More Ultra Marines and Green stuff

So, 2020 is almost over and I do hope that 2021 will be better in so many ways. Over all it has been a productive year with a lot of posts. I have however not been able to finish any of my large longtime projects that has been sitting on the desk for eons. The problem is that I can't find the focus to have a long time commitment to one projects so I move a around working a little here and a little there, and in between I paint single miniatures that I can finish in a a few sittings. I had some sort of belief that I would find more piece of mind during the Christmas holidays but so has not been the case. Instead I have been once again jumping between projects.

Well, I do hope 2021 will offer me a better focus so that I can get Fenrir finished and start the construction of Surtr. I would also like to get the base construction of Opus Magna done so that I can start with detailing etc, and eventually get the airwing sorted. At some point I need to take a photo with Opus and the titans/knights.

These last few days I have been working on the out raider sergeant for the Ultra Marines as well as two more rank and file. From the beginning I did not like the look of this new bike, but it has grown on me and now I actually think it is one of the better New Marine vehicles. I might actually by me the chaplain for these guys. The easy to build construction once again make it hard to get it painted properly. For the remaining two models I will do some cutting to get the raider separated from the bike in a better way. Paint vice I went for solid blue with some free hand motifs (not the best but I need to practice). Over all I thin k it turned out ok considering the construction of the model.

Apart from painting the Ultra Marines I have been working on the base for Fenrir. I have gotten so far that I can start painting the feet as the attachment to the base has been sorted. I have also be working on some details for the base. In this case I went for a Ridge Raider that has hit a mine and gotten its rear axle blown of. I have always wanted to paint one of these because they look absolutely bad as. And I must say that the model is bad as as well. There are tones of details, from the under carriage to the add on's like fuel cans, hammers and power shovels. I might actually get me another one just to paint because the model is so good. It was also great fun building it and I which that GW would make more vehicle kits like this.

And when I have not been working on Fenrir I have been trying to finish the Armor plates for my Knight Lord. I think it is mostly done now, at least the parts I got stuck on, so I can hope fully wrap it up soon. And talking about knight I have also been adding the finishing touches to the internals of my Dominus knight, adding the pilots (there are two), cogitator screens etc. Soon this will be ready for paint. There are still some details left to do on the main guns but once that is done I will just do some quick chaosifications to the armor plates and I can finish of this project.

I really need to close some of these long time projects so that I can start new ones.

Ultramarine Primaris Captain

The time before Christmas is contrary to common belief (my) not a time for hobbying. One might think that once the Christmas holiday is here there will be ample of time to tackle all those projects that need you attentions. But that is the problem. Why do to day what can be done tomorrow, and you have the whole holiday yet to hide in the hobby hole. And there is off curse all the other things that needs doing before Christmas, even though, shopping for presents has not been an option this year.

But I managed to sneak away for a couple of hours to paint some Ultramarines. I Choose a Primaris captain and a standard bearer and following my example with the Necrons I also need to paint two rank and file together with character model (just so that the rank and file ever gets done). I thought I had the recipe down for the Ultramarines and set to work, but in the end I realized that they were a bit dark compared to my first batch, and it turned out I had used wrong blue (Kantor blue instead of Altdorf guard blue). The difference is subtle as the blue is applied watered down over a dark background, but in the end they sometimes look almost black, especially if I use a bright contrast color.

Left is Kantor and right is Altdorf

Which brings med to the gold trim. I am not sure what I did to the trim in the beginning or why, but is was a very pale, almost towards a silver gold. For these models I did a brighter gold which I sort of like better, which meant I needed to go back and redo some of the paint I had already done. This included my Guilliman model, and I must say that I am not sure what I did there. It is very tempting to get a new one and do it properly this time.

The free hand on the models is not great. I am not sure how others do it but I can't get the brush to produce thin enough lines. Also, for some reason I am having problems with the raised areas as on the standard. I think it might be that the raised areas are slightly raised to much so that it is difficult to get god coverage on the sides of the relief without getting paint on the lower parts, i.e using one stroke of the brush.

All in all I am happy with the result, I will have to finish the five man squad in the darker tones, but I think for the rest I will return to the brighter blue.

Canoptek Wraith

Last week I painted some necrons as a way of doing something simple after the Lard Discordant, and ques what, I got hocked. I have never really liked the Necron fluff as they seamed a bit forced when they appeared first time around. They were the undead in space, pulling a terminator theme of human extermination. Since they they have kind of evolved with some retconning, getting some variety and personality. But, the models are looking great and they are great fun to paint, and as I have a bunch of em laying around from some of the GW boxes I though I would paint them.

This time it was one of the Canoptek Wraiths from the Forge bane box that I got my eye on. And as I am not into this for the playing I need to do two Necron warriors with any other interesting model if I am to get them all painted. My first concern was how to build the Wraith. I have lost the build instruction and there are a lot of parts for these so I did not want to gamble with the assembly by just improvising. So a quick google later and I have a pdf with the instructions. After running back and forth between the hobby room and the computer I had it built and in disassembled in suitable pieces for painting. The two warriors were just the next in line in the Indomitus instruction.

