Browsing Tag

conversion

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

And now for something completely different – lizardman scar-vet battle standard

Posted on June 1, 2012

The tank weathering takes a small break (I have another 3-4 tanks to go through before the end of August…), before the flyers come out (ZOMFG, want!) to do some touch-ups on a model I’ve been slowly working on for a little bit now.

It was a few months ago that I realized that I really wasn’t enjoying playing my Slann list. I don’t like the magic phase in Fantasy, and I prefer to boycott it whenever possible. Game balance makes this difficult, and so I had been playing a magic heavy list since Throne of Skulls last year. A random comment on our way back from GottaCon made me realize where my heart truly is – DINOSAUR! (you can see him in the title banner for this blog!)

BSBs are pretty much mandatory in 8th Ed, even for an army typically known for not needing a LD bonus, so I set about making a list that worked for my playstyle and desires.

Enter – the dinobus! The center piece of this 1500 point army, the dinobus is roughly 530 points of 14 Cold one Cavalry, and 135 points of Cold One riding Scar Vet banner bearer! (yes, the dinobus is roughly half of my total army, and isn’t very hard to kill. I don’t care – it’s awesome!)

I wanted to do a conversion for the BSB, and so here we have it. This is draft 2. Draft one was about 20% less awesome – with the base being very plain and the cold one mouth closed and not at all ready for battle. RAWR!

The headdress that came with this model was a hideous lightning bolt thing.

Thanks for reading!

Work-in-progress

Ork Warboss 1

Posted on January 7, 2011

I’m re-jigging my Ork army a little bit in the face of Derrick having played and provided input on it.

Prepare yourself…for Dug’s latest creation!

I’m going to take one of these…and put a warboss in it. I don’t quite know how yet, but that’s usually the best part of being an Ork. 😀

WAAAAAAGGHHHH!!!!

(also the Kroxigors are making fine progress, just haven’t posted any photos recently – I should make time to do that, since they have several layers on them now).

Work-in-progress

Ork Battlewagon 2

Posted on July 25, 2010

This part was less heartbreaking, and more difficult – how to fit the GW add-on kit deffrolla onto the Rhino. The deffrolla fits perfectly onto the stock cab of the battlewagon…no attachment points on the Rhino!

When I started out, I was fiddling around with placement, and I found a spot that looked like it was almost as if GW had intended on the deffrolla being attached to a Rhino in this way. The spots where I glued it – if the Rhino had been a quarter inch higher on the trukk bed, and the deffrolla been a quarter inch thinner, it would have been absolutely perfect.

As it was, I had to shim. Cut a door in half and stick it under the rolla attachment points. Cut up some sprue and glue it beside the attachment to add extra stability.

Added an Ork glyph or two to each side door, and voila! It’s done.

I will be adding on extra grots and orks and things later. I learned that lesson from the last trukk I assembled – don’t glue things inside until you have them painted, or they will look like ass!

Painting

I read this GW article on painting a battlewagon. Pretty good, with some good tips on rusting/corrosion. I have a different paint scheme in mind, but that article will be sitting in a Firefox tab for the next few weeks.

The Rhino will be my standard Regal Blue, with Space Marine Blue highlights. Not certain what other colours to use, but I think I’ll be using the technique mentioned in that article on some darker grays or reds.

Work-in-progress

Ork Battlewagon 1

Posted on July 23, 2010

With the last of my Fantasy tournaments for the summer over with, it’s time to change focus to my Orks again. I have some dethkoptas and a battlewagon to finish. I’m prioritizing the battlewagon for a couple reasons:

  1. If it goes no further than it is right now, it isn’t playable. The dethkoptas are playable, and look mostly done.
  2. For some reason I’ve constructed a barrier of fear around the dethkoptas. I really don’t want to paint them anymore.
  3. Battlewagon == AWESOME.

With that decision made, we pick up the project where I last left it – mostly assembled.

