'Armour' from ByronM: 28mm APC for Sedition Wars

For the first of the Fortnight Theme week entries, I had planned to paint up some 28mm Bolt Action vehicles, including a bren carrier. However, I realized at the last minute (last weekend) that I still had a vehicle kicking around that I have meant to paint for at least the last 2 years and one that I really should get done, so pulled it out and got to work.

The vehicle is a 28mm Caiman APC from Khurasan Miniatures and it is huge!  It is a bit over 19cm long (about 7 1/2" for the metrically challenged) and about 10cm wide (4").  It is a solid resin hull with a resin turret and it weighs a ton.

The finished transport with a squad of Vanguard troopers.

Anyone that has ever watched any Aliens movies can tell, it is a pretty close copy of the Marine vehicle from Aliens and I was very tempted to paint it that way.  Here are pictures of the miniature painted up from the Khurasan site in a close approximation to the movie and a clip from the game of the movie, you can see how close they are (I am actually surprise there has been no legal action).

However, I actually grabbed it for my Sedition Wars force as a transport as I thought that the overall shape and lines would make it fit well with them.  Therefore my paint scheme was very different than the movie.

The Vanguard are a high tech fighting unit, and therefore don't really worry about passive camouflage as they have electronic active camo and stealth systems to deal with threats.  With no need to blend in their armour is clean glimmering pale blue / white.  I wanted to go with the same look for the vehicle, however that would make for a very plain looking miniature.  To spice it up a bit I decided that I would have to chip and weather it a bit, but in a way that still made it look fairly clean, a tall order. 

That idea led me to look back at some of the cell shading effects used in games such as Borderlands 2 for their vehicles.  I didn't want a pure simple colour though as I thought at this scale that may be too bland, even with chipping and some dust, so I faded in some pale blues and greys as a base.

The base coat was all done with airbrush, blending in some blues and greys to start with, then going over them on all the flat areas with a very pale white/blue mix.  Then going over them again with a thinned down translucent white to provide a bit more white while still allowing for the undercoats to show through.  After all that was done, I went on to chipping it with a dark German grey, and then applying a hard line white edge highlight to make some of the sharp corners really show up and pop.

This being for Sedition Wars (which is a board game much like Space Hulk) there were no decals for anything so I had to figure that out next.  I tried some test stencils since I knew I wanted the numbering to look like military stencils, but had little luck with that as the numbers were too small to get accurate cuts with the exacto blade.  Therefore, I had to freehand all the numbers and logos, but make them look like they were stenciled.  I am not very good at freehand work, but I think they came out decently enough to work.  If you look closely some of the numbers and letters and not exactly even with each other, and the star on the logo is a little off, but overall they work.

After all that was done it was time to dirty up the tyres a bit (add some grey dust) and to add some dust to the side panels as well.  I tried to keep it fairly sparse and not too grungy, after all these guys are high tech and would keep everything clean, but dirty enough that you can tell it is used and out on a mission.