Tag: Work in Progress

Deepwars Dark Mariner – work in progress

Good morrow all!

I had made an unofficial rule a while back that I wouldn’t be posting miniatures on here unless they were completed, but I’m breaking my own rule today as I wanted to share my WIP picture of a tentacled, barnacle encrusted beastie from Deepwars by Antimatter Games. The Dark Mariners faction have a very obvious Elder Gods/Cthulhu connection which is pretty darn cool.  He’s looking very orangey brown right now but I’ll be adding a few green patches here and there to break it up a bit. So far what you’re looking at are a basecoat and a few washes. The only part that has received highlights are the helmet and the ether crystals on the shoulder and the weapon:

I’m going to try some of the OSL on this (hopefully I won’t cock it up!) because I love the idea of these creatures skulking around in the abyssal depths, eerily outlined in the gloom by the light from the ether crystals.

When this guy is done, that will be 2 of the 4 miniatures for the Dark Mariners warband that I have for playing Deepwars. Then  I can start on the Ancients of Atalan! I’m hoping to run a few demo games of this soon to try and garner some interest at the FLGS’s in the area. The setting for Deepwars and the fluff and the miniatures are all really great, and deserve to have a lot more exposure, especially since the low buy in costs can be very appealing. Couple that with the RPG elements and different play styles that you can opt for, this really is a hidden gem in the depths that more people should know about!

I have lots planned for upcoming articles: Deepwars demo game terrain, some long overdue fan fiction and also another international paint pledge/reducing the unpainted pile of shame project. In fact, I’m considering opening this up to other people who may be interested in participating. Drop a comment below and we’ll see what happens!

Cheers!

A dream of wolves in the snow…

OK, 1,000 extra internet cool points if you can guess the reference in the post title 🙂

I actually finished my Wolf Guard in TDA last night, and boy was I glad. I’m keen to get rolling on some other projects I have lined up. I’m guessing there is about 12 hours of work in this mini, give or take. I’m pleased with the results, although I have to say that the whole waterslide transfer thing on marine shoulder pads is very frustrating. 3 attempts at securing one on this shoulder guard (even with applying Microsol) proved fruitless and saw me wanting to take a hammer to the figure, as the Microsol actually started taking the paint off the mini.

After cooling my jets and repainting the shoulder guard, I though f*ck it, I’ll stick with what I know is a tried and tested method – hand painting the bastard on. So I did. I think it actually turned out pretty well.

I’m still going to have a shot at painting a Space Wolf in darker grey armor, to satisfy my curiosity, but it will have to wait for now.

In other news, my loyal Black Templars have been sorely neglected, but no longer! I bought a couple of torsos from Ebay from the ‘Masters of the Chapter’ set, with the intent of converting them into Castellans or Marshalls or something, to lead my zealous Templars into the fray.

My first selection was the Master of the Arsenal (not the football team!). I chose this basically because of the feet (nothing kinky). The feet look like they are from an old suit of armor, so that sold me straight away.  Over my lunch break yesterday I got to sketching a rough idea of what this chap will look like with some simple additions and converting. I’m still unsure on the power weapon, so that is subject to change. Here is what I have:

You can see my notes there too, as I would’ve probably forgotten which bits I needed.  My son saw this drawing when I took it home last night and wanted it, so I told him I would get a copy and he can color it for Daddy. I told him I’d post it on here before I stick it on the fridge too 🙂 Bless him!

OK, thats it for now. More to come shortly!

Some WIP updates – multi-tasking aint so bad.

Throwing caution to the wind, I have actually been working on several projects at once. I’ve actually found it somewhat liberating, as I can see progression on a number of different things at once, instead of painting one mini/unit and then thinking ‘wow, I still have a shit load of stuff to do’.

Did some more work on Evan’s Nurgle Rhino. I figured I should as I was running out of excuses lol! Weathered it a little, using the same technique I had used on my Chimera a little while back:

Next i’ll be adding the rusted metal colors on there, and figuring out what color to do all the gross bits. Painting this up prompted me to start another side project, which happened frighteningly quick, but I won’t go into detail here, as i’m writing a separate article about it. I’ll show you a teaser though:

I also started on a Wolf Guard Terminator as well. He’s painted using the recipe I used on the other shap I showed  y’all recently.  I’ll be redoing the flesh though, as I wasn’t happy with the way it turned out with this formula:

Arse shot!

There are some spots that need tidying up, but I want to add some weathering too, so I’ll wait till i’ve done that. I also have a Black Templar Rhino sitting on my worktop that keeps honking it’s horn impatiently at me. I suspect that little bugger will get worked on over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Thats it for today! i’ll be back shortly, enjoy!

Paul

Weathering my Chimera APC

After reading a rather informative article from my buddy Colin, or as he is known in other circles, ‘Dethtron’, I decided to try out his technique for weathering vehicles. I thought I would try this out on my Chimera, and although I was missing one paint that Colin recommended, P3 Umbral Umber, I figured I would just do the dozer blade and see how it would turn out.

I think weathering works for nearly all tanks, and works well. There are some others that I feel probably would benefit from not having as much, if any, of these weathering effects as I feel it may detract from the paint job. I think that this works well for Guard stuff. The jury is still out, for me, on whether I want to do this on my Sisters or Marine vehicles. We’ll see.

Anyhoo, its pretty simple After I had painted my hazard stripes on the dozer blade, I took an old sponge from one of the mini blister packs and ripped a piece off. I first used black and stippled it on all over, to show where the wear and tear had taken the paint down to the undercoat. I was already excited at how this was turning out, so I eagerly busted out the boltgun metal and repeated the process. I concentrated more on the edges to show where general use had taken the paint down to the metal.

