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Craig

Horror unit

Posted on July 31, 2013

I’m taking part in the WCP Escalation League for the next few months. I usually avoid these sorts of things like the plague (har), since I prefer to paint on my own schedule. But I figured it would be good motivation for a bit, and after I saw the scoring scheme that Dan had cooked up, I was inspired. I <3 games, and he’s just made painting and converting into a new one!

Here’s the unit. Two pieces of unit filler, the one on the right is the same base as the last one, but with 3 horrors on it instead of tentacles. The Herald is in the front of it.

I had a unit of horrors in my Warriors of Chaos army many years ago, and despite painting them in a (bare adequate) rainbow of colours, they still looked like a uniform, ranked, Warhammer unit. I’m hoping that the staggered 50mm bases will break up the uniformity a bit.

The unit.

I really like the older horror models, but had to use a new one for the musician. Downside of the older metal is that they have tabs, and I was making my own bases. I was holding the two pieces in my hands when I had a brilliant idea – sculpey can be cut and sculpted! So I made my own slotta-bases!

After gluing the sculpey to the cork, I glued two different sizes of hobby rocks to the bases first with super glue and then a layer of watered down white glue. When that dried, I painted the oxid paste over the bases to get rid of any flat areas, except for places on top of the sculpey.

Custom slotta-base, old metal horror and a bare base.

Next steps:

Tomorrow I’m going to do a colour test on the tentacle unit filler. Hopefully it looks great. >.>
Glue 3 Flamers to another 3 bases that I made.
Start painting!

My plan is to airbrush 3 colours onto the models so I can start playing some games, and then get working on the details.

Work-in-progress

Daemon unit filler

Posted on July 27, 2013

I was going to assemble some horrors tonight from the models I stripped the other week, unfortunately my bitz box had other plans. Today I learned that while I have a large number of bases, I have only a single spare 25mm one, seen in the photo below.

My only spare 25mm base. A few chunks of baked sculpey for horror bases. Oh, and what I did tonight instead of assembling horrors.

I took two of the tentacle bits from the Tzeentch Burning Chariot and glued them onto a base such that they became tentacle unit fillers, instead of tentacle chariot bits.

The base is a re-formulation of the one I did for the Herald. I thought he was standing to high up on the base, so I made the sculpey thinner this time. When I mentioned my problem with the sculpey bending, Wappel said I probably didn’t have the temperature right, so I tried it at 250F instead of the recommended 275F. Still bendy, but I don’t have an oven thermometer, so who knows what is really going on there.

I also left some room on the base itself to glue some bits of rock down, to create some interest that wasn’t cork+scupley. The problem with unit filler, is that it’s lazy. The glorious thing about unit filler is that it’s lazy. But you have to put some effort in anyway. 🙂

My hope for my big unit of plaguebearers is to convert them in such a way that they don’t look like plaguebearers, or bloodletters, but could be used as either if the mood struck me. My colour scheme will not be god specific and will be similar across the army, and similarly I imagine that this 50mm square could be put into any daemon unit I put on the table.

After the glue dries, my plan is to re-oxid paste the area a bit, to create more cohesion between some of the rocks. And go buy 25mm bases so I can actually put some horrors together. I think I have like 40 horrors in my house…and only half that planned for the army.

Work-in-progress

Herald of Tzeentch – Chaaaaange!!

Posted on July 26, 2013

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…

Work-in-progress

Moar dakka!!

Posted on July 26, 2013

I usually make a significant change to my 40k army each year for Astronomi-con. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do such a thing this year – not only haven’t I had any strong Orky urges recently, but I also thought my list did alright!

I looked through their brand new comp system and calculated out what my list would be – an 18. Not bad, but there was a single unit that was losing me 2 points. I looked into how I could get those 2 points back. A bit of research into numerous IA books, and I came up with the Flakk Trakk, an armor 12/11/10 vehicle that can move Flat Out and still shoot it’s Flakk Gun (Heavy 4, S7, AP4, Skyfire, Interceptor) at a flier. Given the number of croissants and turkeys I saw at Adepticon in April, this started to sound like a brilliant idea. And even better – I had a Flakk Gun model from my Forge World order at PAX last year!

I’ve got less than a week to finish this thing off. I’ve been focusing on the Escalation League this month, thinking that I’d have lots of time to finish the gun. Whoops! This may be a little tighter than I like…

Musings & Meta

New lizardmen!

Posted on July 24, 2013

Hopefully those who care have already seen these photos! New lizardmen are in the latest White Dwarf issue and should be release Real Soon Now(tm)! I’m so very excited! My initial reaction was cool towards the models. The photos didn’t look that good overall, but there was definitely enough there to get excited about a few things – terradons for one, and the bastilidon looked neat with more Old One Technology on it.

But upon seeing clearer photos…I want everything.

Help me, readers – what should I buy and paint first?

