Works in progress...

Finecast Hive Tyrant review, part 1

2011-06-18T10:23:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have officially purchased my first 'Finecast' model and I thought I would do a review here for all of your enjoyment. First, lets start off with GW's announcement made on Monday May 23rd...

"Andy Hall: Last week we announced something very special - so special in fact that it's nothing less than a new era in wargaming, as we launch the highest quality miniatures the world has ever seen - Citadel Finecast.

Wow, that's quite a statement isn't it? Nonetheless, it is very true."

Or is it?

Upon opening the box, I was greeted with a nicely packed box with the parts laid out well in a clear clamshell helping to ensure the parts arrived undamaged from shipping. Only one part had come off the sprue in transit (the single largest part), so not bad. Upon removal from the sprues, I started to notice some issues. The first thing I noticed was that a few of the sprues had their molds 'slip'. What this means is that the mold halves were not lined up properly when the piece was cast which has resulted in a slight step on most of the parts between halves, and the worst of it was a step of nearly a full millimeter.

Now, this will not be impossible to fix, however with such a large step it will be difficult at best with the aid of a fair amount of putty and re-sculpting. Not something I am particularly impressed with for something being touted as 'the highest quality miniatures the world has ever seen'. I have seen much cleaner castings at a much lower cost.

Next is one of the legs (I did not get a picture of the other leg as the battery died in the camera). What you see here is a little bit of the afformentioned slip, but the most glaring issue is a void where it failed to fill. The other leg had a similar void on the front top part of the armor detail which will necessitate resculpting an area about 1/8" square, pretty big on a small scale miniature.

So my overall opinion on the matter? Given the high cost involved and the high level of hype, I am dissapointed that quality control is not where it should be for them to honestly make the statements that they did so publicly. The bonesword that came with is also warped and I have yet to find an effective method of permanantly correcting this issue as it keeps springing back to its cast shape. At least this means that the figure will be durable on the tabletop.

The new resin formula is indeed easy to work with and will shave down very quickly, so inexperienced modelers will need to be extra careful or you will gouge it. The parts glue very well and the other modeling aspects make it fairly easy to work with. I do not know about painting yet, however I do not forsee any issue with it holding paint.

I will be continuing to post the cleanup and fixing process for your enjoyment as I move forward.

Progress

2011-02-22T16:06:00.000-08:00

Greetings all, life has been interesting. Despite financial struggles as my wife lost her job (Though she just recently got a new one!) and other issues, life goes on and we can pick up the pieces. With all of this I have been taking stock of all that I have for my hobby and have made the decision to streamline. What this translates to is that I have a fairly large collection of Steel Legion figures (something like 12 full squads, a plethora of missile launcher teams, etc.) that are currently going unused and neglected. Along with all of this is a bunch of other randomness which I am still sorting through. Hopefully I can get things set up to either trade away or sell to fund further reinforcements for my primary army and other side projects.

On the subject of current projects, I have made good progress on my version of the Deathstrike artillery spotter. Hopefully with additional hobby funding I can finish my trio of Colossus siege mortars and eventually tackle Big Bertha. I would post pictures, but alas I still have no camera. :(

Alive and kicking in the frozen north

2010-12-17T21:29:00.000-08:00

Greetings to all who look at my blog. Life has been interesting the last couple of months between transitioning to being unemployed for a month and a half and now being employed once again. I do have some great new in that regard... I am now currently employed as a full time modeling artist for making the plug models in preparation for making of the final mold for casting in metal at Gabriel Metal Casting. Things are looking up and hopefully I will be able to start posting more regularly.

Given the particular time of year, Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, may your holidays be blessed.

