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. 🙂
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…
Have a moment at work to spare, so here’s the start.
We left Vancouver around 5pm on Wednesday, to head to Seattle for the night. The con started at 4pm on Thursday, and all flights that got there before 5pm were leaving at 6am from Vancouver (or Seattle), so we saved time and some money by leaving from Seattle instead. We saved about $200 each with this plan, mainly because we got a great deal on a hotel in Seattle because some family members of Patrick’s own a hotel that is about 10 minutes drive from the airport. Pretty awesome!
Getting down there was pretty uneventful, which is nice since the border wait can be lengthy at times. Patrick didn’t kill either of us while driving. We had some great conversation, and we checked in and got to sleep pretty easily. The next morning, we woke up at 4am. We ate leftover fried chicken for breakfast and it was glorious!
Get to Seatac, and because of excessive weather problems in Chicago, our flight was delayed by 3 hours. …I would have loved to have slept in for 3 hours. That 4 hour sleep was the beginning of con exhaustion for me. I tend to need 8 hours a night or I get a little wonky, and being at a gaming convention means that you prioritize the event over everything else (we’ll come back to this topic later). I managed to get an hour of sleep on the flight there so I’m almost human by the time we land.
I had a Necromunda tournament scheduled for 4pm that I had to miss, sine we landed around 5pm. Sucks, but we got to wander around and check things out instead. Lots of big rooms that were vibrating with gaming potential. A few smaller tournaments were running already. There was a vendor in one of the halls with big bins of bitz. Some people were playing the X-Wing with Star Trek models…and flying stands that were as tall as I am. We found some guys building a giant gargant. “Taking it to far” is the watchword for this event, and we had only just shown up with our naive smiles and wide eyes.
These guys were “taking it to far”. The center piece is a mini-TV that will be playing a music video. They were selling CDs done by the ork band.
WAAAGH!!
This place doesn’t have alcohol in their gas stations, unlike in Washington state, so we had a 15 minute walk to a liquor store, followed by a 15 minute walk back carrying a wine box full of beer. Heavy, but important to the weekend. I got an “Angry Orchard” cidar, which was delicious.
Back to our hotel and went to sleep – we have a Team Tournament to play in the morning!
I just found this draft that I had started in August…
After Astronomi-con, I’m usually pumped to work on some terrain. That tournament makes me neeeeed terrain. This year I got pumped to make some before the actual tournament, so I got some work done early.
Obviously since you didn’t see this, and I don’t recall where these pieces are, it didn’t go that far…but here it is.
I use MDF/hardboard for the bases. I have a Dremel that I cut it all out with and then power-sand the edges so they are smooth. Glue gun and kids popsicle sticks from Michaels make the frame.
I did this one a few years ago when I came back from my first Astro. 😛 I had wanted to make three, so when I sat down to make some more, I made 2 more.
At this point the two new ones are completely made and have a little bit of paint on them, but I got excited about other projects…some Forge World, some bases, the stegadon…Dreadball…I love my life and all the little projects…but sometimes it gets to be to much. 😛
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Working on a plane tonight. These things are so damn cool looking…I want one for Astro.
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The first tank was a frenzy of trying techniques out – a slap-dash variety of colours and layers of the dry pigments, maybe a dullcoat layer, some blotted paint, another layer of blotted paint, an attempt at rusting that still needs to be fixed. I require order, and so this was the first tank to attempt to bring the process into something manageable.
The tank body itself got 4 dry pigment layers in total. Dark Earth on all of the sides, and high up. Green Earth slightly less high up. Dark Yellow slightly less high up, and then one more Dark Yellow to fill in where it wasn’t bright enough. Then I did a dullcoat layer – the idea of this was to “matte out” the ugly splotch lines of the pigment fixer, and it worked great! Lastly I did a single layer of blotted Codex Grey with a piece of foam. On the previous tank I felt that a layer of Fortress Grey made it to bright, so I took that out.
