Life's a Gaslands

An excuse to own toy cars and the ability to customise things….without having to worry about being good at painting miniatures. Around 2018 I had a crack at painting some game pieces and convinced myself I was not meant to be a miniature painter.

**LEARNING POINT** If you are new to painting avoid crap quality miniatures while you are learning. Avoid game pieces (Zombicide style plastics), Wizkids small miniatures or Reaper plastics. Get a few decent plastics (Wargames Atlantic/GW sprue from ebay maybe). Remember if you are on a budget you can paint miniatures more than once, but take a photo if you are doing that. To document your journey.

**LESSON ENDETH**

I was excited for Gaslands, I had been looking curiously at those blue Osprey Books for years. I really wanted to get involved and so I blew my bonus that year on getting 2000 skid dice printed up by a factory in China, this more than covered my expenses in terms of cars ,mats and add ons. Here are some early pictures from my Gaslands journey

This is actually the start of my second wave of builds, before I had purchased the book and discovered the factions (sponsors), the one thing that I didn’t really take to , I had envisioned teams running several vehicles and being able to acquire equipment from any manufacturer, rather than a team being tied to one sponsor. But hey ho, probably would have created imbalances.

The first bunch of cars I painted I actually used craft paints and nail decals. Here’s a gallery of some of the bits and bobs I started out making.

The billboards were magnetised so I could swap them out, I used mod podge to decoupage the vintage adverts. The car reference sheets were just business cards I got printed up.

In addition to having a go at a bit of scenery I was intrigued by the cottage industry that sprang up around the game . I wanted to be involved, more about contributing to the community than the $$s.As I mentioned before  I took a highly uncharacteristic gamble. I spent £800 of my bonus (i.e most of it) on getting a factory in China to rattle off 2000 skid dice. I was questioning my sanity the whole time.

Sorry if you get a crick in your neck looking at that. I remember now, I made canvas road sections, four of them, canvas board with wall paper as the road, the idea being you could keep adding them to the front for a long running road battle, I should maybe have read the rules by now….or I could build a lorry!!