Plague Pact test miniature

2010-10-06T10:23:00.000-07:00

Greetings all, time for an actual hobby update. For a while now I have had the bits and pieces for the beginnings of a Nurgle themed / Plague Pact Lost and Damned army using a combination of traitor Imperial Guard and s light spattering of Plague Marines, and of course a horde of plague zombies. Now, fluff says that the average Guardsman is around 6' tall while a marine in armor is around 8' tall. Now, taking a look at an Imperial Guardsman next to a Space Marine, they are for some reason about the same size. Not exactly ideal when they are in the same army together. So the plague marines are being 'true scaled' by use of Terminator legs, inserting spacers in the arms, and some sculpting work. I had a random guardsman laying around unpainted so I modified it up to how I want my traitor guard to be... The general idea is a highly tech advanced Imperial planet that has massive chem manufactorums and bio research facilities fell to the taint of a special strain courtesy of grandfather Nurgle. So in general, the guard are in hazmat style suits and have had the last 3 fingers of each hand blended together to represent the trigger finger style hazmat gloves. A quick nozzle change on the flamer has turned it into a chem sprayer.

And for a size comparison shot of a WIP Plague Marine:

Getting back to it

2010-09-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

Well, life has been less than conducive to my hobbies as of late between moving, work, computer issues (not my own thankfully), among other things with life in general. With the move I am starting to slowly unpack everything and I am taking stock of what all I have. I am taking a critical eye to what I am even working on anymore, where my interests have taken me, and I will be lightening my load. I have been involved with so many different things over the years and have moved on and away from many things between lack of time, changes in laws (model rocketry), etc. I am bringing in a much sharper focus to what I am involved with now and where I want to develop to. This being said being that I finally have a garage all to myself again, I will be organizing things in a much better way than I have been able to do for quite some time.

The primary project that will be seen through to completion and eventual expansion is my WWI inspired Imperial Guard army that I have been working on for far too long across too many codices. Next on my agenda will be a Lost and the Damned Plague Pact force opposite my guard army and terrain. The L&D army will give me a chance to exercise my sculpting ability, developing and refining it beyond my current skill and ability. I have other ideas mostly on paper for things to do eventually once my sculpting ability has improved such as a game that I have been developing slowly over the last number of years.

Current projects with pictures pending are my IG army as it stands now with a number of vehicle conversions to go along with it, the initial work in process for the L&D army with a test figure for the plague pact guard, and a figure that I threw together from bits and plastic stock for the Golden Guardsman competition being held over at the Imperial Guard Message Board (http://commissar.proboards.com/index.cgi). So, hopefully I will be able to borrow a camera, take some pictures, and share what I have been doing.

Commissions

2010-09-10T12:47:00.000-07:00

Ok, not exactly a hobby update, but it is definitely modeling. I did some commission work a couple of months back for Gabriel Metal Casting when they needed a couple of models built to make molds from to cast and I now have pictures to share of the final castings. The first model that they had me do was a high definition digital movie camera about 2.5” long. The blank was made from layered together styrene stock and tube which was shaped and polished to what you see there for the final casting.

The next model that they had me make for them was a dialysis machine and chair, about 1.75” tall.

Hopefully with the holidays coming up in the next few months I will get some more commissions. If anyone else needs commission work done, feel free to drop me a line!

Still alive

2010-07-20T08:24:00.000-07:00

Greetings all! I am giving an update to let everyone know that I am not dead, things have just been not particularly conducive for my hobbies as of late.

So what have I been doing lately? Well, there is going to be a 500 point event locally which has lit a fire under me to get things finished for at least some infantry and some vehicles going. Now, at the 500 points level they have imposed some restrictions for total armor values (front + side + rear not to exceed 33) on vehicles, no named characters, no models with 3 or more wounds, and you can only take up to 1 HQ choice (but you do not HAVE to take a HQ choice). What this means to me is that I am restricted to Chimeras, Hydra flak tanks, and most of the artillery vehicles, and that I cannot use any of the HQ choices as they all have 3 wounds for the IG HQ choices. Now with so few models on the table at this level, artillery may not be the best choice. I have decided to go with the Hydra flak tanks for their combination of range, good hitting power, and twin linked shots. Now, this gives me a problem in that I only have one flak truck made. So, digging through the models on hand I dug out 2 more ork trucks and have ordered and already received (I strongly recommend www.thewarstore.com, they are great!) the tread sections from ork battlewagons (I am keeping with the halftrack pattern I started with, just a less expensive route this time), and now I am waiting on 2 more Aegis defense line kits for their quad autocannons. So while I wait for those, I am whipping out the patterns from Dave Taylor again and making 2 more trucks, giving me a total of 3 Hydra flak trucks. Fortunately I happen to have some Sentinel cockpit sections laying around due to an armored sentinel project currently waiting on a bits order that has yet to be placed. For those that do not remember my Flak truck, here is the first one I did:

