Using Warhammer Skills to Make Gifts For My Parents

An 80th birthday present is not be the realm of book tokens or a pack of socks. With my mother reaching this milestone last year, and my father getting there this month, it seemed apt to go at least somewhat further. Making something felt more meaningful to me than an acquisition. But what to make?

Then I hit upon the notion of making something for each of them that would symbolise what they'd chosen to do with their lives. Today's post will be about the process of making them. It's not exactly our usual content, but hopefully you'll enjoy the diversion.

So, Mum's present first. She has been known to enjoy painting (this is an understatement) and has spent much of her life appreciating and aiding wildlife, so a painting representing that in some way felt right. However, to keep things a bit comedy (and within my skillset) I decided I would make the painting preposterously tiny, requiring a level of detail and precision entirely at odds with her preference for looser, more expressionistic stuff.

For the content of said painting, I considered my options. Back in the 1970s she did a lot of work surveying and advocating for the UK's dwindling otter population, and her work there is one of the reasons we still have otters in this country. That's a level of real life accomplishment one can't help but have a deep respect for. The thing is, I was unsure of my ability to paint an otter well. I've painted some freehand designs on miniatures, and I've done digital paintings, but paintings of creatures are always one bad brushstroke away from the uncanny valley.

On the other hand, the other kind of wildlife she's encouraged is more readily paintable. She has a field opposite the house which, at the right time of year, is quite emphatically filled with wild orchids (of the southern marsh, common and heath spotted varieties). That, I was willing to have a crack at.

I took a wee piece of styrene/plasticard, primed it with Wraithbone spray, and gave it a white drybrush to add some subtle tonal variation to the background before diving in and having a go at painting a southern marsh orchid. The image I ended up with is a blend of several reference photos I found, and while it's hardly a masterpiece, it managed to avoid ending up on the fridge door.

When I handed it over to her, I suggested she should put it in a stupidly big frame, and Mum being Mum, she somehow did this, but also made it tasteful.

Hand for scale

So there's present number one. But this being a site dedicated to making miniatures, the rest of today's post will be about the second present. See, Dad was always going to get a mini. This is the man who introduced me to building them. I have fond childhood memories of sitting with him in the workshop building various tiny aircraft. I enjoyed it, but that enjoyment was significantly hampered by the excruciatingly slow rate at which enamel paints dry. Being as patient as geology itself, he was always perfectly happy to take a few minutes to apply a layer of paint and leave it to dry for a day. I, on the other hand, was far too impatient for that. I like to get into the zone. You can't get into the zone if the zone is hard locked at about thirty minute's painting, and on this limited dataset I concluded that miniature painting wasn't for me. Obviously that's a take that aged like milk, but working with acrylic was a revelation that would come a few years later (you can view my comedically bad childhood paint jobs in this post from 2012).

Anyway. Concepts. Since Dad's a rampant World War 2 nerd, going full circle and making him a Spitfire or similar was tempting, but here's the thing: that's something that he might like, but it doesn't symbolise him. He's not a military man, he's an agricultural historian who part-owns a 1950s tractor. 

Wait, I thought, that's it! A miniature tractor!

A clandestine chat with Mum revealed this to be a Ferguson TE20, or 'Little Grey Fergie'. One couldn't help but wonder if a miniature kit existed... and it bloody did. Heller make a 1:24 scale kit.

Dad's a huge Francophile, so the fact that this is a French product was too perfect. When it turned up, two things then served as immediate twists: first, my Warhammer-playing self was not prepared for how spindly the parts can be in scale modelling. Second, the tyres in this kit are cast in actual rubber. Here are the sprues, including the floppy rubber one:

The parts looked rather fragile. Just look at this rod and the two tiny holes in the end, intended to serve as the entire contact point for two more similarly weeny rods:

I arrogantly assumed assembly would take me an evening or two. In reality it was built up over multiple long sessions. In terms of visual style, the instructions were more like an IKEA manual, with simple black line art rather than the 3D representations you'd see in Warhammer instructions. This sometimes made it impossible to tell which way round things were meant to go, which in turn meant flicking back and forth in the 60+ steps of the assembly booklet looking for images from other angles, and on more than one occasion, watching YouTube videos of cheery middle aged Americans showing off their aged Fergies. I suspect Dad would've had far less trouble, given his familiarity with the workings of his own tractor, but I wasn't about to ask him for advice, was I?

Despite these challenges, the kit's detail did impress me. Below you can see me getting together the bits that go into/around the front wheels:

Remarkably, the wheels on this kit are designed to turn. However, This wasn't necessary for a display piece, and the tiny rods inside the rear axle were so thin that I had no confidence they wouldn't just snap, so I glued the rear axle solid for structural strength. The front wheels do still turn, as their construction is a little more robust (despite all the tiny pieces in the image above).

Assembly may have been spicier than expected, but the nice thing about the Little Grey Fergie is that it's little, and it's grey. This bizarrely made painting the tractor itself the fastest part of the process. I'll come back to how I painted it further down, but for now, I'll cover how the base was made.

I acquired a small display case, but plain black plastic hardly sparks joy. Some vegetation would add a pop of much-needed colour. However, the display case itself would make for unnaturally flat ground, so I decided to do some landscaping.

First I sanded a sheet of 1mm styrene (to improve adhesion). This was given wiggly edges to avoid conspicuous straight lines on the base that would draw the eye. With the shape sorted, it was covered in a paper-based modelling compound from Geek Gaming Scenics. To ensure there were decent grooves for the tyres to sit in, some extremely precise masking was applied to the tyres.

