paints "four characterful figures that seem to come directly from a vintage vampire movie..."
Last year, I produced a Workbench article that followed firstly the construction and, later, the painting of a 1/300th scale model of USS Meade (a USS Kersarge-class, two-turret monitor from the game Space 1889).
This article follows a similar workbench project, featuring a group (or Jasta) of three SMS Hamburg-class armoured gunships - which are based upon the paper models produced by squirmydad based on Space 1889 models, and are therefore models of models of models!
Background
In 1988, GDW published a roleplaying game called Space 1889. The brainchild of Frank Chadwick, the game takes place in an alternative universe which has more in common with the imagined worlds of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs than our own. Mars - the Red Planet - is inhabited by an ancient race who have built canals and a thriving civilization. When Thomas Edison invents a space drive (the Aether Propeller), he opens up these mysterious worlds to the imperial nations of Earth, and a wave of interplanetary colonization begins.
Vessels on Mars are able to float or fly through the air by the magical properties of 'liftwood' - "a sort of anti-gravity material"! For anyone wanting additional information, there are many books, games, and models still available.
The model is built to a scale of 1/300th (or 1mm = 1 foot). A scale arrived at by accident when I was thinking of building a model of HMS Aphid (a flying gunship which is featured quite heavily in the game). I now have a number of models built to this scale, which I occasionally use to fight small skirmish actions using Aeronef - a Victorian Science Fiction (VSF) game and available from Wessex Games.