As it stands, my 500 point force will have a platoon command squad armed with 4x flamers, 3 squads with a grenade launcher and a 4th basic squad, and bolt pistols all around for the Sergeants and the platoon commander for the mandatory 1 troop choice and then 3 Hydra flak tanks for the muscle. It should be interesting to see how things go.

At the same time that I ordered those bits for the trucks, I also finally ordered the bits to make a stand in for a Sgt. Harker 'counts-as' model. I have used a cut down ork Big Shoota spliced onto a Cadian flamer arm and attached the ammo backpack as well. It looks rather like an air cooled heavy machine gun. He certainly looks like the badass trench raider I am going for. Now to figure out how to equip his squad…

I will definately be posting pictures of these projects once I get access to a camera again. In the mean time, happy modeling and gaming, may the dice serve you well.

Greatcoat Guardsmen

2010-06-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

Things have been fairly quiet on the hobby front as of late due to various real life things being in the way of my getting much of anything of note done, which will only get worse for the remainder of this month as it is the fiscal year end for my job which means lots of overtime. Great for the paycheck, not so great for any other aspect of ones life. This has lead to a chance to reflect on my army of little toy men and where the idea started, what has actually been accomplished so far, what has yet to be done with what I currently have parts for, and where it will go from here.

The idea for my army started at least 7 years ago when I received my great grandfathers equipment from the Great War (World War 1) from my grandmother. I have always had an interest in WWI and the history and this just furthered it. I had decided that I wanted to do a WW1 themed and inspired army for the Imperial Guard. It started with a few sketches here and there, some test figures, but it never quite had the feel I was after. I had other projects going at the time and never really fully committed to it. When I stumbled across Westwind Productions and their separate heads for their Secrets of the Third Reich game, specifically the doughboy style helmets with gasmasks, I knew that was it. The next biggest question were the greatcoats, which in all honesty is still a sore point since it just is not quite right and it bugs me.

Greatcoat guardsmen are a thorn in many a hobbyists side, especially if someone wants to keep their figures GW tournament legal. The best looking greatcoats produced by GW in my opinion are the Steel Legion miniatures, and even those are not full greatcoats. The biggest problem with these miniatures, as far as conversions go, is that they are pewter which makes converting them just that much more difficult. They are also expensive, and if you are like me and are not using missile launchers in your army, you will have loads of unused figures. If I had the money I would jump at the chance to use the Death Korps of Krieg miniatures as the basis for what I want to do, but like many others my hobby budget simply does not allow for Forge World armies. So the question remains, what does one do for greatcoat guardsman on a budget and keeping it legal to use in GW sanctioned events?

So far I have been using a mix of Brettonian Men-at-arms and Peasant Bowmen. With a bit of work and trimming the bodies of these figures can do a reasonable job for greatcoat guardsmen. My problem with them is that the regiment ends up looking like a rag tag bunch of guys because the uniforms are simply not uniform, and trying to pull together an Imperial Guard regiment without uniformity bothers me. So here I am with a bunch of figures converted up using the rag tag assortment of bodies with a strong desire for uniformity. So what am I to do, since Games Workshop apparently does not want to listen to the public outcry for greatcoat guardsmen?

