Everything before it’s done.
I put some newspaper down, put on the Game of Thrones commentary and started painting.
Just some broad strokes to start.
And when that dried, I did a ton of drybrushing.
And then even more drybrushing.
There’s still sections that need another highlight, and we’re going to wash down the cobblestone to give it more contrast, (and the pencils need just plain painting), but it’s definitely coming along!
I lost track of the part number, and they don’t matter anyway.
This thing is now more Oxid Paste than anything else. Here’s a photo from after I took off all of the heavy objects. It’s glued to the hardboard fairly well.
We got together again tonight and I worked on a backing while Patrick carved out his castle some more. The castle is amazing. Just you wait until you see it!
We took it and my airbrush downstairs and started to spray it black. We had been looking for a product called Krylon H2O that Kas had recommended, but we couldn’t find it in the city so we decided to just spray with acrylic paint and hope. Most of the board is covered in texture anyway.
I have a confession to make. My airbrush is expensive, full of effort and more often than not doesn’t do what I wanted it to do. I can count 3 times when it succeeded at the task I gave it. My ork plane, some terrain I was spraying random earth colours on, and this one time I sprayed Jamie’s tanks. Every other times, the paint is to thick, or to thin, it runs all over the place, gets clogged up in the nozzle, or I’ve lost a part and didn’t know it or it just gets everywhere. It takes a while to take out, and a while to clean up and put away. My airbrush embarrasses me.
The problem this time, was that even once I had a decent mix of the paint, there was no coverage. It was either doing solid thin lines, or transparent medium-sized lines and there was no way we were going to cover the board with it.
I know you can get different sized needles and nozzles for different applications, and I’m wondering if I have a particularly thin set up right now.
We quickly adjusted, putting the airbrush down, grabbing a container lid and our largest brushes and got to work painting black everywhere. In the morning I pulled out my spray primer and went outside to cover up the areas that we’d missed.
We’re ready to put some colours on this thing!
The ongoing adventures of display board!
Since the back half of the board is entirely rocks and gravel, I used a good amount of Oxid Paste over it. I mixed this with some small stones to create more texture, but otherwise this half is pretty barren.
The front half I glued down a bunch of cobblestone plasticard and then filled the gaps with a combination of the Vallejo Black Lava and Oxid Paste.
Patrick came over this afternoon and we set to work!
We effectively carved foam all afternoon. I took a few pieces and carved up a long stone fence. He built a castle thing. I don’t have any photos of the castle thing, because he keeps taking it with him when he leaves, but trust me, it’s pretty badass! We were both impressed with how easy the foam was to carve and create useful shapes out of.
At the end, we glued our base foam to a piece of MDF hardboard and put a bunch of heavy things on top of it.
I don’t even know what’s going on with this model anymore. I think it’s going to be cool when I’m done, but right now I’m torn between thinking it’s the worst thing I’ve ever painted, and loving the shit out of it because it’s the worst thing I’ve ever painted. It’s not done. It’s still ok.
I started with Boltgun Metal over just about everything. After the Rail Golem skin, I wanted to start darker so I didn’t have to bring it down as much. I did a layer of Guilliman Blue along the bottom edges of things, and crevasses, Lamenters Yellow at the top of edges and…well…it looked like ass. So I went and did some edges with the Boltgun, and Bloodletter in the middle of things and Soft Body Black in crevasses and…well…it’s a mess. But from a distance, it might be a good looking mess. A little purple. Or blue. Or…red. Only Tzeentch knows. Or Khorne. Maybe sleep will help it out. My sleep. Of course.
The gun is obviously a giant fleshy thing. If I’m lucky, when all is said and done, no one will look to closely at the metal. Giant fleshy gun calls to you…
This is my priority this week. Get this done, and the rest of life is easy sailing.
Patrick and I got together again and made a pact to focus on getting this display board done. We leave for AdeptiCon in 4 weeks, and that’s much to close for my tastes! (At least it isn’t 3 weeks…which is what I thought it was until I looked just now!) (Also, this post was written on the 6th :))
Our last work on this thing has been sitting around for many weeks, while we both prepared for other things and I think I went to Mexico in the mean time as well.
We each got to work building the “tall thing” on our respective sides of the board. We had decided last year that “tallness” was a property we wanted, as tall things stand out and are looked at in more depth. A tall thing says “Come over” and it says “look closer”. It is a form of advertising that short things do not have.
Patrick is building a tower/castle/gatehouse thing with pink foam. I’m building the entrance to Tzeentchs’ crystal labyrinth, a part of the fluff that I’ve always though was super cool. Like Tzeentch has a Fortress of Solitude. I stole the pencil idea of Mark/Mach_5’s Rasputina crew, and apparently he stole it from someone else.
Board in progress.
PENCILS FOR THE PENCIL GOD
This is going to be amazing.
The taller elements are removable, for both ease of transport and also re-usability. We’ll be getting together again soon to continue, as we have a lot of work to go!
I picked up the Veer-myn Booster Pack the other day, as the last few models I need to get my AdeptiCon models done. I opened the box and found 3 of the now well known Mantic baggies inside. The sprue-less plastic is nice for packing and shipping. Hell for figuring out what pieces go with what model! Thankfully they have done a superb job of ensuring that the joins for each piece are different – you literally can’t put the wrong tail on the wrong rat.