Musings & Meta

Temple Guard – AWESOME

Posted on July 14, 2013

This is the most badass drawing in existence. I don’t remember where I’ve seen this before, but I have a strong and currently unfulfillable desire to model and paint this guy.

Work-in-progress

Temple Guard – Banner Mk2

Posted on July 12, 2013

I had originally planned my Temple Guard banner to be modular. This was mostly because I didn’t have a plan for making one until after I’d finished the unit, but once I was done my original one I realized that I could easily make a new one for it.

The Thursday night before OFCC I scrambled to use some Sculpey to create a big slug of a banner and pin it so that it would fit into my banner-bearers hands. I primed it Thursday night and planned on painting it at the tournament. I usually eschew last-minute painting, priding myself on being good at time management, but this was a special case.

CHOP!

My painting station in the Red Lion.

Technique

More airbrush

Posted on July 10, 2013

I bought some airbrush things.

I bought two things of airbrush-specific paint, and a large thing of airbrush medium. Reading a bit today, I discovered that the problem I was having (which you probably couldn’t see in the last photo) was because of the surface tension of the water I used to thin my paint with. Droplets are formed when there is to much water. I could add less water…or solve the problem by throwing more tools at it. 🙂

I did a bunch of tests tonight, which again, the camera does not properly show. >.<

Left: Pthalo Blue Airbrush Paint, Center: P3 Exile Blue+Airbrush Medium, Right: Altdorf Blue+Airbrush Medium

The airbrush blue is very striking! You can see some “basic highlighting” here, but I think that’s just because I’m painting over top of my previous test paint jobs which had dried with some darker sections and some lighter sections because of the water content and how the pigment moved around with it. The right two look green…but I feel like I should take new photos because I’m looking at them on my desk here, and they are definitely blue – damn white balance!

Something that was nice about the airbrush thinner was that it came out of the pot in small droplets so you can control how much goes into the airbrush. Also, there were no tiny droplet puddles formed on the models, so I call that a success.

Left and Center: Scaly Green+Airbrush Thinner, Right: Pthalo Green Airbrush Paint

The second part of my model test was to apply some green, this failed quite a bit. I have an older Scaly Green and it was dry. I tried to liven it up with some of the Golden Matte Medium, plus the Airbrush Thinner, but it doesn’t look like it did anything – on the camera or in real life. My second test was to use the Airbrush Paint Green…which has the word “transparent” at the top of the bottle. >.> Not…intentional. I applied this several times to the bright blue model, but it kept pooling in the recesses (bad) so I kept wiping it off with a paper towel. Didn’t notice it said transparent until I looked at these photos now…whoops.

Having said that, I’m liking how the GW paints are turning out, I just need a modern colour that isn’t dried up! The airbrush paint really is that shiny! At least with the GW or P3 with the airbrush thinner it comes out semi-gloss, much easier to fix with a dullcoat layer at the end.

The next thing to figure out, is now that I’ve got my colours and such, how do I plan on highlighting? With the ork plane, I could just mix in more bright blue and it highlighted very nicely. This is a much smaller application, with fewer sharp edges. I could try the same, or I could accept that the airbrush is applying a base coat and shade with a brush from there. If I’m using GW paints, this is also a bit easier since I can use my techniques as normal.

Technique

Addendum: Stripping daemons

Posted on July 9, 2013

I think what happened with my hands is that the glue from the models melted. While I was brushing the paint off, the glue seeped onto my fingers in a really fine layer. Two days later (I spread out my posts, this one is actually real-time) my fingers are still coated with glue and the skin underneath is still growing and should be discarding dead skin but isn’t, because of the layer of glue. Gross. Tried to take an emery board or something to them, but ended up just scraping at my fingertips with a fingernail while watching TV. This morning they are much better. 🙂

Technique

Stripping daemons

Posted on July 8, 2013

I haven’t stripped models in years. I think I remember why. These are the last generation metal horrors and flamers. I usually don’t like “older” models, but in this case I feel like these models are still just as awesome looking as the current plastic ones.

Empty bottle of Pine Sol, the only water-tight container I could find that I didn’t care about, a new toothbrush bought just for stripping and my hobby knife.

It’s a painful process.

Submerge the models in Pine Sol (or your stripper of choice) for “some significant time”. I tend to do more than 24 hours.
Pull them out of the Pine Sol, put on a movie you only need the sound for, get an old toothbrush (“Firm”) and scrub those suckers.
Rinse and repeat (literally) until all the paint is gone.

I’ve heard people using brake fluid as well, but I’ve never used that before.

I put on Avengers, and the next day, Avengers with Joss Wedon’s commentary (still an awesome movie, even after I’ve watched it 6-7 times). I’ve scrubbed so hard that my fingers look like utter crap several days later.

Most of the paint is now gone from the models, but there is still some paint, in some recesses. Ugh. I’m hoping that I can catch the rest of it while I re-assemble the models, because any paint left over after priming will have that section of primer falling off.

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