I have a thought on that issue which will mean a lot more work on my part. My thought is to work up some greens in various poses with separate legs, torsos, etc., and cast my own conversion bits. GW has made it very clear that you cannot use miniatures from other companies in their sanctioned events, but it is fine if you scratch build something, so long as it follows the What You See Is What You Get rulings. So going along with this, who is to say that so long as I sculpt and cast them myself for my own use, that I cannot use figures that I made in sanctioned events? I have been scratch building and converting for some time now, but I have not attempted a full sculpt of figures on my own yet, so this may very well be a lesson in frustration. At least I am always pushing myself to do better and to broaden my abilities. Now let us see if I can find the time to do this between finishing up what I already have and where I am going with this.

Mad ramblings

2010-05-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Deathstrike... Artillery spotter?

2010-04-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

Greetings once again. No physical progress to speak of for this update, jut some random scribbling and some ideas… As many of you know the lure of the Deathstrike missile launcher, as published within the newest Imperial Guard codex, has inspired a number of model builders to make their own since Games Workshop, up to this point, have not released an official model nor have they announced any plans to do so. Why the allure for such an expensive one shot weapon platform? Quite simply it is the possibility of laying down a 21” template that hits really hard. Infantry are for all intents and purposes vaporized unless they have and make an invulnerability save. Vehicles are even in peril since it hits so hard. Now this is great for a normal Imperial Guard of Cadians or other modern to futuristic regiments, but what about those of us who have chosen to play a more archaic faction such as the Praetorians or my WWI inspired Iron Dogs? A huge ICBM type missile just does not fit in with the theme.

So I got to thinking… (Yeah, I know, scary…)

My regiment is an artillery corps and reaching back into history for inspiration, there have always been giant artillery pieces with incredible ranges. Now the ones that has caught my attention was the Dora cannon and Karl siege mortar built by the Germans in WWII. Imagine if you will a mortar model so large that the table top model would be mounted on a chassis that is made from a pair of Baneblade class hulls with a large span between them… The model would be about 30” long. I have had machinations to build that display piece for quite a while, however funds simply have not been plentiful enough for me to justify $300 plus on a single model. As you may be aware, such a monstrosity of a vehicle would have a plethora of smaller support vehicles, especially ammunition carriers. So in this line of thought, who is to say that such an artillery piece would not have a dedicated targeting / spotter vehicle to guide its shots? An easy conversion for such a vehicle would be to simply take a Chimera and mount the dozer blade as an antenna dish onto the turret with the multilaser removed. While again this would work for the Cadians, this would not be suitable for the Iron Dogs. So taking inspiration from Rich at Bossmans Bitbox (http://bossmansbitzbox.blogspot.com/) from his Hellhound conversion, I give you this sketch. I realize that the scan is not that great, but you can still see what I am getting across…

As you can see, the hull is based off of the Leman Russ hull with the hull mounted weapon placed where the driver typically goes and turning where the hull weapon normally goes into the drivers compartment. The tracks are patterned after the French FT-17 light tank for that much more archaic style I am after. The turret would be made from a pair of Chimera turrets placed bottom to bottom giving it the distinctive shape. More for appearances I have decided to mount a Heavy Stubber into the turret along side a spotlight. It would also mount the old style round antenna at the top of the turret. On the rear of the hull would be a telescopic binocular spotting and range finding site. Below the spotter tank you can see a basic sketch of the mortar it would be directing. Again to give you an idea of scale, the vehicle hulls carrying it would be Beneblade class hulls with the supporting center structure being based on the Highshield landing platform.

Now in color!

2010-04-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

Greetings all, just a quick update on my Griffon project. They are being painted in the following steps:

Flat black primer
Drybrush hull and sides with dark metallic
Paint the tracks with a rusty red-brown
Drybrush tracks with orange
Drybrush entire tank in steel
Wash with brown followed by black
Apply rubber cement mask for chipped paint effect
Paint tan, let dry, rub areas with masking to peel off and leave chipped paint effect
Highlight exposed metal with silver
Paint a thin line of brown at the top edge of paint chips and a lighter tan on the bottom edge of chips for forced lighting effects on the paint chipping
Paint markings, lenses, other details
Black wash

I have not highlighted the chips yet, but here is the first one thus far...

