Browsing Tag

bases

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.

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Stegadon Base: 3

Posted on December 9, 2012

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.

Work-in-progress

Stegadon base: 2!

Posted on November 23, 2012

Wanted to take a break from working on my Android app tonight, and thought I could gather the courage to paint my stegadon base. The problem is, that I’m pretty happy with how the sculpting went, so if I screw up the painting it’ll be tragic. Take heart and stare down the enemy!

I started by doing the part I knew I could do. Drybrush a Codex Grey and a Fortress Grey over the rocks. This is the colour scheme of the rest of my bases for my Lizards, so this was a foregone choice. I wanted the volcanic rock area to be mostly black, so I took some P3 paints of Thrallmar and Coal Black and highlighted that up. You can see the last layer of black here quite clearly at the lips of the channels.

Now we get into the scary part. I started with my Raphael brush, but felt it was to big for the job and dropped down to the GW Fine Detail. A good lot of Sunburst yellow later, and I have yellow rivers running through my base.

Next layer was a bunch of watered down Fiery Orange just above the top of the yellow. Because it’s watered, some of it flows into the yellow and the pigment spreads out to be a little transparent. After this dried, there were spots that looked a little “dry”, so I went over it with Badab Black, which I then took a wet brush and spread around in the channel. Effectively I watered down my wash.

Two last layers – a Baal Red wash over the top of the orange and the lip of the channels. This was somewhat plain, and I wanted a more obviously glowing effect. Heavily watered down some Blood Red and painted it over the area I had just washed, which gave a great looking effect!

Overall, I think that the lava looks ok, the big rocks look ok and the volcanic rock looks…eh. But the plus side is that I’ll have a giant dinosaur standing on top of it, so it’ll be fine. 😛 I’m not certain what I would do differently next time. I feel like there is to much black area, and that the bottom of the lava doesn’t look right. Maybe a little bit of water effect? That would be neat. Maybe if I tried to make a flowing texture with the putty? I won’t be doing this again for a while anyway, so it’s not a huge issue. 🙂

What will be interesting…my lizards are traditionally a Shadow Grey. That’s a lot of grey in one spot, even though it’s not the same colour. Any thoughts on how to resolve this problem? I’ll make something up if you don’t. 😛

Later!

Work-in-progress

Stegadon Base: 1

Posted on November 6, 2012

My Lizardmen have sort of a yellow/red and grey colour scheme going on. The idea was that it was volcanic/lava colours, to better blend into their natural environment. I’ve looked into “lava” bases before, and while I was able to find some that looked ok (most of them are for 40k…), I’ve never gone ahead and bought them.

A quick search last week showed me that I might be able to…make them myself. So here I am, testing this idea on the largest base I’ve got.

I started with more cork. After using it on my skirmisher movement trays, I’m pretty impressed with the stuff. It looks like rocks when you’re done! The only concern I still have is longevity – will it all last longer than a few days.

After the cork, I set about trying to emulate this YouTube video on making lava bases.

I got a box of Milliput, so I wouldn’t feel like I was mushing hundred dollar bills onto my base (in the form of GW modelling putty). It has a very different texture than the green stuff I’m used to using – I used the “standard” milliput and it’s much more grainy when you’re mixing it together. Comes off on your hands, almost like a flaky dough.

I mushed it on there and then tried to use my sculpting tool to smooth it all out. That didn’t work, so I ended up wetting my finger and using that. Worried about fingerprints? Me too. But the tool I have is to thin, and so it left edge marks where it depressed into the putty.

After I’d covered the base, I used the tool as shown in the video to cut in and pull the putty apart to create channels. Then I used my exacto blade to cut mini-channels.

Lastly I used some extra putty to build up a step on one of the cork pieces for the stegadon’s back foot – he’s kind of standing on a rock or something.

I want to paint this separate from the model, so now I’m thinking of how to attach them afterwards. Patrick says he hasn’t had any issues with this sort of thing, but I’m thinking I’ll try to pin it, and then glue the pin down after painting.

For colours, I was thinking: the rocks my usual drybrush fortress/codex grey, the puttied ground a darker grey/black and the channels a red/orange. I’m hoping to do some source lighting such that the edges of the channels can “glow” a bit, but we’ll see how successful that is.

I would love if you would give your opinion on colours! What would you do with this?

Thanks for reading!

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Skirmisher Movement Trays

Posted on November 4, 2012

I’ve been following this great blog recently by James Wappel. He has some absolutely fantastic painting on there, regularly, and recently a number of modelling projects as well. He’s working on a display tray for a tournament that he’s going to right now, which is a great read.

I read through most of his archives, and one of the posts was on skirmisher movement trays. I have this problem – whenever I move my skinks, I always end up breaking the laws of physics. I move one model at a time, each no more than 12 inches, and when I’m done, the unit is no longer in anything resembling a formation. Or if it is, I’ve moved several models 18 inches and cheated.

These were pretty simple to put together – most of the materials are at Michaels :). Matboard, cut with an exacto blade. Measure out your models bases with a half inch space between them. Pull apart pieces of cork as spacers and glue them down with hot glue. White glue sand down, and bingo-bango, you’ve got a movement tray. Repeat times 6.

I’m using them for 3 units of 11 skinks each right now, but I did them in groups of 3, so when I decide to play with Chameleons again I’ll be able to take units of 5 easily.

Primer was no problem, although I worried about the cork slightly…if it wasn’t actually cork…that foam stuff melts under primer. Drybrush my two greys, sprinkle a little dead grass on it. Done!

Thanks for reading!

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