"Granny Grate" Vehicles

Needlepoint plastic canvas sheets, otherwise known as "Granny Grating", is useful for lots of useful customizations, especially guns. One of the questions I received previously, when working on my WW II troops was when I was going to make a vehicle. As it happens, I generally like infantry more than cavalry, artillery, or vehicles, so I gravitate towards infantry games and those WW II troops were for one. However, I started working on a modern Africa project – something along the lines of the rules AK-47 by Peter Pig/RFCM – and I did intend to have vehicles in those. So what was I going to do about vehicles?

I had thought about it quite a bit in the past. I could see myself taking a block of balsa wood, sketching the outline of a vehicle, and using my Dremel tool to power-carve it out. Another was to do the same thing just for the basic outline, and then adding other elements to flesh out the details. Then one day I was sitting there painting the soldiers and spotted the granny grating...

I knew I wanted the vehicles to look a little "cartoony" because the figures were also. (Let's face it, when the head is bead and the entire body is a bead, the chibi effect is a bit cartoony, so everything else needs to be too.) So I sketched out the shape of a technical (generally  pickup truck with a heavy weapon on the back in the pickup bed) with a black marker.

Here are the pieces, cut out, making it a little easier to see. I seem to have lost the pictures of the truck assembled before I put in filler, but I basically took a hot-glue gun and did my best to make a box, after trimming all of the pieces closely.

Once I had the truck assembled I had to figure out how to fill in the holes. I started with acrylic modeling paste and I can assure you, that is a bad idea. It may look thick and goopy, but it dries thin so it requires a huge number of layers to fill out the holes and smooth out the "bumps". In fact, I still haven't succeeded in the smoothing.

Here is where it is at right now, after filling and sanding a number of times.

The hood of the truck is clearly too small, but it seems like a perfectly chibi-style truck! 😄

So, my next vehicle will still follow the granny grating method – I think it is a great way to beat out a basic shape quickly and easily – but I need to figure out how to fill the holes and get a smoother finish than what I have now. As I am working on a terrain board project right now I am eyeballing that wall spackle as a possible candidate. Another possibility is using wood filler. The latter can still be easily sanded and will take hobby paint very well.

If you have any ideas, please let me know. But I can see that this could be the start of a new series of pieces, as long as I can find a quick and easy way to fill the grating that still looks reasonable and does not resist hobby paint (such as, say, silicone caulk would).