a grot tank commander sticking out, since the model needed some character. The head on the grot is one of the ones from Micro Art Studio. I can tell any of you thinking about buying these heads that they are a nice product, but they do not fit on the current grot plastics - the heads are too big for that. I had some fantasy goblin plastics, though, and since those guys are a wee bit bigger, you can get away with sticking one of these big melons on them without too much in the way of consequences. I gave him a sword just for the whole 'Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!' memetic effect.

I tinkered just a little bit with the back end by drilling some holes out of one of the exhausts and turning it into a cowling for a bigger exhaust pipe. I also wrapped the end of the boomgun barrel in chain, and put a cow(?) skull overtop, since I thought it was a nice touch. Glyph plates were added sparingly in places where I thought they'd help provide a bit of interest.

Truthfully, there's not a ton to do to this thing - it's a reasonably well-made, orky looking tank, and Boomwagons don't need much in the way of extra wargear or ornamentation. I was considering putting Rokkit Launchers on the thing, since they are able to take two additional ones, but someone pointed out to me that I'd basically never get to fire them since you can't fire other guns along with ordnance weapons, and in the event I can't fire the ordnance weapon (because of, say, the Don't Touch Dat! rule) I probably still won't be able to get much use out of the guns.

The only thing I'm really considering adding to this thing, still, is a banner somewhere around the back end. Not a vertical one, but something like a wavy flag behind where the commanding grot is.

I think I may give salt weathering a go on this thing - I bought it mainly because I thought a good paint job'd turn the model right around, and it seems to present a good number of surfaces for me to experiment with.

Paint aside, that's an awesome tank. Very, very Orky. Was it a scratchbuild or an OOP model?

Grot? Would orks let grots near something with that much dakka? You need to put an ork with a commander's head (one of those non-GW head swap things) if you want to do it proper.

You could try some scorchas, merely because they look good.

I'd really like to know how that thing was made. I love how damn chunky it is, it looks really beefy, like it can take a hit. Your modifications help livin it up a bit.

Norwulf wrote:I'd really like to know how that thing was made. I love how damn chunky it is, it looks really beefy, like it can take a hit. Your modifications help livin it up a bit.

As far as I know, the original builder made templates for the things and built them from that - this is further bolstered by the fact that when I was working on it, and hacked some parts up, you could see where he labelled bits "C" and "D" on the interior of the tank, so I guess he could keep track of things.

Breotan wrote:Grot? Would orks let grots near something with that much dakka? You need to put an ork with a commander's head (one of those non-GW head swap things) if you want to do it proper.

I love Grots in positions of power.

Ouze wrote:Paint aside, that's an awesome tank. Very, very Orky. Was it a scratchbuild or an OOP model?

The basic model is a scratchbuilt, yes. PVC pipe and styrene, really.

I figured I wasn't going to do too much more to the Boomwagon, so I went ahead and primed it using Krylon Rust Primer, which is a nice dark brown/orange color. After that was done, I whipped out two colors and just started spraying plates on the thing at random: The darker color is P3's Thornwood Green, which I find makes a really nice dark metal contrast to the rust... despite being a green color, it looks more like dark metal than green when applied over the orange rust. I also used some GW Vermin Brown in the airbrush to increase the contrast a bit.















I'm looking at it now and wondering what color I'm going to paint it. The idea was to put this kind of varied rust color on underneath, and maybe try my hairspray masking or experiment with salt masking techniques. I'm thinking a dark black Goff color with checkers and maybe some red might look nice; that, or blues and yellows, since it is a looted wagon.

Any ideas, guys? What colors do you see when you look at this?

Black and White it just screams it out but if you really want to spend time on it have the checking on different panels going in different ways. That would be just EPIC WIN

Where do you get your chain at the longest chain I can find that is not for jewelry was 3"

sonofruss wrote:Where do you get your chain at the longest chain I can find that is not for jewelry was 3"

Why would you avoid jewelry chain? Craft stores like Michaels or AC Moore sell very fine chains, a few feet of them, for a couple bucks. That's the stuff I'm using.

Anyway, this was something I heard about and thought I'd try: toothpaste.



The idea's straightforward enough - you use toothpaste as a mask for airbrushing. As you'll notice, and as I've since come to determine, I've applied the stuff like a bit of a moron - I should have kept it to the edges of plates and the likes, but I really didn't know what I was doing. Anyway, you simply squirt a bit of toothpaste out onto a palette and grab a sponge like blister foam and just dab it around a bit. Then you airbrush right over it. Which is what I did!





I decided to go for a Goff Scheme that I imagine will be a fair bit black, but I made the tank a bit more on the grey end of things because I figure I'll end up using some Black Wash on the armor later on in the process to make the plates stand out a bit better... which will bring the grey shades right back down to a dark, Goff-y color.

Anyway, once the airbrushed paint has a chance to dry a little bit, removing the toothpaste is incredibly simple - you just hold the tank under a faucet, and off it comes in about a minute, no scrubbing required. You'll notice from my final results that the masking looks a bit more like... well, some sort of slowed camo scheme, rather than rust, largely due to my irresponsible toothpaste placement. Also, I didn't pick up on the fact that the toothpaste would mask off some areas almost transparently - a very thin layer of the stuff's all that's needed, and I didn't realize just how effective it'd end up being.







It's interesting, for sure, and most of all it seems to do it's own sort've blacklining around the 'rust' areas. I'm hoping at this point I'll be able to cut the effect down a bit by painting some plates in red colors and adding things like checkmarks.