The Dilemma

Most of my trukks are Space Marine Rhinos that have been caved in, sawed in half, guns glued on randomly, etc. It’s a lot of fun. However, for this model I won a Battlewagon model and so wanted to use it instead of the Land Raider that I would have used otherwise.

I started to assemble it a couple months ago. I was amazed at the quality of the construction. Everything fit together perfectly. The instructions were complete and useful. The model was beautiful. It was a work of a divine being, and not the Games Workshop that I’ve come to know and love.

Which left me with an issue – how can you cut/carve/slice/scratch the work of the divine?! I didn’t want to convert it. I wanted to put it together in its pristine beauty and leave it for all the world to admire.

But…that would go against my theme. I asked a bunch of my gaming friends what I should do, and none of them could truely understand the nature of my problem – they all said (paraphrasing) “carve it up!” They thought I was asking for conversion advice, and not looking for permission to leave it as it was “no, it’s ok Craig, you don’t have to follow your theme this time…my that’s a beautiful tank you have there.”

The Solution

Time. I left it for a month. It’s still a brilliant model, but I don’t feel so bad about slicing it up. woot! Lets get cutting!

The primary conversion on this thing was to take a hack saw and slice a Rhino into 2/3rds, then glue it where the cab of the Battlewagon usually sits. For this stage, everything else is stock Battlewagon.

The Next Steps

  1. Figure out where to place a couple guns. The stock tank has gun turrets on top of the cab, but that won’t work out perfectly anymore.
  2. Figure out how to attach the deffrolla. Yeah, this bad boy needs a rolling pin.
  3. Decide what options I’m going to give it standard, and provide magnet attachment points for those. Think about future options and see if I can’t provide attachment points for those as well. This is hard, since it requires reading the future and I’m not so awesome at that.
  4. Orkify the cab.
  5. See if the Animosity Orks will fit in the trunk. gwahaha.

Work-in-progress

Lizardmen Temple Guard 1

Posted on May 31, 2010

Lizardmen are my current favourite Fantasy army and, even better, the first army to have had an updated army book that didn’t ruin the army for me (O&G, Chaos both ruined…).

I was reading the Warseer forums one random day, and came across a some random person commenting on how he was thinking of converting up some undead Temple Guard. This idea just latched onto my brain and wouldn’t let go. I picked up a Lord Kroak model and painted him up, purchased some Temple Guard…who then sat there on my shelf for several months waiting for me to do something.

You see – I’ve never worked with green stuff in any significant way. I’m more of an Orky sort of converter – grab some random bits and glue them together until it looks mean and green. This project would require slightly more finesse.

I asked a friend of mine to show me how to putty up some bandages – his work is brilliant. He took one and did it in about a minute, and it looked gooooood. Damn him and his crazy skillz. But you know what? It turns out that making fake bandages with green stuff is a lot easier than you would think.

I’ve been working on these guys really slowly for almost a year (rough guess). Most of that time was puttying one model at a time, once a week at the local GW if I couldn’t get a game in on Fantasy night. They are a long-term project so far…but I’m planning on using them at a couple tournaments I’m going to this summer, so they need to be finished “soon”.

Paint Scheme

  • Codex Gray drybrushed, with Fortress Gray overtop on the skin. The point is to make them look old and dusty. My other lizards are a similar shade, but darker.
  • Graveyard Earth bandages. No idea what I’m doing from here, but biege is the plan.

Conversion

  • The bandages were relatively easy. Roll out a line of putty, flatten it and then wrap it around various body parts. Make sure you keep your putty tool wet (I use saliva…despite that being a potentially unhealthy idea). Once it’s wrapped, draw lines in the putty with the knife edge to make it look wrinkled. Rinse and repeat. A lot of work, but not hard.
  • While transporting, the banner fell off of the banner-bearer. About a year ago I had been working on a hand-drawn design for a banner. I took this as a sign that I should put this design on this unit. We’ll see if I have time.