This Saturday heralds the arrival of Necromunda’s biggest vehicle yet – the mighty and many-wheeled Cargo-8 Ridgehauler. We sent this armoured behemoth to Warhammer Community regular and Golden Demon finalist Garfy to see what he could whip up – and got more than we’d ever dreamed of.
Garfy: There I was, working away, when I got an email from Warhammer Community asking if I’d like to paint a Cargo-8 Ridgehauler. It’s a huge model, the deadline was short… It couldn’t be done!
Naturally, I said yes.
By the time the Ridgehauler arrived and I cleared my other commitments, I had just 12 days to build, paint, and photograph the model – then write this article. Here’s how I did it.
I was never going to just blindly paint the models, photograph them at the end, and hope it all worked out. The shot had to be dramatic, with the vehicle appearing to burst out of the scene, so I needed to plan this in detail and envision the photo in my head first.
A dusty, beaten road would create a nice perspective leading into the photo, amplified by some rocky outcrops running parallel. You can’t get much more dramatic than driving out of an explosion, and adding some Outrider Quad bikes would start to tell a story of how House Orlock were ambushing the Guild of Coin.
I airbrushed the Cargo-8 Ridgehauler, washed it using Agrax Earthshade* thinned with Contrast Medium, drybrushed on the lighter colours, then applied weathering. This worked a treat – after a couple of days I had a solid-looking model, only taking one more day of detail work to finish.
I assembled the Outrider Quads and started to mock up the board to see if my vision worked. This showed me that the 24" by 24" square board I wanted to use was a bit short, as the horizon line was too close – but overall I was pretty excited.
The rocky outcrops were made by cutting bases from 4mm thick plywood, making skeletal frames from cardboard, then covering them in damp plaster cloth strips. I smothered them in filler, added texture by dabbing them with a sponge scouring pad, and painted my new outcrops.
For the board, I raided my daughter’s sandpit and covered a 2’ by 4’ piece of medium-density fibreboard with PVA glue and sand. The road was made using filler textured with a sponge – inadvertently, it looked like I had created monster teeth protruding from the desert floor. The project now had its name: Ambush at Drakefang Gorge.
The colours needed to work in the photo composition – the Quads were background props, so I didn’t want a bright paint scheme to detract from my lime-coloured Ridgehauler. With that in mind I painted their outfits in drab, desert colours, whilst the bikes got an industrial yellow paint job, matching the Munitorum Armoured Container on the Cargo-8.
Since I was ahead of schedule, I chose to paint the Ridgehauler trailer as well. The trailer comes with its own armoured container, plus boxes, barrels, and a flatbed piece – which I painted but didn’t glue in, so I could swap it out if need be. Three days to go!
I set up the desert board on my dining room table and started to ‘dress the set’ with the terrain and models. I took a few test shots and gradually started to add the lighting to the scene, before finally using a disco fog machine to add smoke.
The explosion was made from cotton wool balls hot-glued together and sprayed yellow, with a touch of black in the middle of each ball. I placed one of my hot shoe flashes inside it,** with others around using colour gels to add dramatic lighting to the shot and change the colour of the smoke.
I still can’t quite believe I managed to get everything done in time – but I hope you enjoyed this insight into what went into taking this dramatic photograph of my Cargo-8 Ridgehauler.
Phwoar! You can practically feel the heat coming off that explosion. Thanks for your hard work, Garfy. If you want to pick up your own Cargo-8 Ridgehauler – whether for lugging loot across the tabletop or building a diorama of your own – you can pre-order it starting this Saturday, along with the rules in Book of the Outlands, and all the extra guns and trailers you could ever need.
* In case you haven’t seen the news – our Shade paints are getting even better…
** Hot shoe flashes are flashes used by photographers to increase the lighting around a shot. They can be triggered to all go off at the same time as the camera, giving a consistent light.