The Return Visit

As you will no doubt be aware, a few weeks ago I painted up some key figures from the LA resistance in the 1980s cult classic V.

This combined with the fact that I've just watched a battle report on the Peachy Tips YouTube channel which pit the Visitors against a range of 80s action heroes (Rambo, TJ Hooker, etc.) has made me want to get nosy off the last few unpainted Visitors I currently have.

Here they are...

...well, almost. I still have another model to do who is a duplicate of one I already own, but I want to see if I can do a suitable head swap to keep some variety, but I need to see I have a female head that's the right scale, ideally with a cap or sunglasses.

We'll see.

As pointed out five years ago, when I painted the last lot, I've gone with orange rather than red for the uniforms.

When you trawl the internet for images, it seems that there has been some colour enhancement going on with images that has convinced many folk that the Visitors wore red. However, only their flags and iconography were red, the uniforms were dark orange.

In an attempt to achieve this effect and match a paint job firm half a decade ago, Ive actually been quite sloppy compared to a lot of my more recent work.

Simply basing in Ryza Rust...yes, I know it's a dry paint but mine dried up too much, so I added some water to it and now have an orange paint I can actually use...adding the black, flesh, gold and hair before an all over wash.

I did pick out the gold again as a highlight, but overall not my best work.

These troopers with the gold helmets first appear in the second miniseries, V: The Final Battle, and seem to be security guards rather than more active soldiers like the ones in black armour.

I get the feeling that the decision to introduce them might have been cost induced as adding gold trim some of the spare uniforms from the first series and making what look like much cheaper helmets would have strained the budget less for the larger battle scenes in the second miniseries.

I did have to do a little bit of repair work on this model as his baton was missing a section, so I needed to trim it off and add a small length of plastic rod. Not the hardest job, or done with great finesse, but good enough.

His pistol is also missing the bottom bar of the hand grip, but it's a small detail and not particularly of the profile of the model, so I'm going to see if it annoys me enough to try to fix it.

And there we have them. I think they fit in quite well with only a slight difference in the orange. In fact a more noticeable issue is the asphalt flock on the base. I've no idea whether I've used a different type or the colour has faded, but I might need to address that.

So I still have another model to do and then I need to get round to sorting out the shuttlecraft that I've lost the landing gear for. After that, I may finally pick up some Visitor keeps to complete my collection.

Acquired: -29

Painted: 29

Lead Mountain: 601