More toy-bashing
As mentioned previously, the Armored core model kits are expensive, prohibitively so. But what if there was another way? What if there were cheap knock-off figures that existed at a more wargame appropriate scale. That brings us to today’s article, in which I show some progress pictures from this mini project.
Purchased for the princely sum of £4 from Aliexpress, I have acquired 4 of these little figures. Objectively the quality is not great, but for the price you really can’t complain. The torso of the figure is a hard plastic whilst the limbs are a rubbery PVC type material. Thankfully neither were especially hydrophobic and so took primer easily. I did not make any attempt to remove the factory paintjob.
This is the factory paintjob. Kasrkin for scale.
As always, I started off overly ambitious, convinced that to get a good final result I needed to disguise the action figure origin of the base model. To achieve this, I used a hodgepodge of pieces that I had on my desk including the chassis of a retro Imperial guard sentinel (sacrilege, I know), the head from a Tau battle suit and half of a pencil sharpener, as well as the legs of one of the 4 toy figures.
Whilst this did create an almost wholly disguised figure, the figure is a pain to handle as the metal components are all placed up high, resulting in a fragile, unbalanced design. the resulting silhouette is also quite unbalanced, with the pencil sharpener creating an almost rubber duck like torso profile. As a result I resolved to tone it down for the next figure.
For figure number 2 I decided that I would only replace the legs in order to create some kind of hover unit. This worked well and so to reinforce the hover/ flight aspect I used a thruster from some long lost model kit to add mass to the back to account for the reduced height achieved by swapping the legs. Things were going swimmingly right up until it was time to attach the figure to a base. I pinned the figure multiple times, hiding the pin hole directly under the back thruster but ultimately I wasn’t satisfied with the stability or appearance of the result and so I went back to the drawing board. Removing the hover legs, I went back to my bits box and retrieved the original legs.
The hover legs. Looks great but made basing a challenge.
I'm moderately happy with this figure, though I think a new base is in order as the current one was thrown together in 5 minutes and frankly looks a bit crap. Additionally I was not happy with how I ended up staining the light grey sections with nuln oil which is why I did not apply nuln oil to the legs after swapping them. At some point I will need to clean up the upper body and re-apply highlights on the grey areas.
On to the third figure. Having already used the torso of the sentinel I wanted to make use of the legs and what better opportunity to do just that than to match them with the donor torso for the legs used in model 1. In terms of the build decisions made for figure 3 I’m pretty happy. The metal legs keep the centre of mass low, so the figure is stable despite lacking a base. I am however, not pleased with the red paintjob, which again was stained with nuln oil. I had hoped that the gunmetal accents would break up the solid mass of red though it seems that it is not quite enough, leading to a paint scheme that is lacking in contrast. Better luck next time I suppose.
Here we have figure 1 painted. Not a fan. Again, lacking contrast.
At this point in the project I had learned several things.
Large solid blocks of dark colours make the model visually uninteresting.
using parts from multiple sources can disguise the toy-ishness of the end result, but too much will disrupt the cohesiveness of the whole.
And so, moving on to the 4th figure I decided I would not modify the existing sculpt and instead I would take greater care with the posing and painting. It also helps that I spent some time thinking on the composition for the base. This is by far the figure that I am most pleased with as the panel placement lended itself quite well to alternating blocks of colour, keeping the model interesting. Additionally I did not use nuln oil, so the tan surfaces did not get stained.
