Painting Cybermen and Building Conversion Chambers

As part of some preparation for an upcoming 7TV Doctor Who event in November I am currently painting up a number of the Cybermen figures I purchased in the end of line sales Warlord Games did last year.

I’ve ended up with a LOT of miniatures representing the silver monsters in their early Telosian form and am going to run these as a baddie cast at the event probably alongside a yet to be determined incarnation of the master.

The Warlord Games Doctor Who range was of variable quality and scale, but these minis are not bad in terms of the sculpt and size and paint up well. A black wash over a silver undercoat was the order of the day. I picked out some of the details using a fine black ‘Gundam’ marker pen. A few lights and controls on the chest units were done using the old Citadel Technical ‘Gem Effect’ paints.

To go alongside my silver monsters I am also preparing a table layout for the event. This is going to be based around that oft reused Doctor Who trope of their being aliens in the sewers. Although not the right models of Cybermen I’ve been inspired by the 1986 Colin Baker story ‘Attack of the Cybermen’ to model some Cyber-conversion chambers hidden beneath the streets of London.

For the sewers themselves I will be using one of the Gale Force 9 Tenfold Dungeon sets, fleshed out with the Archon Studio plastic modular Dungeons and Lasers scenery.

Checking through my digital stash of STL files I found some figures from Titan Forge Games Cyber Forge range which were obviously inspired by the Cybermen and in particular that thing that always terrified me more about them than perhaps the Daleks. They didn’t want to kill you, they wanted to make you like them.

These models were printed and painted in the same basic way as the Cybermen but with the addition of some blood effects to make the body horror particularly gruesome. I mounted each of the conversion units on a 2 inch square floor piece from the Dungeons and Lasers Vault 7 set. The back walls of which I am decorating with some Cyberman symbols I found on Thingiverse and printed myself.

More work to do on the scenery, but I have plenty of time before the event. At the time of writing there are still places available at the 7TV Doctor Who event in Nottingham on 25th November 2023. You can access details on this here.

Print, Paint, Exterminate!

I’ve been on a bit of a quest to paint up as many Daleks as I can recently. No idea why (although catching up with loads of old Doctor Who on Britbox may have something to do with this).

From a gaming perspective Daleks are pretty easy to come by nowadays due to the release of Warlord Games Into the Time Vortex range of miniatures and supporting Exterminate boxed game a few years ago. I’ve recently written about painting up some of these models.

Warlord Games Davros (metal), Special Weapons Dalek (metal), Dalek (plastic)

More recently I’ve also been painting up some of the redesigned ‘new paradigm’ Daleks. This radical new design of Dalek is now believe it or not ten years old, and while the TV series went back to the classic design quite quickly I managed to buy up quite a lot of the cheap plastic models that were given away on the front of magazines at the time. Just coincidentally these are also the perfect scale for 28mm gaming.

The one thing I have been really missing is a proper old school classic design of Dalek for the tabletop. Here’s where the wonderful world of 3D printing comes to the rescue. There are loads of designs for Daleks uploaded to Thingiverse of varying quality and accuracy, but I eventually settled on trying the files by Stryker123.

These look to be designed to be printed at a much larger scale than the 28mm tabletop standard. The design files are split into components, but there is also a completed (assembled) version in the files. By chance this defaults to a near perfect size for the tabletop (although in the end after some trial and error in printing I scaled them by 105%).

Printed on my resin printer (an AnyCubic Photon) these have come out well, albeit with some problems printing the sucker arms and gun sticks (that are just that bit too fine for the resolution I am printing at).

This particular batch were printed in clear resin, which made for quite a spectacle working on them in the summer sun!

In the end following further test prints I ended up printing the sucker arms and guns seperately and sticking them on to the ‘completed’ models on which the majority of these features had not come out. In fact the gun stick was so fine I just ended up using trimmed bits of scaffold to represent them in the end.

Based and ready for painting

Stryker123 has provided incredicbly accurate Dalek designs covering all the 1960s variants. While to the non-geek eye many of these look very similar I was delighted to see the effort that had been put in here.

