United Colours of…Dalek

Regular visitors will have noted that things have been a little quiet here at the Buffet…

Unfortunately, various external factors have conspired against me, resulting in very little time to spend on hobby-related pursuits. In fact, the only painting I’ve done up until very recently was my fence, which is now ‘Forest Green’ in its entirety, including the parts that were replaced when the weather kindly decided to knock it down.

However, now that tedious and arduous task has been completed, I have returned to my painting queue and as a certain batch of militaristic war-machines were stridently clamouring for attention, I thought it best to focus on them.

When we last saw my Daleks, they had just been assembled and based (go here for a reminder).

So, first up is the ‘New Paradigm’ Daleks, which explains the title of this post;

Colourful bunch, aren’t they? So, I’ve given each a base coat of the relevant primary colour, then painted in the bumpers and neck grills in black. The plunger arms, guns and eyestalks have also all been given an initial coat of GW Chaimail. The two ‘Drones’ on the far right are supposed to be the same colour, i.e. red, but as both were a slightly different shade of red plastic, one looks a bit more orange-y than the other. I also think that the blue Strategist Dalek may be a bit too dark a blue and the yellow Eternal Dalek is not quite the right shade of yellow.

I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised by the level of detail on these cheap plastic toys, although it’s clear that different molds were used for different Daleks, as the detail is not as crisp on some of them compared to others.

Next up, my ‘specialist’ Daleks;

The one on the left is the Special Weapons Dalek, who has been given a coat of gloss white and an undercoat of bronze on its bumper, central gun housing and head. Checking my references, this actually needs to be a dirty gold colour, so these parts will be repainted with an elderly pot of GW Shining Gold, then dirtied up a bit.

The one on the right is a plastic GW engineer Dalek, which I decided to give the livery of the most recent ‘classic’ model Daleks, i.e. silver and light blue. The shoulder slats need repainting silver and the bumper in black, but I like how this colour scheme differentiates it from my normal Daleks, which currently look like this;

That’s right, I decided to go for the classic grey and black colour scheme! However, as I wanted to replicate the shiny grey of this type of Dalek, I used a pot of Humbrol Satin Enamel. Whilst it does give the finish I wanted, I forgot that this type of paint takes absolutely ages to dry, so wasn’t able to do much more than this, annoyingly.

That’s all for this week. As Salute is mere days away, the next post will be a post-Salute round-up, similar to last year’s. However, this year I intend on taking at least some photos, so won’t have to scour the Internet for suitable proxy images of my fellow bloggers. You have been warned…