has been watching some documentaries lately set in the Western Desert, and was inspired to create this...
A few years ago, I watched a rather silly movie and got the idea for a simple miniatures campaign. And I needed five surfer dudes!
The figures I picked up were the aptly-named Surfer Dude in Reaper's Chronoscope range. These are one-piece metal figures with a plastic slottabase.
Since the figures were identical, the goal was to give them personality with a variety of skin tones, swimwear, and surfboards.
I wish the surfboard had been cast separately, as I think it would have been a lot easier to paint that way. Also, note some casting issues on the lower part of the back of the board.
I did an online search to get an idea of what surfboards actually looked like. Here, I made a mess of trying to get some white panels on a yellow board.
The figure wears a wristwatch on his right hand. One of the harder parts of painting this figure is keeping the colors divided between the arm and board, and to a lesser extent, the board and the leg. Lots of touch-ups.
On this figure, I tried out a paint that was supposedly an Asian skintone. Or maybe just a good tan.
I flocked the bases with coarse sand. A bit out of scale, but it looks nice.
Here I tried a black skintone. (I think the bottle said 'African Flesh'.) I wanted to use proper highlights and shading, without making the figure look dusted. I'm trying to get more practice with black skintone.
As I've often said before, I'm not a championship painter. I'm just using basic techniques: basecoat, drybrush, wash.
Stripes on this figure required a lot of patience and touch-ups. (You can also see touch-ups on the board, unfortunately.)
As usual, I filled the base bottoms with spackle, then added LITKO FlexSteel on the bottoms for storage in magnet-lined boxes.
I hope that I've given my five surfer dudes enough differentiation so they won't be confused for each other on the tabletop.