Clothespin aka Clothes Peg Spaceships

My recent game of Full Thrust was lots of fun - I'd forgotten how much a simple game of 'fly around and blast everyone' can actually be. One of my mates shared with me a great picture of someone's home grown spaceship miniatures using wooden clothes pegs, paper, and markers which came up a treat. Having access to such materials myself, I also tried my hand at creating some similarly cheap-ass spaceship miniatures.

Here's my first batch of three clothespin "pegships"

One of the great things about using such cheap materials is that you don't feel the pressure of getting it right. If I had bought even a $15 model kit, building and painting it to a standard that I'd like to achieve creates some frankly unwelcome pressure - this is my hobby after all, and the last thing I want or need is additional stress for what should be my stress release mechanism. By the way, here's the image that sparked off this little experimentation...

Some nice detail on those ships - I've started playing with a 3D modelling application to create some paper skins for the pegs. I'll just have to see how that goes.

How does that translate into my builds and painting? Well for starters, if the build isn't going in the right direction, I have no reservations about starting afresh or brutally making adjustments - we're talking $10 tops in raw materials here and for that price you get heaps of pegs, matchsticks etc.

The hobby space in action!

The actual building process isn't planned... it's more a mad dash to superglue bits and pieces together in interesting shapes. During the process I found that cutting, carving, drilling, and sanding the wood was quite easily done. In addition to using my hobby knife, I also took to my Dremel and multitool, which made the shaping that much easier. One of the best things I found was to hot glue a large pad of sandpaper to a piece of board: with the board placed upon the table I could easily stand down the various faces of the pegship rather than having to put the ship into a vice and hold a file etc.

Here are some works in progress, including one that Charlie built.

Once I had a built a few ships I sealed them with a black craft paint and PVA mix. Truth be told, I should have just used one of the many cans of spray paint to undercoat them - I ended up doing so anyway! Painting was very quick, employing a combination of drybrushing and sponging craft paints onto the models. When the result didn't really do it from me, I simply sprayed the black again and started afresh!

I was really happy with the look - all of 5-minutes of painting effort and all!

I've already repainted the above ships a number of times, so while the shapes remain, their colours etc are different - I'm not one to leave good enough alone!

So what's next? I'm interesting in playing the A Billion Suns spaceship game in the future and apparently one needs a fair few ships on hand to make it work. I think a collection of pegships would do the trick, especially given they're so cheap and easy to make.

I also want to try a more complex design, shaping and carving the hull more that I had previously. I like the idea of trying to keep non-wooden/peg-related components down to a minimum as well - there's something very authentic and satisfying about making wooden toys. I also like the idea of making the construction and painting give off an 80's Saturday morning cartoon vibe... I'm not sure exactly how to make that happen, but I am willing to experiment and give it a try.