Looks great, love the grot commander.

I was just saying that I have no problem paying say $25 for some nice silver chain for a char or a titan but for say a tank where it is painted I would use copper like FW used to put out back in the day.
With the silver I would put it on after paint to show that it is silver and you went the extra mile for it.

Nice little tank, it reminds me of Lungbursta a lot...

(check the first vehicle here: http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat1290360&prodId=prod1110107 )

sonofruss wrote:I was just saying that I have no problem paying say $25 for some nice silver chain for a char or a titan but for say a tank where it is painted I would use copper like FW used to put out back in the day.
With the silver I would put it on after paint to show that it is silver and you went the extra mile for it.

I don't think the chains you get at the craft stores are actually, well, silver. I have about 3x more chain than what I actually wrapped around the barrel, and it cost me maybe 5 dollars.

So I figured I'd keep experimenting a bit on the tank. Into the Warp it went, to stew in Simple Green for the better part of a week while I occupied myself at school. When I fished it out and scrubbed it down, I actually managed to get most of the paint off right down to the underlying styrene:



Then I set about hitting it with my ol' Krylon Rust Primer again, and airbrushed some brighter orange colors overtop just to try and make the rust brighter. After that, I started applying the toothpaste again, in the hopes that I might be a bit more conservative with it this time.





Then came an airbrushed coat of grey overtop - again, a lighter color than the final coal black I picture the tank being at the end, largely because I hope to use some black washes on the entirety of the thing to make the armor plates stand out more.





Then came the pivotal moment - about half an hour after the last spray, I stuck the tank under the sink again. You don't want to work too slowly when you're using toothpaste, because if you leave it on there long enough it'll turn rock-hard and won't rinse off. This time, I had a much stranger experience with rinsing the mask off - in some places, the water actually managed to get underneath the grey paint after I'd rinsed the toothpaste off, and it lifted larger patches of the paint off than I actually masked. However, it did so in a very organic manner, leaving me with an irregular looking, patchy paint and rust job that I actually sort've like.









I think this looks a lot less like camo than my first go around at this method, and I think it'll be workable in the long run. I'm going to probably stipple the rust areas with a very bright color like blazing orange to give them some irregular coloring, and then I'll set about adding the actual colors onto the plates of the tank that will be getting 'em. After that, a black wash should help make the whole thing a bit more Goffy.

I love this tank, its got a lot of potential! and your doing a great job

In the end though it will have so many layers of paint that it should easily survive an atomic blast

The rust effect is certainly interesting.

Adding streaks under rivets and the like with a brush later will help tie it in better and look less like camo, I think.



Moving this one over to the Blogs section...

Is their anything that can't be used a s a modelling material? Probably not given some of the evidence. I actually really like the effect you've got as a rust undercoat it looks like the paints peeled of (which it in fact has) giving a realistic abandoned look like a lot of old trains I've seen.

Looks really good so far. With some weathering I'm sure it will turn out fantastic.

I never would have thought to use toothpaste, looks pretty effective.

Thanks for documenting that experimentation for us. Very interesting results. Looking forward to seeing what that rust looks like with the stippling over it.

- Blackbone

This is lookin good. I think the first try would have worked, but it looks like you'll have less work to do this way. It's a nice technique, thanks for sharing it.

I really like this tank, love how stumpy and chunky it is. The additions you've sparingly made do improve its character and take it from being rank and file to being something a bit special, at least visually. Shall follow this project with interest.

I really dig what you're doing here. The model is very cool looking (to whomever made it), and that original paint was very suspect. It's a bit late, but have you considered trying the salt method?

The paint scheme is great and I do like how the paint's flaked off, but the weathering perhaps looks a little too large.. which makes me tempted to agree with jabbakahut and suggest that salt might work better at this scale.

Salt would've worked, I just wanted to try something different.

I've been working on and off on this Boomwagon when I have time, and I'm actually pretty happy with how it's coming along. I did some highlighting along the edges of the armor plates, first with Vallejo Model Air German Grey, and then with Model Air USA Grey, before washing the whole tank down a bunch with some thin black. I've picked out some red areas (mostly the glyphs) as highlights, but I'm trying not to get too much color on this since it's a Goff vehicle and the Goffs are a rather dark-colored and serious lot.

















Thing didn't quite fit in my smaller photobooth, but you get the idea. I still need to work on the treads and ram a bit, and I need to add the white elements in - I'm thinking some checker panels or stripes will set off nicely.

Looks gread man. The toothpaste did the trick nicely; I might have to replace my jelly method with that, if only because it is less likely to result in finding little gross patches of jelly I missed like a week later

Again, excellent job. I look forward to seeing it come together fully with some dags and checks painted on.

Is that a custom build or is it a produced mini??

If it was built whats it built out of because thats a really nice mini..

BOSS_PIMPALOTZ wrote:Is that a custom build or is it a produced mini??

If it was built whats it built out of because thats a really nice mini..

I'll refer you to my previous post...

Into the Warp it went, to stew in Simple Green for the better part of a week while I occupied myself at school. When I fished it out and scrubbed it down, I actually managed to get most of the paint off right down to the underlying styrene:

I know it's suppose to be dark, but it isn't really dark, it's more of a washed out grey. Monotone. It looks great, but it looks plain great. I think the tracks would be better a different color than the body.

Yeah, it could definitely use a little more colour variance.

Coming along well, though.

Agree with Jabba, also think checkers would look cool.