I am, so far, very pleased with the result:

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I won’t be doing as much with the rest of the vehicle. I went a little overboard on this as I figured it probably gets the brunt of the hard work. I’ll probably put a couple of bullet marks on there as well.

Thats it! Thanks to Colin, who, under the moniker of Dethtron, can be found with his rapier wit over at his blog ‘Dick Move’ (yes really!) for showing me this stupidly simple, but effective method of weathering. I’ll be sure to put more pics of this APC up as I get more done on it.

Cheers!

Paul

December is here already!

Really, I mean, wow! where is the year going? it only seems like yesterday when I was packing away the holiday ornaments… yikes!

Well, with Yule festivities just around the corner, I dare say that you readers of my humble little blog already have ideas of what you would like to find under your tree this year, so how about you share it with us? Some of the things i’m hoping to get will be:

New Space Marine codex
SM Assault squad (to pad out my already mean ‘hold off plague marines for 4 turns in h2h’ squad)
Terminator set (the beginnings of my Salamander force….)
Razorback or a Predator to give my Black Templars some much needed heavy support
Another Vindicator. Big, shooty, makes big holes. I have a soft spot for ordnance 🙂

also, Lizardmen stuff. I have a Tomb Kings army that is being assembled, but I have been admiring the lizardudes for a while now. We’ll see what the fat dud in red leaves this year, eh?

I recently read a very interesting article at http://lauby.blogspot.com/ – Laubersheimer Industries, written by my good friend John, in which he mentioned actually taking your hobby to work. Ludicrous! you may cry… but, it was something I had actually joked about a couple of times, but it was John’s article that actually spurred me into action.  So, with an impending game on the horizon, and little time at home to do any gaming stuff (I hate it when people call it ‘hobbying’), I decided that I would give it a shot and took my Vindicator kit in to assemble. I packed some glue, knife, plastic clippers and a cutting mat into my trusty backpack.  I would take all the stuff out  just prior to my break.  I assembled it over the course of the week during my lunchbreaks. I would eat my lunch first, which took up about 15 minutes, then, for 45 minutes, I put my sign up on my cube which reads ‘out to lunch’ and commenced construction.  I have to say, the experience is great. It allows me to ‘escape’ for a little while in my work day. I mean, we all spend enough time at work, right, why not make it bearable?

I haven’t ventured as far as actually painting at work, although I am preparing for that step. My Black Templars would be a prime candidate for that, as I could do all the hard-line highlighting at work. It would only require 3 pots of paint and a couple of brushes. Feel the stress melt away! In the meantime, go and take a peep at John’s blog entry on ‘Taking your Hobbies To Work’. I’ll let you know how my venture pans out 😉 So far it has been rewarding, and that was just kitbuilding. Hmmm, I wonder… if I get some tables set up in the conference room with some terrain…..

 

Nurgle Lord WIP! update

OK, just a quickie before I go out for a game of 40K. I started on my Nurgle Lord the other night. I think i’m pretty happy with the armor color, but I want to experiment with some washes as well, check it out:

Hopefully I’ll get him finished this week. I’m pretty happy with how the helmet looks and i’m glad that I added the extra horns, as it makes him look a little more plaguebearer like.

Cheers!

‘Suffer not the Witch to live…’

I know I know it’s been a little while since I posted something, about a month i’d say? Thats not to say I haven’t been feverishly working behind the scenes on my mini’s. I have been more constructing and assembling than painting. We are having some nice days weather wise, so I have been taking advantage of it and undercoating loads of my mini’s. As a side note, I have tried a whole bunch of different spray undercoats recently, Games Workshop, Armory and some others, but I think I have found one that seems to work well across the board and has good coverage. Krylon make a paint called ‘Fusion’ which is what I have been using. It’s about $8 and is available from JoAnne Fabrics and any other good art/craft/hobby stores. Here is a direct link to the stuff I use:

http://www.krylon.com/products/fusion_for_plastic/

So I have finally settled on a color scheme for my Sisters ‘Order of the Exalted Saint’.  It took me about 10 seconds to realise that it was basically the same as the traditional Protectorate of Menoth scheme, but I figured, ‘hey, if the caps fits, wear it…’ So, my zealous warrior women will be decked out in maroon-ish armor, with beige-ish robes.  I’ll probably have my Seraphim in a vaguely similar scheme too, maybe with less maroon though, to distinguish them a little more.  I’m excited to have settled on this now, as the wheels can finally start to turn and I can get my Battle Sisters on the field. I assembled my Immolator the other night and I can’t wait to get this painted up in the colors i’ve chosen, especially with the golds and all that, it should look quite impressive. Not a bad thing to take in before being sentenced to a heretics death at the muzzle of twin linked multi-meltas…

sisters-bargeavvie

 

Ave Imperator!

WIP – AoBR Dreadnought – Black Templars

I have started working on my Black Templars Dreadnought. I had already painted the one arm, but was not happy with the highlighting, so I went over it all again last night. I only painted a small part to get a feel  for the black highlighting process. Now that I have a formula I am happy with, I will continue with the rest of it. In the meantime, here is what I have done:

I’m pleased with how he’s looking so far. However, that being said, I don’t think i’ll ever want to paint another AoBR dready, as there is something about it that makes it feel like a toy more than a model. The plastic its made from seems harder and more unforgiving than the regular boxed sets. More to come!

Paul

WIP – Destroyer Khador heavy Warjack

As promised in my December painting challenge, work has begun on the Destroyer! Work has also started on Eiryss too, but I took this picture before that began, so I’ll post some more pictures later.

destroyer

I want him to look work and battle weary. He’s going to have some rust spots and some chips, and snow clumped on him too. I was deliberatley slapdash with the highlighting to start giving him that ‘been in a few fights’ type look.