by Brian Thewlis

Yep.. an original Series Cylon figure, not called toasters then, but still nasty pieces of work. I am still not sure exactly what the sword was for, as the blaster they packed appeared to do all the nasty work, albeit with bad aim as is normal for TV bad guys. And what is with the chrome armour? Very tactical.

This is an old figure, Comet Miniatures 85mm Cylon Centurion.

I picked it up in the UK some 20 odd years ago direct from the Comet Miniatures shop front, which is an adventure in itself and it has lurked in the stash since then. Until now!

As you can see, not really a testing subject for construction straight from the packaging. However, I did decided to remove one of the arms to slightly reposition it and allow access for the burnishing process. The basic finishing work was firstly sorting out the seams, then hitting it with some wet and dry and finally the dremel packing the wire brush. At first this was just an experiment to see how it came out, as clearly paint just was not going to cut it here on these chroming beasties.

The dremel actually did quite a good job and I continued down that path to as bright a finish as I could get with this method. When that was done the colour work.. did I say colour? Cylon clothing appears to come in any colour you like - as long as it is black. Yay. we all luuurv painting black and trying to get some variation and shading.

Anyway, I settled for a very dark grey which allowed a little bit of room for some real black shadows and a little drybrushing, which may or may not have helped. The roaming red eye, was picked out and I tried to emulate the moving bizzo by doing a sort of following pattern in darker and smaller dots. A bit of a wash over the armour, which was then carefully burnished again and………by your command!

Image: Close-up

Image: Boss

Image: Starting point

Image: Burnishing