Project III/14

Idea

Many a year ago I bought some Italian hard licquorice (kind of like the pharmacist's salmiac one can buy here) from a Spanish pharmacy. It came in a handy metallic box, even. I immediately had an idea of using that as a medikit at work. Of course it was way too small to be called a medikit so I thought it should be called a stimpak instead.

Then, a couple of weeks ago I started playing New Vegas again. Fallout is a fine thing and it gave me the idea: the long-ignored box shall be turned into a Mentats box! Genial! Beautiful! Awesome! Wonderful!

Implementation

The basic shape(s)

For some unexplainable reason I was going lazy and started only on the top of the lid, so I masked off the bottom and the edges. As usual, I primed the thing grey and the next evening I masked the shape for the inverted green triangle (yes, I was going to paint it in this order). And the following evening I painted the rest yellow. Didn't I mix up an orange-ish paint myself to be more true to the real thing? I tried, failed and decided that the impending devlan mud washing would tone the yellow down enough.

Decoration

All sorts of imperfections and general unevenness was more than acceptable in this project. I mean, everything's shitty and worn-out in Fallout, especially tiny and portable things. For the black line on the lid I used some tape to keep the lines straight and for a moment I considered using a 0,01€ coin for the rounded corners but in the end I did them freehand.

Texts

I reserved the space for the red "Mentats" text with masking tape again. I just did it by eye instead of carefully measuring so the text ended up off-center. But it wasn't so much that I got annoyed and therefore didn't feel the need to redo it. Then I painted the black shadows and later used the same methods to paint the white "MED-TEK" inside the green triangle.

Final messification and varnishing

To finish up I applied a liberal amount of devlan mud all over. Cleanliness or lightness was of no importance or even a goal. At this point I decided that the bottom has to be painted too. So I spent a couple of extra evenings by priming, yellow-painting and messing up the visible part of the bottom.

Because this container was meant to be carried around instead of leaving it on a shelf to be a static item, I applied a varnish as well. The same Vallejo matt varnish I bought for the previous project.

Result

Of course I carried the box to work as soon as it was done, according to my plan and of course I proudly showed it around. Now my b&w Nuka-Cola -themed water bottle looks pretty poor. I guess I just have to obtain a glass bottle and a colour-printed label because war. War never changes.

It only has Strepsils inside. They don't give you +2P +2I and +1C nor are they addictive.