Greeblies | Googly Eyes

Greebly, greeble, or nurny - which is correct?  I don't know - I first ran into the term in the infamous Star Wars Sketchbook by Joe Johnston, on the Millennium Falcon pages.  A note for the set designers that something called a "mechanical greebly" will hang down from the underside and help hide the set.

That's a pretty large-scale one though - most of the greeblies model-makers concern ourselves with are little bits and bobs that we can use to imply detail or complexity, catch the eye, or simply break up large blank surfaces.  Most model makers with any eye toward scratch building have a few piles of unused parts, sprues, etc., to use for greeblies.  Or a few bags.

Drawers.

Bins...

We can quit anytime we want.

One of my "standard" greeblies is the good old "googly eye":

These kinds are of an "ultra-low-profile dome roof" shape.  (I looked it up.)  They come in various sizes so they're pretty useful.

Side views included with cat hair:

I use them for hull bulges on spaceships, end caps for cylindrical forms, and the like.  Sometime I cut the bottom stiff paper off and remove the loose eye disk for yet another type of greebly.  Most recently I used them to build and cap the fuel tanks for my cardboard semi truck.  I highly recommend having a bag or two around.

Build Part 2 | Truck for RPG Session

 Trucks need wheels. 18 of 'em.  I thought high and low and finally settled on the thickest cardboard I could find in the house, a circle template, pencil, and an Exacto.

The result was 18 "close enough" disk-shapes.

I'd intended to make them spinnable for funsies but I ended up just superglueing them to the chassis because it was sturdier.

Front pair is a little skinny but I told myself that no one would notice.  And they're cardboard.

I cut out a pan for the cab to sit on and planned for doors that opened.  Starting to look like a truck-shape...

On the Shelf | Star Wars | Joe Johnston Concept Snowspeeder

We all saw it in our Empire Strikes Back Sketchbook and thought it was super cool: Joe Johnston's vision of a Rebel snowspeeder made out of a spare Y-Wing cockpit pod.  

Well, I had TWO SMT resin Y-wings at the time, and there was no way I was going to do THAT again (it's a huge chunk of resin) so...

I think it's a true statement to say that the only kit pieces I used were the pod itself and the cockpit piece.  And the little round "this was where the turret was" round thingie on the back roof of the canopy.  Everything else was snipped from styrene, and maybe some solder for small pipes.

I remember using naughty words when I realized I had glued the canopy framing together without painting the interior edges.

As often typical for me, I went straight from "can I do this?" fooling around to "holy crap, I'm doing it." midway through, so very little measurement.  Most everything is by eye.

I have to say I've always been pretty proud of this one.

Build Part 1 | Truck for RPG Session

I like reading build threads and posts.  Youtube is great but I am older so reading and snapshots are just fine with me.  So I think I will do some build  posts here.

So, as stated in the previous post, my GM asked me for a truck hauling a flatbed for an upcoming session.  He asked me to do it cheap & fast "like those helicopters".  Different scale, different needs (has to hold up to stacking 28mm figs on top, etc.), but minimalist is fine.

I grabbed some stacks of cardboard thicknesses, some balsa strips, and some styrene sprues from a model kit I'd done recently, and set to thinkin'.

A ton of image searches later I had the drawing I wanted and scaled it to roughly fit 28mm.  (Remember, all this is by eye.)  Printed it out.

Grabbed my bag of balsa strips and some sharp things and prepped for a chassis.

All hail white glue!

 

Ten-Four, Good Buddy

The "Red Markets" RPG I'm playing in is set in a Zombie Apocalypse, so that's scifi enough for me.

A couple weeks ago the GM asked me if I could "whip up" a semi towing a flatbed for one of our upcoming "jobs", like I had thrown together the Russkie choppers for Night's Black Agents a couple years ago. I toyed with getting a toy or carboard model to use instead but the toys near 28mm scale (arguably 1:56 I think) aren't cheap and I couldn't find anything at Sarissa or the like.

So I limited myself to cardboard, paper, balsa, googly eyes, and sprue scraps, and got to scratching. I found a decent set of line drawings for a longnose semi and roughly scaled them appropriately. Then I went to work.

Everything's by eye - the only times I used a ruler were for a straight-edge fold or cut. Was super-fun. I was going to do another layer of detailing to sort of "Mad Max" it out, but then I remembered that this is a limited-session prop to put 28mm figs on and is going to be pawed by aging gaming gorillas for a couple of nights.

I'll hit it with a gray prime job and then maybe paint some other stuff. Maybe.

What's Going On Here?

 A place to post pictures and thoughts about building, painting, or playing models, miniatures, and games.