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Space Brutes
Big, hulking brutes with guns are an important staple of scifi battles. But, they can be as damaging to your wallet as they are to your (or your opponent's) forces. Generally, they are bigger, requiring more material to cast blah blah blah, things, stuff. No problem. Got that for nice scuplts people deserve to get paid better. But often these types of figures are just generic fillers and it seems a little tough to shell out five times as much for the cannon fodder as your heroes when the heroes are just going to cut them down anyway.
So, this approach takes some generic figures from a larger scale and converts them to gun totin' brutes for a smaller scale. In this case, since I play a lot of 28mm, I am using some 1:48 generic crewmen from Robo Gear. They didn't have any guns that came with them, so I gave him an extra one. One good thing about brutes like this is you can have them carry heavy weapons that should be two handed or on tripods in one hand.
The next step in conversion is to add some extra brutish details to them. I put some liquid latex (that stuff in craft stores that is for decorating t-shirts) on the bare arms to give them a bumpy, brutish effect.
The big step for this conversion is doing the face. I used some Crayola Model
Magic clay to add a big jaw to them. The MM clay isn't as good for doing details
as regular sculpting clay, but it is cheap and easy to use. It also does a good
enough job when you don't need a lot of character and detail - these are generic
filler brutes, remember?
1. Add a small glob of clay.
2. Push it back to form to the face.
3. Dig out some nostrils. Poke in. Pull out and lift a little.
4. Cut a mouth and squish it back together.
5. Now, rinse and repeat.
Next, we just paint 'em up. I used a tan primer to give them a kind of organic
mushy tone overall. A few basic, blocky colors did it for the uniforms. I did
add some pattern to the pants with four different colors of green Sharpie. The
guns are done with silver, mixed with black and detailed with green Sharpie again.
On the pants, with the green background, the peb bleeds into the background color
and makes a nice blended fabric effect. Especially after using spray sealant,
which has a little keytone in it, so it dissolves the paint and ink a little,
causing them to mix a little at the borders. Over the silver paint, you don't
get the the bleed effect. It ends up lookin like glowing buttons or powercells,
depending on what part of the gun your are painting.
The final effect is pretty decent, considering they are made from generic figures without a lot of detail and character. And considering that their purpose is to be part of a generic horde to be cut down one at a time, dodged and evaded, or blown up en masse. Below is a picture showing them in the context of a few of the figures from our collection that they are likely to fight.