I have concentrated mainly on the models from the very first Dalek story and also from the classic ‘Evil of the Daleks’. My painting has also followed these stories. However for the very first Daleks I went with the colour scheme that this model was given when appearing in more recent ‘Nu-Who’ story a few years back.

For my ‘original Skaro Daleks’ I went for the colour scheme shown here.

The models were given a black undercoat and this was followed by a complete coverage of silver. Both colours were car paints from spray cans obtained from the local Poundland.

I painted the ‘grills’ (between body and dome) in this case using Black Templar contrast paint from Citadel. This provided a nice deep shading will keeping the grills hightlighted in silver. Nodules and for the banding on the original Daleks without shoulder slats was acheived using a light blue. The nodules or domes on Dalek models are very definitely not one of my favourite things to paint!

A couple of the ‘Evil’ versions were painted with black domes to indicate that they were part of the Emperor Dalek’s guard. In addition to the standard silver models I undercoated a handful of others using Citadel Wraith Bone with the intention of painting these in red and gold liveries.

Not canon in terms of Dalek colouring, but a nice contrast to the silver hordes.

Finally I left one of the black undecoated models as it was in order to paint up a Dalek Supreme to command my new forces. These are all still work in progress.

I’m currently working on some profiles for the Daleks for 7TV and will cover them in a future article.

Ainsty Castings OOP resin scenery piece shown alongside a couple of troops.

Mark III Travel Machines Conquer and Destroy!

Like most folk in these interesting times I find myself with a lot more hobby time than usual at the moment.  Despite having a number of different projects on the go at the moment (including a recent delivery of my Reichbusters Kickstarter rewards) as per usual nothing ever stops me getting distracted.

New distractions

I’ve always been a big Doctor Who fan, and so when Warlord Games released their range a few years ago I dove in and bought the Exterminate boxed game.  I played the game a few times, but it didn’t really do anything much for me (and I defaulted back to my standard approach of ‘oh well, at least I can use the figures for 7TV’).

And therein came the problem.  As you may be aware the Warlord Into the Time Vortex range was scaled at about 38mm and so most of the figures are much bigger than standard wargaming minis and so don’t really ‘play well with others’.  The exception to this in my opinion are the plastic multi-part Daleks that came in the core game (and also released seperately with Davros).

But to base or not to base the muderous pepper pots?  Logic states that to minimise any scale discrepancies when mixing these with others, then leaving the Daleks unbased would be the way to go.  However logic is for Cybermen!  Also the only real option being to place them on 28 or 30mm bases, and that just looked, well, odd.

Any how having filed my painted (unbased) Daleks away in their very own Genesis Ark (i.e. a box in the cellar) I forgot about them for a few years.  That is until I was tidying up the other day and came across a set of basecoated but otherwise unpainted squad of Daleks.

The ultimate figure case

Having previously almost exlusively painted these guys so far in a bronze scheme as per the new series, I opted to go with a more classic series feel for these guys.  One of the more obscure Daleks is the so called ‘red top’.  Real creator of the Daleks, Terry Nation (not Davros), had a small collection of full sized props and when interviewed for Doctor Who’s 10th anniversary back in 1973 one of these appeared in the photoshoot.

A combination of props from the TV series and the sixties films, ‘red top’ had well, a red top (while the rest of the body was the standard silver and blue).  There’s something quite retro about this look that puts me in mind of the crazy sorts of random livery that the Daleks often had in comic strips.

I used a combination of standard and contrast paints for these guys.  I also remembered why I hadn’t painted any in a few years….  Those blasted globes on the bodies – I very nearly gave up (due to a combination of boredom and cramp).

In addition to the standard plastic ‘drones’, I also had a couple of half finished metal models, the Supreme Dalek and the Special Weapons Dalek.  Not too happy with the former, but think the latter came out OK.

So what’s all this waffle about basing then?  Well since then Primaris Space Marines have happened.

Eh?

Well they introduced the 32mm circular base.

Just the perfect size for a Mark III Travel Machine!