Fallout Boy conversion wip

I know, the actual mascot is called Vault Boy, and it annoys a friend of mine when people refer to him as Fallout Boy, but that's the sort of awful, lazy wordplay that I can only assume keeps you coming back here (I'll see if I can work in an Atom and his Package reference next time to raise my indie cool points score back up)

Some time ago (back in the hazy days of early 2014) I decided to replay Fallout 3, as my original save had been lost in an unfortunate Xbox 360 crash, and I think the initial Fallout 4 rumours had started leaking out. As tends to be the case, I was inspired to dig out my knives and files:

When I started the conversion, my character in the game was scrappily armed with a combat shotgun and some rather sparse scavenged armour, and so this was my inspiration. A Crooked Dice minion was my starting point, as I figured that it's weird raygun looking weapon would be a good starting point for building a Combat Shotgun:

So, I cut of some extraneous bits to leave the body of the gun, which I planned to build on:

It did not go particularly well. I tried a variety of bits and bobs (both from cut up miniature weapons and miscellaneous other sundry materials) and nothing seemed to quite look right - the stock from a rifle was much too skinny, every donor drum magazine just looked wrong... So off came the lot, left hand and all, under the assumption that I'd be able to find a suitable combat shotgun as a whole:

And that was really as far as I got, way back in January 2014...

(Well, truthfully I also crudely fashioned some straps and a knee pad out of some green stuff and part of a heroclix riot cop, but that step was sadly not documented in picture form anywhere that I could find...)

And so, into a baggie went the pieces, to await me being able to find a combat shotgun that looked enough like the one from Fallout to satisfy my nerd OCD - the drum magazine was the main sticking point for me.

I kept playing Fallout 3, but very soon found a suit of power armour, and so from that point on my character never looked like my planned conversion again. Regardless, I kept the idea for it squirreled away at the back of my mind...

[time passes - imagine a montage where clock hands spin, pages tear rapidly off of a calendar, a pair of cartoon squirrels are born, run around eating nuts, and age to the point where they are sat in a pair of tiny rocking chairs]

Then, idly browsing the internet, I found a suitable donor - one of Heresy's trenchcoat gangers had a likely looking weapon:

So, I tweeted Andy at Heresy to ask if they were available seperately, and he told me that it was something he'd been meaning to get round to, but had been unable to with being so busy with his kickstarter. I asked him again at Salute, and Andy told me that he still hadn't had a chance, and suggested that it was probably worth just buying the figure and cleaning it up myself, so I did!

It's a little large (as Heresy tend to run on the larger side of the scale and Crooked Dice tend to run slender), but the only one of it's type that I was happy with!

With some careful cutting and filing, I was able to remove the arm and hand, leaving the shaped gun butt. Unfortunately, given the position of the arms on the receiving miniature, it didn't fit with the gun butt, so off that came too:

Then began the painstaking, repetitive process of filing and dry fitting to get a result that I was happy with:

I found a donor hand from a Perry miniatures set (the same piece as I used for my Eddard Stark conversion) to gave him a left hand resting casually on his weapon, and then I pinned everything to within an inch of it's life.

Then came the other essential identifier for the character - the Pip-Boy! As with my previous Pip-Boy equipped model, I carefully cut out squares of Green Stuff on my thumbnail, and then cut and shaped them using a variety of clay shapers, knife, and a pin liberated from my wife's craft room until I had this:

A Crooked Dice head sprue provided a hard hat wearing head to finish off the ramshackle look of the low-level Fallout character, although I wasn't sure about it at first, and spent some time googling pictures of  hats from the Fallout series. Nothing seemed to amuse me quite so much as the hard hat though, the sort of thing that you wear when you're desperate for any point of damage resistance that you can get! Plus, when it comes to painting, it should be fun playing around with weathering to make it look suitably scrappy!

Which leaves me with this chap awaiting some basing - I enjoy how the pose turned out: so calm, composed, in control; completely at odds with how I actually played the game, manically running head on at threats and using VATS to shoot them in the face (as opposed to shooters like Halo, where the general tactic is to run backwards away from the threat shooting it, occasionally hiding in a room that is extremely far away from any threat in order to wait for your shield to recharge).

Taking a short break from writing this post to fill the gaps in the base, I was suddenly struck with an idea: 'how hard would it be to add some more ramshackle armour, like a shoulderpad?'

Hopefully it takes less time to paint him than it did to finish the conversion...