I thought I’d write and post a photo of the final sorting. The easiest bag is the Keeper, who is in the bottom left of the photo. There are 2 bags that are identical, containing 1 prone marker, 1 alternative guard and 1 alternative striker. The other 4 models in this photo are from 1 of these bags. (I opened the other bag before realizing that I didn’t want to do that…)
I’m playing in a Dreadball one-day league this weekend (or rather, I’m organizing it…) so I’m hoping to figure out roughly how many extra models I’ll need for the Adepticon League in a Night event. I want to get the Keeper done, at a minimum, because I love the idea of a rat who’s sole purpose is to knock people over, take the ball and then punt it into the other end zone. YAY RATS!
I also constructed a name for my team — the Cheddar City Blade Runners. I think it’s a delicious mix of goofiness and sci-fi tropes. Now they all need names. 🙂
(This message has been pre-recorded for your reading pleasure, but I’m probably back in town by now…)
The last thing I built was…
Well, not this. Patrick built this for me. When we dreamed up our Adepticon team army, he was going to do Tomb Kings and I was doing Daemons. We had an elaborate conversion of a necrosphinx planned, which was going to be absolutely brilliant and gorgeous. As the plan continued, Patrick decided that “Chaos Empire” or, potentially, just “Chaos Warriors” would be his team army. The conversion was going to be for a Skull Cannon, and I still needed one, so he built me a Dark Elf Cauldron of Blood with a giant fucking Tyranid gun in the middle.
I built some bases for it. The Cauldron is on a giant base that’s huge, and the Skull Cannon is a chariot base, so I built up from a chariot base to something that this conversion would sit on.
As I was building this massive base, I realized that we had decided that the Skull Cannon would sit on his side of the table we were building. So I built yet another base…with the same technique as I’d previously built cobblestone.
I won’t be doing this technique of cobblestone for the entire display board…
(This message has been pre-recorded for your reading pleasure!)
After my paint-fest for a week or so, I didn’t feel like painting anymore, so I built a ton of things.
Rail Golem for Malifaux!
I used this guy once the other day. I’m trying to find a replacement for Miss Step, who I feel isn’t performing well. I don’t know if this guy will, but he was fun to use. Hoping to use him some more before Adepticon, just in case I want to bring him.
Deadzone Reb humans!
I’m playing in an informal Deadzone campaign. Last game I played I lost 7/8 members of my strike force who went into the game. I made a mistake. My force went under 70pts, so High Command sent me 3 free humans…who are at -1 dice for everything for the next game. But I needed some more humans first. No problem…I bought 2 Reb faction starters and a booster, so I’ve got a few humans kicking around the house
Just a ton of Dreadball MVPs.
I’m running a Dreadball tournament next month, so I thought I’d have a few MVPs available for that. Not certain if I’ll paint them all, but I wouldn’t mind getting at Gabe and Reek at least, because they are cool. Slippery Joe too…who knows. 🙂
I did this part on my own – getting together can be difficult, and there wasn’t much that needed doing aside from filling in all of the cracks in the pink foam.
I picked up a product called Model Lite from Magic Box Hobbies. It’s an interesting product with a texture a little like grainy CoolWhip. I tried to apply it using some sort of tool, but in the end just used my fingers. It dries and hardens in less than 10 minutes, creating a plaster layer on my fingers, but it washed off with soap and water no problem.
Patrick is planning to put a sloped cobblestone road on his section, so I carefully carved a piece of foam out so it would fit.
On Patrick’s and mine drive back from AdeptiCon last year, we had the most amazing conversation, planning and scheming about what we would do next year. That’s…this year. April 3rd-6th, specifically. I’m a planner. I love to plan things, it gives me a little thrill to have my little schedule in mind and to check items off of it. The biggest and riskiest item still on that list is the display board we had planned out. I called him up, and we got together to get some work done on this thing!
Our original plan was that he would be playing Tomb Kings, partnered with my new Daemons and the TK would be sacrificing things to Chaos, and we’d have this 300-like pit in the middle of the board, with men being thrown into it and come out the other side and have both sides of the board be reflections of each other.
He changed his mind a few times, and is now working on a Chaos-themed Empire army. Like Traitor Guard. Or maybe he’ll revert back to Warriors of Chaos. But he’s still thumbing through the TK book…either way, I’m bringing Daemons and we’re building this thing!
He’s been keeping a mini sketch book, which is pretty awesome to flip through, and has done a dozen drawings of what this board would look like. I wanted to put some foam on the table, put some models on the foam and really set down what we would do.
Measuring is good. You can see The Notebook (not related to the movie) just above the foam.
We’ve got a 3/4 inch piece of pink foam and a bunch of models. Took a sharpie to the foam and marked a bunch of things down.
I drew a slope up and some parts to cut out. Patrick drew unit placements, a side slope and a little ruin.
Many many many years ago, a good friend of mine and I built a ton of Necromunda terrain. We built a bunch of tall boards and a few short boards, and I ended up keeping the foam mountains we’d built for one of the short boards. It’s crap terrain, in hindsight, so I was super glad to be able to re-use it for this project. We cut it up and glued it down.
One of the things we learned from last year was that tall terrain catches more eyes. We’re flying down, so we can’t build a 6 foot tall Chaos Dwarf cave with an idyllic fishing village on top of it…but we can build some stuff that lies flat, or can be packed into a suitcase or similar and get the height through modularity.
We’ve got some height to build.
Stay tuned, I’ll be posting on this incredible project regularly, and this hobby duo is going to produce something absolutely amazing!