A few other odds and ends: two layers of rust dry pigments on all of the metal bits, black exhaust from the exhaust vents, and a few carefully lined places of pure Mithril Silver where the vehicle occupants would have had some recent use of it.
There are a few things I don’t like about this tank, which I hope to fix in the next iteration. I’d love to hear about if you don’t mind these things, and if you think anything else could fix a fix.
Derrick mentioned that the grey/yellow dirt thing didn’t look right, but honestly I’m really liking it. I’m thinking it’s ancient dirt from an ancient world, and new dirt from the new world (all of my Ork bases are grey). He thought that was to much explanation, that I should keep it simple. Problem is…I think it’s a great looking contrast. 🙂 What do you think?
And since my Dukie requested full-on photos, I have a few full-model photos in addition to the macro shots I’ve been taking recently. 🙂
Thanks for reading!
I’ve “finished” weathering my first tank. It’ll probably never actually be done, and the goblins on top need a little bit more love before I’ll be really happy with it, but I’m happy with the end result of the weathering job.
I believe that the last time I left photos, I wasn’t pleased with how the dry pigments were working out. I fixed that in a really simple way – add more weathering, of a different sort. I took foam bits and splattered on a gray colour, and I think it looks pretty sharp.
What do you think?
This will probably be a lengthy series, since I’m only just starting and I’ve got a lot of tanks that need a little touch-up. By “touch-up” I mean, making them look like someone has beaten the everliving shit out of them.
A quick update today showing what happened when I put a yellow earth pigment on and then just dullcoated over top of it.
It looks like the dullcoat spritz put dots in the pigments. I think I like it here, but on the tank sides it isn’t so great.
So I’m fixing it…by adding more paint! More photos later. 🙂
I haven’t yet gotten around to writing the final day of my Masterclass posts, so you wouldn’t have read about my experiences with dry pigments. (It’s still on my todo list!) But there is a minor story that goes along with this post. These first two paragraphs are just preamble – head below the jump/line to read the interesting part. 🙂
I leave the class and immediately head to Secret Weapon Miniatures to purchase dry pigments. Out of all of the techniques we learned for vehicles, I felt like this one was the most accessible and the most generally useful for what I wanted to do – mess up some Ork trukks! Upon navigating to the web site I was presented with a staggering array of colour options…I tried to pick and choose the ones that I thought I’d need, only to order every colour they had. $100US and several weeks later, I have the pigments.
You also need a pigment fixer in order to ensure that the stuff stays adhered to the model. I was told that Burnaby Hobbies stocked it, so I went there…only to find that they had sold out. And apparently this stuff can’t be air mailed, so they weren’t expecting a shipment for some time. I asked a few people, did some research and randomly called Strategies on the off chance they had some…Darren told me that they had one bottle left, so I rushed over on my lunch break to grab it!
Head below the jump to read about the pigments, using them, what I liked, what I didn’t like and questions that I have!
I’ve been thinking about this blog since I got my new camera. One of the things I wanted when I started it, was to purchase a macro lens so I could take some better close-up model photos. I still don’t have the macro, but I do have some models…
I’ve been working on a piece of terrain. Started with a piece of “hardboard”/MDF and used my Dremel to cut it out to shape. Glued down a piece of construction foam to serve as a core. Added wood filler, hot glue, and plasticard to create the shape you see below. Then a few select pieces from my never-shrinking box of bitz, and voila, you have something that resembles a crashed Ork lander.
Painting started with a drybrush Codex Gray+Fortress Gray. They’re my Ork base colours. Regal Blue on the Space Marine tank parts (again, to match my army). Then…I got an airbrush. And started to use it :P. Airbrushed on the metal, then a couple layers of different grays, then the black.
A few things I’m not happy about right now: the black isn’t scorched enough, the hot glue needs to be something, and the entire piece is really just a big gray lump on the table, and the lighting of my photography…
Ah well. Better than nothing, right? 🙂