The front view shows off really well how the rubber cement masking really achieves the chipped paint effect I am after...

Enjoy!

Incoming!

2010-04-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

Greetings all, just thought that I would share my current tread headed project that I am working on at the moment. The WWI themed guard army that I have been working on fluff wise is primarily an artillery regiment and up to this point I have been having to make due with an old pair of Griffons from when they were originally released. Now I have 4 brand new ones with the enclosed crew upgrade waiting on some paint and detail work.

The mortar is actually the Demolisher cannon barrel from the new Russ kit I got from bits. You can see where the plasticard is and the general idea of what I have going on here. The conversion is really simple using the contents of the Chimera kit and the Demolisher barrel with a bit of plasticard to fill the gaps. The internal mount for the mortar is made from the dozer blade mount cut just after the crossbar with the remaining U shaped piece being notched into the main mount and angled back to the floor as a brace.

I filled the lasgun ports with punched circles of plasticard made using a paper punch. The lasguns are being saved for another project (the Russian themed army with the AK-47 style lasguns)and just would not look right on the mortar carrier. Another bit of detail is the spotting site on the mast on the rear of the hull. This is quite simple. The mast section is the comm array that is included in the Chimera kit with the searchlight mounted at the top of the mast.

Experiments and excercises

2010-04-07T17:22:00.000-07:00

Greetings all, I finally got hold of a camera to take some more pictures and first off is a figure I threw together to play with how I want to do the lasguns for my upcoming Ruus regiment. The lasgun is actually really simple to convert using the standard lasgun. Start by cutting off the end of the lasgun just in front of the site and take the lasgun assembly off of the ball joint that comes in the chimera. Cut off the energy cell from the bottom of the lasgun and replace it with a clip from a bolter and there you go, an AK-47 style lasgun.

Next up are just a couple of figures I was messing around with just to do something a bit different from my normal Imperial Guard. It is the commander from the Assault on Black Reach box set and a Terminator converted with an assault cannon. For the most part they were just an exercises in painting yellow.

Tanks for looking

2010-03-31T21:17:00.000-07:00

Hello all, though I do not have a pictorial update on the German monstrosity I mentioned in my previous post, it is done and the client is thrilled with it. They will get me a picture of it as soon as they can.

Ok, that aside I do have a rough sketch to share of how I intend the Leman Russ tanks to be in my impending Imperial Guard army.

Those of you familiar with 40k will note that the hull is based on the Chimera chassis with some modification to the drivers area and replacing the troop area with an engine area. The turret is large and slab sided not entirely unlike the Russian KV-2 tank or the Ragnarok seen in the Epic 40k game. The cannon barrel will be made from the Empire Great cannon from the Warhammer fantasy line. To bring more interest to the simplistic design I will be having rivet details on the reinforcement strips and the sides will be painted in the style of classic medieval Russian icon paintings complete with gold leaf detailing. These tanks will be a labor of insanity and love, and I will in all likelihood go cross-eyed with the obscene amounts of detail planned.

Anyways, it will be a really neat army once I get it going, but to get there I need to finish the one I have been working on for the last number of years...

Something weird this way comes

2010-03-23T08:10:00.001-07:00

Not much of an update today… It would be much better for updates if I had a camera!

Anyway, I am starting to get back in the swing of things and getting me going again is something a bit different. A friend of mine is going to Gamers Reunion next month which is a gaming convention just south of the twin cities in Minnesota. Regardless, he is going to be running a game of Weird War II and wanted to borrow my Nurgle Dreadnought as a stand in for a massive German super science robot of doom for the final encounter. Now, I have always had an interest in the Super Science pulp type stuff so instead of letting him borrow the dread I am whipping up a conversion for him that will fit the bill perfectly. Since it is a model I have had in my sketch book of things to build someday I figured what the heck.

