This is just as much hobby as the rest of this stuff…Patrick came over Monday and we worked to fit our board into a board that would meet the Alaska Airlines Checked Baggage Requirements (less than 62 linear inches…).
He brought over a bicycle box and cut the shit out of it!
Wrapped the board itself in bubble wrap. We decided that the crystal labyrinth and castle (which is now finished!!) belonged in a separate piece of luggage, since they were still to tall and breakable.
Found some photos in my upload folder…turns out these are a few steps back in my plaguebearer work.
You’ll have noticed last post that I own a Dremel. I originally bought it so that I could cut up plasticard and MDF board easily, and that’s how I used it on this project.
The portal is just two pieces of fairly thick plasticard.
To give the vertical piece some stability and strength, I pinned it three times across it’s length. I glued the base to 2 pieces of 50mm bases, which is how many plaguebearers it is supposed to represent.
This part was scary. I mean…I have a lot of bloodletter models kicking around my bitz box, but if this hadn’t worked I wasn’t certain what else I would do to get the effect properly! I used an old GW hand saw down the center of this model to split it into two.
Glue both sides of the model appropriately on either side of the portal, and you have one model entering and exiting from a portal!
I’ll have some more photos of these guys…finished…in a day or two!
Funny, “Oh hell..”. I had finished the conversion of Skulltaker. Carefully filed off the Khorne symbols, created a little Nurgle crest on his chest, done my best putty work on the neck and making sure the head looked awesome. Everything was exactly how I wanted it.
Except that he was supposed to have a banner. Damnit.
If you look at the model, you can see that there isn’t really a great place for a banner to go. I had a little panic moment – what was I going to do? I took to the internet to see about solving my problem, when an idea came to me from my Ork Warboss in Mega Armour – attach the banner to his backpack (or something). I quickly found this stunning example of nurglings (scroll down 5 photos). I sculpted a similar work of art, stuck it on an Ork shoulderpad, glued a little Goblin banner in it’s little LEGO-like hand, and BAM, instant BSG.
Despite the accidental nature of this conversion, I think it’s fantastic. A touch of whimsy in an otherwise Very Serious Army. 🙂
A small preview of the conversion I’m planning for my plaguebearers. I had hoped to find a ton of the ymargl heads from the Genestealer box, but they are very difficult to come by – only two heads per box and I don’t know enough Tyranid players! Instead I went to ChapterHouse Studios and bought a ton of their metal knock-off heads. I don’t think they are as nice as the GW ones, but…they exist, and didn’t cost $5+ per head, so…I’m in.
The guy in the back is lying down because he’s to top-heavy to stand. Something I’ll have to correct for when I put them on square bases.
I’ve wanted to do a daemon army for many years, and with the new daemon book out and (…previously…) no hobby projects on the go, I decided to convert a Herald.
Trying out some of the Wappel basing techniques, with the cork on the bottom and the baked sculpey on top and the oxid paste. It seems as though to get the “snap” look on the edges of the sculpey, you have to get exactly the right temperature, and so this stuff just bent and twisted when I tried to get it to look right. A little hobby knife and some paste later, and it’s all good.
With the lizard release upcoming, I feel like this guy and his troops might take the back seat again…
I had mostly finished building my converted Stegadon a few months ago, just before the Adepticon/Dreadball/Blood Bowl frenzy overtook me. Now I’m starting to get planning about OFCC in June, and really want to play with the Engine+Carny dino list in their 2800 team tournament!
Since these are draft photos, they won’t be using any of the photography techniques I want to apply to the final images. 😛
The completely assembled Engine.
I’ve built the steg so that it disassembles really nice, for a few reasons. Partially because I’ve built a giant howdah and will need to fit it into a case somehow! And partially so that if I want to play with a regular Ancient Steg (or regular Steg, if they get ok in the next book) that I have that option.
The howdah is built from pieces of baked sculpey shaped into carved stone blocks, as well as the top piece of the Empire Hurricanum. I tried to use more from the Hurricanum, but it’s just such a ridiculous model and so huge compared to the smaller steg that I had to break it down to just the middle bit.
Each of the skinks has pin-wires glued to their feet so they can be removed easily.
The priest is the skink chief model that is holding a heart in one hand, and I gave him a staff to make him more priestly. I love most of the chief models, and it’s sad that they aren’t viable in the army! He’s had a bit of the same mummified wrappings that the Temple Guard have – as the favoured priest, he was buried with the Pahaux slann and his bodyguard upon the slann’s death.
All the bits laid out. Left to right: Howdah back, 4 skinks, priest, howdah front, steg ceremonial plate and the steg itself.
A closer look at the howdah back bit.
Also have 4 more temple guard to paint, and 2 Dreadball teams lined up. I bought Dreadball Veermyn at Adepticon and I’m stoked to try to play with them!
I decided to paint all of the basecoat of my team before moving onto the highlights. I usually paint an entire colour at once, but I’ve read that this way you can judge all the colours at once. I primed white, and since everything looks darker next to white, it would be harder to tell if the colour you’re painting is actually the shade you want.
