Category Archives: Workbench

A few days’ worth of breaktime doodling

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Something I’ve been picking away at during my breaks over the past few days.

I was going for something that was inspired by the Blade Runner spinner, the floating police cars from The Fifth Element, the Carbon Motors E7 police car, a dash of Blue Thunder, and an extra serving of Syd Mead on the side.

A black/white color scheme immediately leapt to mind, naturally, but that sort of bored me a little because…come on, that’s too easy. A bit of research and some trawling through photos of police schemes from around the world later, I decided I wanted to do a retroreflective Battenburg scheme. The colors were easy once I settled on the scheme: a blue base color because of the aforementioned Blade Runner/Fifth Element/Blue Thunder influences, and white is a good trim color for this shade of blue. You can’t see it from this angle, but there are also yellow/red hazard panels on the back slope.

I wanted the lines to be as clean and sleek as possible, so all of the lights are low profile. That’s where the Carbon E7 police car influenced the design–there are lights at each corner of the vehicle, on the top and bottom. That way, they’re equally visible from above, from below, to the sides, from the front, and from the back, which you’d kind of want with a flying police car.

Still not done, mind you, but I figured you guys would like to see it anyway.

Wash Me

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Grunging things up a bit, as that’s another WWG signature element that Denny requested I play with.
I wanted to split the difference between the Ebbles and WWG levels of grunge. I thought my first attempt was fine until I parked a Brio in a backdrop created from elements of an upcoming Titan set–to my surprise, the vehicle looked much too clean and a bit out of place, so I went back and dialed up the grunge until it started to harmonize with the environment.

Before

After

It looks like an old beater that a college kid bought for 500 credits, which works just fine for me because I like the future to look a little bit lived-in.

Pain in the glass

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Practicing the newfangled WWG way of doing glass. (Clicking takes you to larger images.)

Not sure what I think of it. I mean, it looks a bit more like real glass now, but it’s…different from the cheesy old hand painted non-metallic-metal effect that was part of my artistic style, and that’s gonna take some getting used to. Oh, well. You know what they say: when in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Of automotive colors, job transitions, and so forth

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 Continuing the Veloce Brio work-in-progress…
I mentioned in a previous post that I had some rules for this model that I wasn’t allowed to deviate from for the sake of verisimilitude, and the biggest one was to try and think like an automotive stylist rather than somebody who designs military/industrial equipment. The second half of that is in choosing colors.
Over the years, I’ve had a selection of “safe” colors that I used across most of my models. Instead of using those, I decided I needed to change things up and do a manufacturer-specific palette for each vehicle. For the Brio, there are 12 colors–6 of them are bright colors, and 6 of them are more toned-down colors. I even gave the colors cutesy manufacturer catalog names.
The bright colors:

Nebula Blue

Quasar Green

Pulsar Pink

Plasma Purple

Flare Red

Solar Yellow

And the standard colors:

Midnight

Gold

Storm Gray

Olive

Silver

Ice

And there you have it, the manufacturer-specific palette for the Brio. For each vehicle in this series, I’ll be doing the same thing, and each palette will be different. That way, when you have a whole bunch of vehicles done and you put them on the tabletop, there will be a pleasingly realistic color variance across all the different makes and models. Not all vehicles will have 12 schemes–each vehicle is going to get whatever selection of colors makes the most sense for it.
I’m also in the process of working out a few details with Denny on the subject of releasing this model. I have to stress something right now–this wasn’t originally intended to be an actual release, but it kind of suddenly turned into a full product before I knew it. I pinged him the other night to explain things and asked him what he thought of releasing this model, and he liked the idea. 
He had a few suggestions that I’m still working through, and then there’s the matter of transitioning from the old Ebbles branding to the new.
Yes, I even have a picture for that. Well, two.
Model Frame

Instruction Page
I’ve incorporated the official WWG page key and whatnot into my frame templates, which you can see above. I think that wraps up the transition to my new job.
Now, the reason I emphasized the fact that this was essentially an accidental product is because in the future, when I know something is actually intended to be a WWG product, there’s a good chance that I’m going to be posting the Workbench articles for that product on the WWG forum instead of here.