So far I have the torso section nearly done along with the main parts of the legs. Pretty much what is left is the armor plates on the legs and the arms. The torso is made from a ping pong ball that has been cut up a bit with a wired in pilot viewable under a clear dome made from one of those small vending machine toy containers that are about the size of an acorn. The engine, hip, and lower leg sections are being made from a cut-apart Black Reach dreadnought. The arms are going to have parts from the Ork Truck for a wrecking ball on the right arm and the left arm will have a scratch built ork style set of claws. I am doing it as such that if I want to I can use it as a stand-in for a chaos dreadnought with a pair of close combat weapons.

Once the beast is finished I will be making sure to get access to a camera to take some pictures.

Virtual progress

2010-03-14T11:51:00.000-07:00

Greetings one and all, good news is that I now officially have internet again. This is a small update in regards to the conversion concept that I have had recent inspiration for. The general concept is for a fairly archaic Imperial Guard force that tends towards heavier armor and tend to not use much for special weapons excepting for grenade launchers and an occasional flamer, preferring to rely more heavily on their marksmanship (shown in game terms as veteran squads (higher weapon skill) with the carapace armor upgrade). The units preferred heavy weapons would be Lascannons and heavy bolters. The few Leman Russ that they have are primarily tank hunters with the vast majority of their heavy support being made up of Medusa and Colossus siege mortars. They have worked famously well with Ogryn attachments.

For those familiar with the game mechanics, you will see quite readily that I am not going for a 'competetive' power army for tournament play, but more for a characterful army with style simply for fun of play.

Here you can see a composite image of bits that would give the miniatures their distinctive appearance. The legs are from the Warhammer Fantasy High Elves kits, the torso and arms being from the IG Cadian plastics and the heads being the base heads from the Space Wolves plastics modified to have the fur shakos. The details will be more ornate than the Cadians with the designs tending towards the High Gothic style rather than the more geometric and blocky low gothic common to the Cadian style regiments. If anything the detailing will be nearly reminiscent of the detailed 'baroque' style seen on some Chaos pieces and will be somewhat like the Vostroyan line of metal miniatures.

Unpacking and finding inspiration

2010-03-10T08:33:00.000-08:00

Greetings once again. Well, now I am officially moved in to my new place of residence and life is regaining some sense of normalcy, I have the wonderful job of unpacking everything and figuring out where the heck everything goes. Regretfully I had to move into a smaller place with no garage which means I have lost my workshop for the immediate future. While this hampers what I do quite a bit, it will not stop me. Things will just have to be on a slightly smaller scale and manufactured with different methods. The two main tools I will miss having access to are my drill press and my scroll saw. But, life goes on, I have a loving wife, two loving cats, a roof over my head and a stable job. Life is pretty good overall despite the bumps in the road.

Ok, on to the hobby side of things. As you may note with my Imperial truck conversion (with thanks again to Dave Taylor for putting out the templates for the cab) I like to keep an eye on what Forgeworld is doing with their miniatures for their Orks. As many of you know, background fluff material for the Ork designs is that very few designs are truly from Ork origins and are most often made from battlefield scrap and salvage. A design that has caught my attention is the new Ork Kil Krusha tank. You can find pictures of this pretty easily by going to Forgeworlds website (I will not post one of their images as I do not want to get lawyer hammered). Strip away the orky gubbins and bits and you have an archaic Imperial design. What I see is a Medusa siege mortar carrier with the fully enclosed upgrade with the cupola on top mounting the hull heavy bolter in the primary position and a heavy stubber in the secondary position. Not exactly an elegant design, but it would definitely fit within a more archaic group of Guard.