Such precision

With the compound applied, this was left out in the blistering 35ºC heat to dry with alarming speed (a sentence that my younger self might not have believed). This stuff normally wants a day or two to dry, but this made it workable within four hours or so.

Artisanal small-batch stone-baked mud.

Once the compound was dry enough, it was superglued down to the display base. If you've never worked with this compound, you might at this point be wondering why I didn't just apply it directly to the base. The answer is that it's incredibly messy, and I didn't want to be fishing compound out of the gutter around the rim.

With the ground stuck down, I masked off the rim and then blended the ground into the base with texture paint:

Next, PVA glue was brushed on and grit/fine sand added to create more texture. This was sealed by spraying a 1:1 mix of PVA and water over it. Once again, I left it in the sun to dry extra fast, and used that time to contemplate the imminent collapse of our ecosystem and agricultural output.

After that came the simple matter of painting the ground. This was a three step process: a basecoat of dark brown Rhinox Hide, followed by successive drybrushes of Mournfang Brown and Skrag Brown. This was a deliberately rich palette; I wanted to evoke the red soil of Devon. Dad may have grown up in Lincolnshire, but he rolled into Devon and stayed there.

Next it was time to apply static grass. In the image below you can see the start of the PVA application process. I wanted a patchy look so that there was room for tufts of other foliage later, which meant applying the grass in stages. In the background you can see I had a few colours of grass out, as I wasn't sure exactly what would work with the soil colour.

In the end I kept things fairly simple with the grass and only used two colours: a rich mid-green, and a slightly more faded colour sprinkled into the mix. It doesn't make a huge difference, but you can see a slight green/yellow shift in the grass below. This helps avoid things looking too artificially consistent.

With the static grass applied, it was time to apply a variety of self-adhesive tufts and flowers from Gamer's Grass (some sheets of which are visible in the photo above). I snuck in a little tuft of yellow flowers, which in this context would probably be primroses or something, but in my mind it's a nod (even if only in terms of colour) to the yellow of gorse blossom, something you see all over Dartmoor where my parents live.

Now, some notes on the painting. The wheels were kept as separate sub-assemblies, with the tyres left out entirely (I wasn't sure how well the paint would take to rubber).

The whole thing was given a dark brown spray prime (Colour Forge Hyrax Brown), then a zenithal grey spray (Grey Seer). That was about 95% of the tractor painted in terms of surface area and about 5% of the work. I spent some time finding reference photos (it's amazing how many real TE20s are for sale on eBay this far into the 2020s) and figured out which components needed to be something other than grey, and gave them a layer of Black Templar Contrast Paint.

After that, there were just three things to think about: weathering, the dashboard dials, and the Ferguson logo on the front.

I painted the logo blue, then applied some Vallejo Air Steel around the edge, freehanding a somewhat impressionistic Ferguson in steel to emulate this classic logo:

Sadly this makes it entirely impossible to photograph, since it's reflective, but this sort of gives you an idea:

Next up were the dash dials. The kit came with waterslide transfers for these, but without microset and microsol to hand, the film was never going to sit well in the recessed slots, so I skipped all that faff and just freehanded it, paying attention to the instructions to determine which dial should be white on a black background, and vice versa. Do I know what either of these dials on the real tractor are? Nope, no idea. Monkey see, monkey do.

Side note: the drawbar assembly on the back was a bracing moment during assembly, since it involved simultaneously attaching seven moving pieces: the drawbar itself, and the six bars/rods it attaches to. You can't do it in stages. It was like juggling keys on a keyring while applying poly cement to them.

Now, the weathering. This was pretty simple; a piece of sponge was used to dab a patina of Rhinox Hide onto the tractor, then some orange browns were stippled into those areas that would be much more worn, such as the seat. Finally, a gunmetal stipple was applied to those areas which would be worn smooth, such as the pedals. Since this model isn't designed for handling, some graphite was applied with a pencil to the nuts on the wheels and a few other exposed edges. To finish the weathering on the grey, a thinned mid-brown recess wash was applied. This was the lengthiest step, as it required lots of feathering and wet blending with water to get smooth fades on big open areas.

The much-used seat

Finally, to tie the wheels into the base, an orange-brown weathering powder was applied to the tyres,  since I reasoned that a powder would stick to them far more happily than paint.

In case you're wondering how a small 1:24 scale 1950s tractor measures up to a 32mm scale Space Marine, here you go:

Overall I found this venture into scale modelling fairly humbling. I'm an experienced hobbyist, but I'm very used to the chunky proportions of miniatures designed to be handled in a wargame. Incredibly I only broke one component while handling this thing, and managed to repair my booboo fairly well, but dear gods. I shall return to my chunky Warhammer minis with gratitude. The kit itself seemed pretty well done, although I found that the bonnet/hood, while clearly designed to be able to flip open and show off the kit's detailed engine workings, simply broke itself at the lugs while opening, and had to be glued shut. The thinness of the plastic truly stretches the material beyond its tolerances.

The Trumpeter Display Case itself (210L x 100W x 80H in mm) is pretty much what you'd expect for an affordable plastic display. It's definitely not fancy, and that's fine, but the one big let down was that the top of the case has a very conspicuous inset in it that's conspicuously absent in the photo on their box. That annoyance aside, it did the job.

Here endeth the notes on them non-Warhammer things, what they was, and how they was done. All that remains is to assure you, dear reader, that said wee Fergie and tiny flower painting seemed to have the desired impact on their recipients, and therefore hopefully went some way to conveying how much gratitude, respect, and love I have for both of them.