I’ve gotten into watching the WRC (World Rally Championship) this year, I’ve always been interested in watching rally (and playing rally games!), but the watching part was always tough as there was no easy way to do so. With streaming that’s changed now and it’s possible to watch full rallies now which is great fun (I’m actually catching up on Rally Japan as I type this!). As a result I’ve had a bit of an urge to do something car related hobby-wise, and since I finished my 100 miniatures for the GW challenge I’ve been freed up to do so!
Now WRC cards most definitely do not have guns and armour plating mounted onto them (probably would slow you down too much!), but cars for Gaslands definitely do! For those not in the know, Gaslands is a post-apocalyptic car battles/racing game which encourages you to kitbash Matchbox/Hotwheels/whatever toy cars you want and turn them into road warriors. It’s been around for a while now (I think the first edition was from 2018), and I’ve enjoyed coming across people’s models over the years but never tried myself.
I found some Matchbox cars at my local supermarket, on sale for less than $3 (Australian!), and thought they looked like fun ones to kitbash. One (above) was a raised Jeep, another (below) was an old Mercedes open top car, and the last one (two-down) a 4×4 VW beetle.
Painting-wise, I kept these very simple. I actually found most of the fun in these models was actually the kitbashing part (more on that later). The process was over a black undercoat, first I airbrushed a rusty brown all over, then gave the cars the old hair spray treatment to help chipping the next stage (if you’re not across how that works I went into a bit of detail in this post). For the body I airbrushed a solid colour over each and then attacked it with a wet brush to get that chipping look. I used the hairspray to my advantage to clean off anywhere I over sprayed with the body colour. I then picked out some details like the tyres and guns. I followed this all up with an all over coat of gloss varnish to fix the hair spray layer in place and get ready for the wash stage. This was an all over brown enamel wash, wiped off the raised areas with a sponge. I then hit the car with a mix of dry pigments, with rust colours on the rusted areas and dust. I finally locked all this loose material in with a couple of coats of matte varnish. The only real detailed step for these was picking out the headlights, which were base coated in a light grey, on which I added a couple of spots of highlights to mimic the glass look.
As I mentioned above, I really enjoyed the kitbashing aspect of these models. I painted these models in one evening, but took one evening each to build them. I don’t have great photos of the build stage, but I hope you can get a good idea of what they looked like before paint went on with these:
I started by disassembling the cars and popping the bodies into a jar full of acetone to get the original paint off. After a good sit in there and a good scrubbing they were ready to go. I grabbed a box of 40k bits that I had and started kitbashing, mixing in some WW2 kits, and for the Mercedes some 3d printed wheels I made using my filament printer. I had a lot of fun building the tracks for the VW, they’re spare from a Warlord games Opel Blitz kit that I built using the wheels.
I picked up a 1/72 kit of US Vietnam troops to make some crews for these cars. You can see the one I glued into the Mercedes a little bit in these photos. I have some plans for some of the other cars I’ve picked up to have some more visible crews, so more on those later! I have to say after handling 1/72 models up close I’m even more impressed by John’s work over at Just Needs Varnish, who paints models in this scale on the regular. They’re really quite small, much closer to painting 15mm models than 28mm I have to say.
Anyway that was a very fun project, as I said above I’ll likely make more, and beyond that put together some terrain for the game!
Lair of the Lagomorph 