This archaic vehicle got me thinking about a guard regiment where such a vehicle may be found and inspiration struck. I know that many of you have various favored bits sellers, mine happens to be thewarstore.com, and with a bit of browsing I came up with a bits list to make a small group. What I found that drew inspiration are the scale armored legs from the High Elf group from the Warhammer Fantasy line. Combine those legs with a Cadian torso that has been shaved down and rounded so that the carapace looks more like an old style breast plate, and again use the Cadian arms with the pauldrons for the armored shoulders and simplicity of arming with the lasguns and other weapons. I intend to use the bare and beardy heads from the new Space Wolves kits, further lending to the ‘primitive’ warrior styling. Taking this a step further I found the Silverhelm horses and rider legs which will make fine Roughriders for the group. I will also be working in Dark Angels bits and other more ornate elements into the conversions as well such as the bike banner pole onto the backs of the roughriders (depending on scaling and how it looks together once I have the bits on hand) drawing inspiration from the Cossaks of ancient Russia. The feel of the army will be very Imperial / Tzarist Russian, not entirely unlike the Vostroyan Firstborn. Do not get me wrong, I like their figures just fine, I just do not want to be limited to just the few poses and models GW has produced for them for an entire army.

BUT, this army will stay on hold and on the pages of my sketchbook until I have everything that I have assembled for my WWI themed force painted and done and a group of 4 enclosed Griffon heavy mortars converted and done. Now if I only had a scanner to show you all my sketches of my ideas…

Just an update

2010-03-02T10:34:00.000-08:00

Ok, as you all may have noticed I have not updated in a bit. Long story short is that I was forced to move out of my previous residence and have moved into a new apartment. Needless to say things are a bit chaotic. Due to said move I will be unable to work on anything until I can get our household unpacked and situated. Now for the really bad news... My workshop that I had set up with all manor of tools which allowed me to work on larger projects is now all in storage for the forseeable future which will limit much of what I can do. (grumble grumble)

So, until I can move into a larger place again and have a full shop, I will be limited to smaller projects or alternate build techniques.

Just so the bad news is not so bad, here is a pic of a conversion for how my force does the Goliath remote control demolitions device. The model is a really straight forward conversion using a 1/72 scale Renalut FT-17, a fuel drum, and part of the communications antenna set on the Imperial Vehicle Accessory sprue. For a bit more interest I put the winged skull on the barrel.

Form up and move out...

2010-02-15T10:07:00.000-08:00

Sorry everyone, no pictures today, just some thoughts.

A friend of mine and I have decided that we both need to play more and we both need to get off our duffs and get actual army groups painted and playable. This is more of a fire under him as I tend to do more painting and modeling regardless. Despite this, I do not currently have a playable fully painted force. Much of my time is spent on a few figures here and there with massive conversion and scratchbuild projects in between that are in various stages of completion. My problem is that I have too many projects in various stages of completion. I start on a project and get to a certain point and get inspiration for another and then work on that, and another, and so on.

So, to help myself curb this tendancy and to get my freind painting more we have decided to ease back into game play 500 points at a time. He plays Space Marines and I of course play the Imperial Guard. I am not sure what he is planning on fielding so I am figuring on making an all comers list built primarilay around the IG's greatest strength to get things going: Infantry. The general list is as follows:
HQ has 3 plasmaguns and a medic all with carapace armor.
Troop 1 is a basic platoon with 2 squads and 4 flamers in the platoon command.
Troop 2 is a veteran squad with 3x meltaguns, carapace, and shotguns mounted in a Chimera with an autocannon turret.

The HQ is finished, the Chimera just needs finishing, the veterans and squads are being painted.

Ok, I lied, here is a picture. The picture is not great, but here is how I am doing the veterans. The body is from the new Empire Greatswords box with the Cadian lasgun arms with the lasgun modified into a shotgun with a lasgun from the Chimera kit for the barrel.

I have to say that painting squads for me is the hardest part of doing an army as the painting of essentially the same figure over and over gets a bit boring... And only 6 more squads to go after this for squads already converted up and sitting here waiting for paint...

