“Desecration of the Daleks”

So as this was to be my last week of (sort of) freedom before I return to work on Monday I was casting about looking for something relatively easy to do that I could complete before then, but what to do…. Inspiration struck in the form of this picture from Jez’s blog “Carrion Crows Buffet”*. These are apparently “Eternity Circle Daleks” taken from a Doctor Who novel called “Engines of War”.

I really liked this Dalek colour scheme and thought it would be fun to reproduce it, the only slight problem being that I don’t have any of the current series Daleks! I am in possession however of some of the magazine “giveaway toy” versions of the ever-unpopular iDaleks, that I never thought I would get any paint on, but as these are what I’ve got I had to alter the scheme slightly but have tried to keep the flavour. So first job was to dig my plastic freebie’s out of the box in the loft they have been languishing in since I got them, it turned out amongst the multitude of colours therein there were five blue ones, now it didn’t really matter what colour they were as they would be completely re-painted, but it seemed appropriate somehow, so those five were taken to be painted. Now being cheap children’s toys they were of course poorly constructed, there is a panel at the front of the skirt that doesn’t fit well and is loose, this seems to be caused by the poor assembly of the models, luckily by sliding a scalpel into the seam at the base of the model you can “crack” them open, re-position this panel glue the Dalek back together then secure this and fill the gaps around it by carefully running some superglue around the panel and immediately wiping away any excess. Other than that and tidying around the joints with a scalpel they were actually not that bad. I based mine onto tuppences with one piece of card as a spacer and a bit of Tetrion filler around the edges, just to give them a bit of weight (and because I couldn’t stand them not matching the rest of my figures to be honest!). I also used a touch more of the “Tetrion” filler to fill the strange gap between there “arms”. They then went out for a coat of matt black, and I have to say they looked a lot better already.

So on to the painting, and I began by undercoating the skirt and neck rings in navy blue before covering this with Tamiya metallic blue, then turning to the other areas, sensor balls, mid-section rear vent surround and head dome, I undercoated these in mid-grey and then, well I don’t exactly know what to call the technique I used here as I didn’t re-cover them, or dry-brush or highlight them either, probably the best way to describe it is I re-painted them “badly” in chainmail as I wanted a tiny amount of the grey to show here and there. This actually worked really well and I’m pleased with the end result here. Much touching up around the “balls” followed, as anyone who has ever painted Daleks will tell you that painting those things is a lesson in frustration if ever there was one!! I used chainmail as after checking on a spare piece of paper I discovered that this is slightly (only slightly) darker than silver, so Silver was then used on the gun, plunger and eye stalks and I added the two rings around the eye-stalk in bright blue. The “eye” on the picture above shows the “new” blue light version, but I still prefer the old “black and white” eyes from the originals so did mine that way. I did however do the dome lights in porcelain blue instead of orange (rebel that I am!). Then recesses between the neck rings had some black run into them, and the eye, plunger and base skirt were highlighted with some dark grey and they were finished.

I decided not to “Quickshade” these as I didn’t think it would suit them, so next I finished off the small amounts of their bases that were visible in my usual manner (I am considering rebasing all my Doctor Who stuff this way, but we’ll see). A quick spray with some matt varnish sealed the deal as it were.

These turned out a lot better than I had hoped and have swung my opinion of these surprisingly neat little models, do I still prefer the originals…of course I do! But I do have plans to add some more colour variations to this little Dalek force in the future now.

Stay safe, and cheers Roger.

• https://carrioncrowsbuffet.wordpress.com/2020/08/04/a-good-man-goes-to-war/