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stegadon

Stegadon – Done building

Posted on May 5, 2013

I had mostly finished building my converted Stegadon a few months ago, just before the Adepticon/Dreadball/Blood Bowl frenzy overtook me. Now I’m starting to get planning about OFCC in June, and really want to play with the Engine+Carny dino list in their 2800 team tournament!

Since these are draft photos, they won’t be using any of the photography techniques I want to apply to the final images. 😛

The completely assembled Engine.

I’ve built the steg so that it disassembles really nice, for a few reasons. Partially because I’ve built a giant howdah and will need to fit it into a case somehow! And partially so that if I want to play with a regular Ancient Steg (or regular Steg, if they get ok in the next book) that I have that option.

The howdah is built from pieces of baked sculpey shaped into carved stone blocks, as well as the top piece of the Empire Hurricanum. I tried to use more from the Hurricanum, but it’s just such a ridiculous model and so huge compared to the smaller steg that I had to break it down to just the middle bit.

Each of the skinks has pin-wires glued to their feet so they can be removed easily.

The priest is the skink chief model that is holding a heart in one hand, and I gave him a staff to make him more priestly. I love most of the chief models, and it’s sad that they aren’t viable in the army! He’s had a bit of the same mummified wrappings that the Temple Guard have – as the favoured priest, he was buried with the Pahaux slann and his bodyguard upon the slann’s death.

All the bits laid out. Left to right: Howdah back, 4 skinks, priest, howdah front, steg ceremonial plate and the steg itself.

A closer look at the howdah back bit.

Also have 4 more temple guard to paint, and 2 Dreadball teams lined up. I bought Dreadball Veermyn at Adepticon and I’m stoked to try to play with them!

Work-in-progress

Sculpey!

Posted on December 21, 2012

More inspiration from my new hero! He uses the baked sculpey in a lot of different ways…but I’m just a beginner, so I decided to make stone blocks with it. I didn’t screw up…but I didn’t do it right either.

You can buy this stuff from Michaels for a few bucks, in any colour you like. I choose white…because…I did.

Open the box and it’s this strange stuff that’s a little brittle to start with. Roll it around and when it warms up in your hands it becomes super pliable. I spent a few minutes shaping it into a long and flat piece of stone for my stegadon Engine of the Gods howdah. When I was happy with the general shape, I used my regular GW sculpting tool and some water to flatten out the fingerprint marks. Then I took the end of one of my paint brushes and rolled it around to create a smooth stone-like texture for it.

Cat hair comes free of charge on all my models…

This part was all easy…

It says to turn the oven at 275F and bake for 15 minutes. So I put it on a piece of aluminum foil and tossed it in there. 15 minutes later, I pull it out and check the consistency. Pretty soft…it says you should bake longer for thicker pieces, which this is, so I put it back in for another 15. 45 minutes later I pull it out and it’s still soft. So I turn the temperature up. 15 minutes later, it’s smoking. But still soft. Another 15 and it’s still smoking…and still soft. I think it was in the oven for almost 2 hours by the time I was done. Still soft. But I had to go to bed. It was hard in the morning and it looked like this.

This thing is going to be so awesome…

It’s supposed to be plain white…but it’s stone-like, and it’ll be painted over, so I call it done. 😛

I did two more pieces the next day (not shown) and put them on for the higher temperature for 15 minutes and they were smoking when I pulled them out. Slightly less dark, but still more pink than white. So…maybe 275F at 15 minutes is the right thing to do.

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!

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