Would you like flies with that?

2010-02-12T22:05:00.000-08:00

Ok, next up on the blog is my Chaos Dreadnought of Nurgle. When the new Skaven Screaming Bell kit was released I saw that one of the options was to build it as a Plague Furnace. Seeing as I am going to build mine as the Screaming Bell, the furnace censor was going to be an unused bit, and lo and behold my twisted mind formed a plan... I set the plan aside for a while but with the announcement of the Golden Bolter competition at www.bolterandchainsword.com I figured this would be an ideal opportunity for me to build my idea. So what was that idea? Well, in the Cities of Death book, one of the options a dreadnought can take is a wrecking ball, essentially a glorified Dreadnought close combat weapon. The furnace censor fit perfectly for what I had in mind. So with that one bit I was able to represent both the wrecking ball option and the Nurgle's Rot option, an option that while fun to take, I was never quite sure how to model it. I figure that the smoke trailing from the wrecking ball would represent some nasty contagion being released in the smoke from the 'incense'.

Here is a basic run down of the parts... The basis of the model is an Assault on Black Reach Dreadnought, the wrecking ball as mentioned above is from the new Skaven Screaming Bell kit from the Warhammer Fantasy line, the center is made from Chaos Terminator Lord bits (front of the torso, chainmail tabbard,etc), and the base is made primarily from Tamiya brick wall section pieces cut apart and re-done with a cadian caught underneath the rubble from the felled wall. On top is the Plague Marine standard from the Chaos Marines box set.

Overall I like how it turned out.

A small update

2010-02-04T06:33:00.000-08:00

Ok, here goes for my second post, lets see if I can do the formatting a bit better…

This post is going to be dedicated to Dave Taylor at his blog. A while back he did a conversion of an Ork trukk to an Imperial truck which I really liked and he was kind enough to post the templates used to make the cab and rear section parts from plastic sheet stock. Now though I liked what he did I still wanted to make it my own and with the release of the Ork halftrack from Forgeworld I saw what I wanted to do. The tracks are wider and more aggressive but still reasonably Imperial looking, they just look like they were meant for the mud and much of trench warfare, which is perfect for what I want with my army. Anyways, here is the result.

And so it begins...

2010-01-14T10:31:00.000-08:00

Well, everything needs to start somewhere and I guess my documenting of my works will start here. Mind you this would be far more interesting if I had regular access to a camera that works, I will start things off with some work that I have already done but are currently in progress one way or another.

Ok, to give a little background on what I am going to primarily be posting about, I play a game called Warhammer 40,000 and my primary army at this time is an Imperial Guard army that has been in process for a number of years now. I had a solid idea of how the army was going to be done, but had to change a number of things with the release of the new codex. I now finally have a very concrete idea of what I am doing and am getting to the point of having a fully painted and converted army, one chunk at a time. Now, rather than going with the standard Cadian army produced by Games Workshop, I have been working on a heavily converted WWI inspired army.

First up is my analog of a Leman Russ Executioner tank heavily re-done to reflect the theme of my Imperial Guard army. The track sections are assembled from styrene sheet and the rest of it is using Games Workshop parts with other details added. One of the biggest changes in my version is placing the primary weapon in the hull with the support weapon in the turret. While this does limit the usability of the primary gun, I am more concerned with the theme and appearance. This design feature is taken from early tank designs when the metalurgy and designs were not developed enough to safely mount the primary gun in the turret. This also leads to a lower center of gravity which further aids in trench crossing. Anyways, here are the pictures of it before it had paint. It is nearly fully painted now, I just have some detailing left to do and I will hopefully have it up soon.

Ok, next up is a preview of my analog of the Colossus seige mortar. Those familiar with the
Epic 40,000 game should be familiar with what you are starting to see here.

And to not let the foot sloggers feel left out, here is a veteran in carapace armor with a shotgun followed by an Ogre Bone 'Ead, Rough Rider, and a chimera.