writes:
As you know if you've been following my articles here, I've been putting together a 15mm Mechanoids army for Alien Squad Leader. The elements of the army are complete, but I also need to field an Installation – essentially, a building.
I didn't have anything on hand that looked particularly Mechanoid, so I decided to build from scratch. The base is supposed to be 10 centimeters square, and I picked up a 9.5 cm square wooden base at Michaels craft store. The styrofoam skull was previously profiled here. The not-Legos blocks came from the dollar store. And I cut the bottom from a pill bottle.
But the star of the show is the macrame ball, shown above in the catalog picture from Dollar Tree. Available in black or white.
There's a light in the bottom of the ball, which looks rather charming. I pulled the light out, stashed it for a future project, and used the ball with a hole in the bottom.
Stryfoam doesn't play well with spray paint, so I primed it black with craft acrylic paint. The sparkles on the skull merged into the paint to create a black metallic effect!
I then drybrushed the skull with gunmetal paint. (I'm going for a Terminator sort of look.)
Then I highlighted with steel paint.
Above, you can see some of our components: the macrame ball, still untouched; the pill bottle, now primed black; and the skull.
The blocks have been assembled and primed black, but I realize there's a problem – you'll be able to see right through the building from the entrances.
So I'll add a few more blocks to the interior. I'm finding these blocks don't hold together well, so I'm adding white glue to secure them.
Using white glue, the skull is attached to the pill bottle. I've also highlighted the skull with silver paint to make it more visible.
I've also begun painting the ball with gunmetal metallic paint, giving it a heavy drybrushing. I want to make it look as though it is composed of steel cables.
Here are all the components again. The ball has been drybrushed with silver, then the prominent 'cables' on the top half have been highlighted with a silver permanent marker. The structure has been primed black again, and the bits over the entrances have been painted silver (to suggest they are barriers that can descend to close the entrances). The wooden base has been primed.
The Legos structure has been inverted and superglued to the wooden base.
I notice I still have a see-through problem, so I put a few drops of white glue into the interior, followed by some black sand. This blocks the light.
I use spackle to fill the gaps between the base and the building.
When the spackle is dry, any rough spots are scraped off, and black paint is applied. The building is then drybrushed with gunmetal, followed by steel. When that is dry, the base is flocked with black sand. And when that is dry, the model is given a spray of clear matte to seal the sand in place.
The 'skull tower' is now superglued to the building.
White glue is applied to the macrame ball, and it is lowered over the skull tower.
And here is the completed Mechanoid Installation.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but if I had to do it over again, I would think more about the spackling. I had assumed the flocking would cover any flaws, but then I realized that putting the flock onto the bottom of the building would look odd.
Yes, the 'Terminator' giant skull is in there. It's hard to see in a picture, but quite visible in real life.
Since the ball dominates the model, I decided that the Lego roof would be fine, rather than doing something fancier with the roof area. I considered adding some doodads to the building, but ultimately decided to keep it functional-looking in the Mechanoid spirit.
This is the back view. The three entrances are a bit small for 15mm, but we often cheat with scale when it comes to scenics, and probably the only things going in and out are Mechanoid drones.