Gaslands Cars

Gaslands

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!

15 thoughts on “Gaslands Cars”

  1. These are brilliant, Nic! 🙂 I particularly like the VW Maultier! I reckon one evening each to build them is good going. I think if you look on Etsy you can find people that print different cars and Gaslands guns, armour and accessories. And thanks for the mention – I reckon 1/72 is about as small as I manage with vehicles and figures, but I’ve had decades of practice to try and get things right (or as right as they’re going to get)!

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    1. Thanks John! Glad you like these. 1/72 is weirdly something I’ve never painted (figure-wise at least, definitely painted some airfix kits in the scale as a kid). So it was a bit of an eye opener for me, different world to 28mm for sure, and I’d say harder to get to look nice so I’m even more impressed by your efforts!
      I’ll have to look for some specialised bits for Gaslands, the wheels were fine on the filament printer, but for Guns etc it’s going to be hard to get past resin prints. North Star also do some plastic conversion sprues which I’ll be taking a look at.

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      1. Interesting, because I find it harder to get 28mm figures to look nice! What I’ve found is that whereas I paint 28mm figures as shade + base + layer, I paint 20mm figures as shade + base and I’m not too worried if the shade colour is a bit dark (hope that makes sense)! I no longer paint eyes on 20mm figures, although I did for over 20 years – leaving the eye socket in the shade colour works well enough, even for figures not wearing headgear (yes, I’m a slacker really)!

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      2. I avoid painting eyes on plenty of 28mm models so don’t worry about that! I think the shade + base approach makes a lot of sense on 20mm, I do something similar with the 13mm models I’ve been painting, where my starting point is basecoat plus wash rather than basecoat/wash/highlight as I do for 28mm

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  2. With the Mad Max connection, Gaslands should be a required hobby in Oz, I reckon! 🙂 The vehicles came out looking really nicely and I can definitely see where they’d be a fun change of pace compared to the batch painting you’ve been doing. Do Europeans have easy access to Hot Wheels/Matchbox cars like Americans do? You can buy them at grocery stores or any toy stores you might come across here. I assume they’re pretty much a global toy but I didn’t make it to a toy store when I visited Paris quite a few years ago now so it got me thinking!

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  3. Very nice! Marouda and I have collected a nice stash of toy cars, but still haven’t gotten as far as building out a swarm of gaslands cars yet, despite a couple of false starts. Perhaps something to try to revisit again this month after seeing this post!

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      1. Yeah, I’ve printed a little container of weapons and armour and bits and pieces since getting the A1. No wheels (from memory) yet – the first time we got enthused it turned out that all the 40k scale bits I have were mostly just a bit big, so it fizzled out, then once we got the printer I got as far as printing a whole bunch of bits but not doing anything with them…

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      2. The 40k bits are definitely too big for the most part, I found the trick is to make them something else, like turning the spotlight into a gun turret. For things like guns, historical minis give some nice guns that don’t look too out of scale.

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      3. Yeah, I just found a ton of parts on MMF. Just need to get motivated to build some cars – the thing is, right now I’m trying to keep motivated to paint SWL minis and finish off stuff that’s half-painted on the desk and in the tubs! 😮

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