A continuation of this project. I’m happy with how these proxies for OPR came out. There’s technically no size rules for OPR but I was aiming for 40k and missed badly. Still, I pinned them to 50mm bases and I can measure base-to-base like that so I’m calling it good enough, especially for a first try.
Things I learned; craft foam is super easy to superglue and absolutely awful to airbrush paint on, for exactly the same reason; it’s a sponge. Next time I’m going to use the foam liberally as an intermediary between plasticard (which is non-foamed styrofoam) and plastic (which isn’t styrofoam at all). Plasticard is a fantastic material for building but doesn’t glue well to plastic at all; craft foam makes a delicious and highly secure sandwich. Plastic takes paint reasonably well (better if given a light sanding), but craft foam or even insulation foam (XPS) surprised me with how many coats I needed to get even within shouting distance of vibrant for my colors. This is the first time I ever hit foam with paint, since all my XPS has been terrain that I’ve given at least a thin coat of mod podge to before breaking out the paint.
Picked up some gorilla glue for foam-safe superglueing XPS and it works great but takes much longer than regular superglue; 2 hours instead of 5 minutes. It’s totally fine but the first time I found this out I sort of hosed my evening’s “glue and then paint” plans.
For the painting, on the orange I tried a base pink for vibrancy, some undershot shadows in red, and overshot highlights in yellow. I did much less highlighting than I’m used to, mostly because the foam’s paint absorbency was a major struggle and getting “okay it’s orange now” used up all the mental and time resources I was willing to spend on it. Getting a decent blue involved one attempt at covering orange with blue followed by two coats of a light grey and three thin coats of blue, which came out all right. The blue metallics were easy peasy. Adding weathering with sponge-stippled dark brown and a homemade rust wash was easy enough thanks to practice. I LOVE weathering orange-painted metal on robots and stuff, I don’t know why. The blue paint got orange “chips” to indicate the blue’s been laid overtop, because the 40k lore is that Deathskull orks (the basic look of which I’m stealing for my OPR orcs) steal everything and paint blue over it for luck. I’m getting sort of a colour triad with green, blue, and orange, which is looking okay. The blue’s honestly giving me colour selection struggles and I’m leaning toward a colour quad with red, but no single unit has had all four colours yet. I’m expecting I’ll base my army in a red/orange desert to bring it all together, but I have 20 second hand orks to assemble and paint first.
Anyway, here’s some scratch built goblin robots that I’m happy with despite the deviance from the Killa Kan inspiration that started the project.
Oh, and I magnetized their weapons so I can swap loadouts for my skirmish battles. 😀
