Mad ramblings

Well it has been a while since my last update, so here goes. I have been keeping fairly busy with various projects and life in general. No pictures so far unfortunately of a couple of commission jobs I did for a local casting company, once they send some pictures of the final products I will post them to share. The first commission was a 2.5” long digital movie camera model. There was no real information beyond a small picture to go off of, but taking a look at key features and some searching I was able to figure out that the camera in the picture was a Panavision Phantom 65 high definition digital movie camera. Once I found out exactly what it was I was to make I was able to find all the reference I needed and make the model based on the much larger pictures. It turned out pretty well, I can hardly wait to see the final product in the pewter! After that model was done I was commissioned to do a dialysis machine with chair, it too turning out well. Hopefully these commissions develop to something more constant.

Anyways, on to the 40k side of things. First off is a rant of sorts. My mind is always running a mile a minute with ideas for models and conversions. I see something and like certain aspects of a given design and I think about various possibilities and changes that I would make if I were to make it. Most of these ideas simply get jotted down in a notebook not to see the light of day again for a long time, if ever. One such idea is for yet another possible army. This time it is something completely different than my normal Imperial Guard bent, though again I am forcing myself to make it wait until I have my current army finished (which seems to keep growing…). This idea revolves around the new releases for the new Blood Angels models, specifically around the Sanguinary guard. Imagine if you will a Khornate berserker army with the chest plates done in the more ornate muscled style of the Sanguinary Guard. Now take it a bit further, taking inspiration from the crimson armor of Vlad the Impaler as shown in Bram Stokers’ Dracula. Imagine an entire army of berserkers with the muscled armor that is actually sculpted like muscle tissue, looking slick with blood. For the heads I would want to do a modification of the death masks, minus the halo, looking like they have been bolted to the skulls of the berserkers.

Another one of my random tangents that I am actually doing something about are a trio of Sentinels for my current guard army. I like the current Sentinel model just fine, however it just seems to modern for my WWI themed force and like it would not be particularly suited to the muddy hole ridden battlefields that my forces tend to fight on. Wanting something a bit more stable I know that I wanted something with more legs and in my random wandering of the warp, aka the internet, I stumbled across the Taco-34 quad walker from the Junk Tank Rock series. There I found my inspiration for what I wanted almost to a T. I have modified the design a bit, still retaining the general ball shaped hull but re-doing how the legs join to the hull. So far I have the hulls roughed out and based around some ping pong balls. As I do not yet have the parts for the legs (I really like the pose ability of the new multi-part legs included in the new Sentinel kits!) I am going to continue the work on the hulls for a while, taking my time. I really like them so far and I think you all will too once I get some pictures. And on the note of conversions for my Guard army, I will get to the Deathstrike artillery spotter as soon as I have enough money to make another bits order… Needless to say money has been fairly tight.