So here we are – Codex Grey, Mephiston Red (a lovely colour, by the way), Bleached Bone, Dwarf Bronze and the Goblin Green bases. That’s it – no shading, no highlighting. Just some water and some pigment and me trying to cover the white.
I haven’t painted Goblin Green bases for years! Since I discovered that they were horrendously boring.
Also you can see the Krox conversion I did here. A couple Ogre fists and a lot of hobby knife later and you have one awesome Krox bruiser!
Many years ago, I was playing Blood Bowl with a great group of people at the PR GW. It was awesome, but I was playing a Vampire team, and they are absolute shit. Garrett was playing Ogres/Halflings, but had just started putting his Lizardmen on the table in Fantasy. Dreams appeared in my head – lizardmen…blood bowl…
Years pass. Somehow I paint up a lizardman Fantasy army. I love it.
I buy the Blood Bowl PC game on Steam and play lizards there. It’s a great game.
Adepticon is coming up. I’m convinced to go, but there is a massive wait-list for the Fantasy tournament that my buddies are going to. I put my name on it, but I’m not convinced. I look at the schedule of things…and decide — fuck the Fantasy tournament, I’m going to do everything else. So I set my sights on the Stupor Bowl as my weekend game. The Vampire’s won’t do, they make me so bitter, but thoughts of Lizardmen dance in my head…
So I get Darren at Strategies to order in the original Lizardmen Blood Bowl team because I think they look cool. I get the models…ehh…the saurus look awesome, but the skinks are a little lame. And the saurus are about the same size at modern skinks. I look around at what other people on the internet are doing…and I find some amazing examples. Poke through my bitz closet to find that I have a ton of lizard bits kicking around…and now it’s on.
Ignore the stray cat hair…
I realized recently that my sculpting wasn’t going to get any better if I didn’t actually do it. So here I am, sculpting some more things. A few hats, and just did that loin-cloth thing. Baby steps, but maybe I’ll be good at it one day?
More inspiration from my new hero! He uses the baked sculpey in a lot of different ways…but I’m just a beginner, so I decided to make stone blocks with it. I didn’t screw up…but I didn’t do it right either.
You can buy this stuff from Michaels for a few bucks, in any colour you like. I choose white…because…I did.
Open the box and it’s this strange stuff that’s a little brittle to start with. Roll it around and when it warms up in your hands it becomes super pliable. I spent a few minutes shaping it into a long and flat piece of stone for my stegadon Engine of the Gods howdah. When I was happy with the general shape, I used my regular GW sculpting tool and some water to flatten out the fingerprint marks. Then I took the end of one of my paint brushes and rolled it around to create a smooth stone-like texture for it.
Cat hair comes free of charge on all my models…
This part was all easy…
It says to turn the oven at 275F and bake for 15 minutes. So I put it on a piece of aluminum foil and tossed it in there. 15 minutes later, I pull it out and check the consistency. Pretty soft…it says you should bake longer for thicker pieces, which this is, so I put it back in for another 15. 45 minutes later I pull it out and it’s still soft. So I turn the temperature up. 15 minutes later, it’s smoking. But still soft. Another 15 and it’s still smoking…and still soft. I think it was in the oven for almost 2 hours by the time I was done. Still soft. But I had to go to bed. It was hard in the morning and it looked like this.
This thing is going to be so awesome…
It’s supposed to be plain white…but it’s stone-like, and it’ll be painted over, so I call it done. 😛
I did two more pieces the next day (not shown) and put them on for the higher temperature for 15 minutes and they were smoking when I pulled them out. Slightly less dark, but still more pink than white. So…maybe 275F at 15 minutes is the right thing to do.
I thought I was done after the last post. But a few things happened. First – I let it sit on my desk for a few weeks. And second, I’ve been reading Mr. Wappel’s blog daily, and he’s been painting some lava bases. My base is mostly black. It’s not mostly lava. There’s no majesty to it! The combination of looking at it every day, plus looking at a better done one every day, made me come back to it.
The first thing I did was re-lighten the lava parts. Last time I had black washed this section to give it some depth, but it was to dark. So I heavily watered down some Cygnus Yellow and some Blazing Orange and went to town in the cracks. I brought the orange up the edges of the cracks a bit, trying to bring some more light to these sections, since they are pretty small compared to the rest of the base.
The next thing I had to do was to give some variation to the black parts. I had previously painted this with two different colours of black, but this wasn’t useful at all. I took Khador Red Base, Scorched Brown, Cryx Bane Base and mixed them with a lot of water and washed it over all of the black. Then I added a little bit of the Blazing Orange, trying to bring the lightest parts and the darkest parts together. I still wanted those red and ragged edges, but I wanted more!
I mixed some of the Cryx Bane Base and Bleached Bone and dotted my grey rocks with them. The two greys I had previously used were the same colour, but different shades. Now I have little specks of slightly different colours in these areas, and I think it’s more interesting. I took a similar wash, with less Bone in it and washed the black areas with it, trying to get more “rock” out of it. After I’d done this, I didn’t have enough red, so I washed with Khador Red Base and Scorched Brown again.
