Apocalyptic Survivor

I've been busy bevering away on a couple of terrain related projects for the last little while, but I took a break and painted this figure last night. The figure is from Gripping Beasts MoFo Range, and is one of their Argentinian Commando's from the Falklands War.

As an aside you should check these figures out they are really good, and could easily be used for other things as they are reasonably generic in terms of clothing. As ably demonstrated by my version of the figure. As soon as I saw this figure I thought it screamed Apocalyptic/Zombie Survivor.

I painted up the jacket in blue as a civilian puffer jacket, the type which were popular in the 80's. As it happens I chose the colour as one of my enduring childhood memories is of my dad wearing one of these whilst doing DIY.

I wanted to make the figure look like he had scrounged up most of his kit, so old green trousers, good boots, civi watch cap. Some random belt kit and a simple rucksack. As these are designed with the 1980's in mind the figure is carrying an SLR, but I don't really see this as an issue and if anything adds to the survivor look.

I'm pretty chuffed with how this turned out all in all. Although I think the skin still needs a bit of work. And annoyingly my camera has washed out the jacket shading.

In other news I was in Hobby Craft getting some new paint brushes and stumbled across these 3inch wide, 5mm thick circular plywood basis. They come in a pack of 6 and I got them for £2.79 (if memory serves). I rekon they will make some nice bases for small tabletop dioramas and as bases for support weapons.

They appear to be from something called "Lara's Crafts", and other shapes, sizes were available. I found them amongst the dolls house stuff and presume they are for scratch building stuff. They work out at 46p a base, which is pretty good.