Everything before it’s done.
Coming into a backlog of photos and posts here…the basecoat of my Forge World Flakk Gun. I’ve got pre-Astro photos and comments, mid-Astro photos and comments, POST Astro photos and comments. It’s a zoo.
But here’s a simple flakk gun base coat for you in the meantime. 🙂
Just noticed this draft sitting here…
Used masking tape on all of my bases. I airbrushed blue and green on the models, and wanted to maintain the nice white base that I was starting with on my bases.
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:
My plan is to airbrush 3 colours onto the models so I can start playing some games, and then get working on the details.
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.
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 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…
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.
I need another 4 Temple Guard to make my unit 24 – a 6×4 unit, and enough that in 8th edition (which we’ve been playing for years…) it has enough staying power to not wither and die in seconds without a Life Slann.
This has been a learning experience for sure…my painting style has changed so much in the last year that trying to re-create this paint job has been challenging. The primary problem — the white primer! (and I didn’t realize how much of a problem it was until tonight).
I went back and re-read all of my articles on painting Temple Guard from a few years ago to get a sense of what was going on. The first problem – all of the skin needed to be black so I could drybrush two layers of grey on top.
Solved that and put some more paint on, no problem. I got all of my base colours on and this morning I did a quick wash of a few colours to bring it down – my goal for OFCC (in 3 days) is to have them looking like they could hide in amongst the other 20, not necessarily to be done – and they need to be darker for that.
This evening I came home and they were bright. Hoooly. Bright. Really nice looking colours, Scab Red in particular is gorgeous with a darker shadow behind it and the white primer, but…no…these are dark models. I only had a half hour to paint tonight, so I slapped another coat of Badab over everything and tomorrow morning we’ll do some more hoping. 😛
White primer, it giveth and it taketh away!
I finished the smaller front part of the howdah tonight. No photos, it’s less interesting than the big section. 🙂
Started work on the crew and priest shortly after. Stuck to a piece of foam with blu-tac, they were painted Codex Gray and washed with Badab Black…to soon. Mephiston Red on the scales and Dwarf Bronze on the metal. I kind of want to wash the entire model with Badab…so now I wish I hadn’t done it to the skin already.
Today is my birthday!
I spent the day inside, painting, since I celebrated yesterday. 🙂 Finally screwed together the courage to finish the main part of the howdah for my stegadon!
The brass is Dwarf Bronze and Runefang Steel. The stone is Dheneb Stone, glazed with Bestial Brown and then Fortress Grey to bring the grey back in. The vines are Snot Green, glazed with Umbral Umber to try to make them a little bit dead.
The planets are a random assortment of bright colours, with other colours badly glazed on. Planets are messy things!
The black pillars I’m surprisingly happy with. I thought for sure this was a bad idea, but it worked out pretty good. I ended up following the “shiny stone” guide in the Skorne Hordes book. It says to paint all black, then mix some Coal Black in, which is a little bit green. Then mix in Menoth White Base, which is similar to Ushapti Bone. And then use Menoth White Highlight, or…White, to paint little dots around. After that, I painted ‘Ardcoat to make it shiny.
As a last step, I used some of the Secret Weapon weathering pigments to dirt up the place a bit. I used Green Earth and Sewage Muck on the stone, and dabbed some of the Sewage Muck onto the pillars, an attempt at growing moss and lichen.
Lastly I dullcoated the whole thing to try to fix the pigments. I’ve used the MIG pigment fixer on my tanks, and I usually end up with big tide marks. The Forge World Masterclass 2 claims that they just varnish over the pigments, so I gave that a try. Not bad! I had to re-apply the ‘ardcoat on the pillar a bit, but I’m happy with how it turned out.
I still have the front howdah bit, the ceremonial headdress for the steg, 4 crew and the priest to paint. Then 4 more Temple Guard and I’ll be ready for OFCC!