All in all it was quite a quick paint job as there are not that much else to paint then the rust colored metal. Just the eyes and globes and then it was done. I am a bit concerned about the pose and the balance of the model. It does stand on its own but it is kind of top and front heavy. So I might need to glue in some counter weights in the back of the base.

Well that is it for now. I need to get going with my titans and knights so that I can tidy up some parts of the hobby room.

Necron cleansing

After finishing the Lord Discordant I needed to cleanse my palette. Do something easy, both in therms of building and painting. My choice fell on some Necrons from the Indomitus box, a Royal Warden and two warriors. The sculpts are excellent, but I was a bit surprised to see that the warriors looked more like shambling skeletons than terminators. But that and the damaged and missing armor pieces go well with my rust theme. To make it slightly easier for me I decided to do them in some sub assemblies, but that was not as easy as I expected. The easy to build/push fit makes it difficult to assemble the models out of order which is needed in some cases to be able to paint them effectively. So it is either hard to paint and easy to build or hard to build easy to paint.

Anyway, once I managed to figure out how to build the models and still be able to paint them I set about doing my rust theme. It is really really easy and does not require any fines, just slap on the colors, and the more sloppy the better. Then it is just to go over them with the drybrush, repeat, add some details and you are done. Quick and easy, and so rewarding after the Lord Discordant. With these additions my Necron army can now boast a total of five models, but with the reanimation protocol that is an infinite number of warriors.

Lord Discordant done

I have somewhat mixed feeling for this model. It looks super but is a pain to build and paint. For some reason some of the parts don't come together completely and leaves large gaps in the model. This cold have been solved by fist building the model and filling any gaps with GS, but then it would have been impossible to paint. Already as it is it is very difficult do paint using dry brushing. There is just not enough space to move the brush around and that makes it hard to achieve nice shades. This combined with all the small thin fragile parts makes this the hardest GW model I have painted. Not that I do not like a challenge but here I think it when a bit over board. If the models are to be this detailed, and with such fragile parts they need to be designed to be painted in sub assemblies that are of a reasonable size to hold and work with with out breaking any of the smaller parts just by holding it. All this made me lose some steam mid way, it was just to fiddly to be enjoyable and hence ti took me some extra time to actually get around to finish it. How people are to transport it for games I don't know. Well, in the end I think it turned out ok. I could have made the banner better but I could just not get the motivation to make anything really advanced and already this simple design is not well executed.

    

Next up is to finish the armor plates for Fenrir, and hopefully get the last GS done on the main body so that I can start painting it. I also really should finish the legs as there really is not that much left to do. But that will be for later. I might sneak in some simple easy to assemble models from the Indomitus box just to clear my head after this model.

Random spurts of creativity

Since the Dreadtober challenge ended I have not been able to focus my hobby time. I started the Lord Discordant but have not been able to finish it. It is not much left but I am stuck. Not sure why but there it is. Instead my energy has been spent in a number of other unfinished projects. One of them is Fenrir, my Reaver titan that was supposed to be a "quick build" without to much conversion and scratch building. It turned out that it really requires a lot of GS work... and one I was done that road there was no turning back. So I have slowly trudged on as the inspiration has taken me but not forced it. Currently I am working on some of the upper body panels, the chest, beck and back armor to be precise. I decided to go for the bone poking out the skin look for this titan. I is actually quite fun to do all the sculpting when I have the inspiration. Other times I just look at it and wounder why I bother...  why not paint it as is, why do I need to do all these conversions?

When my mode has not been in for work on Fenrir I have tried building some "normal" models. Since I finished my Helverings for the dreadtober challenge I decided that it might be time to start on the rest of the armigers, the War glaives. But I was not really looking forward to doing six more of the same model but with other weapons so I thought that I might try to make them look a bit different (which I think GW really could have done with this model, it does not require that many "other" parts to make it distinctly different than the Helverin). I decided to cut away some of the side fairings on the top carapace to make it slimmer. I also put the pauldrons on the arms instead of the shoulders. I also made chain glaive into a pole arm and the plasma thing in to a shield. I also added a waist spacer and some clogs to the toes to make it taller. All in all I think it looks very different from the hunching stance of the Helverins.

And as if that was not enough, one of my very old projects reared its head and demanded my attention. Many Years ago I started a project I called the Opus Magna, which is an amphibious assault carrier. The main structure is many built but I did not do my homework good enough the first way around so all the sub components (needed for painting) did not interlock properly and I had some problems with structural integrity. This meant that I need to rebuild them to some extent and add another layer of super structure to keep everything where they should be. This set back realy brought me down and it has been hanging around my hobby room since then. But suddenly I got some inspiration to start working on it again and this time it was the bridge. I am using the imperial bunker thing as the base but to make it look less like a bunker and more like a carrier tower I needed to add some viewing galleries to the sides. My initial thought was to bridge the open space/windows with vertical bars to indicate window panes but I am sort of liking that they look like balconies hanging of the central tower. I will see how I proceed with this. If I can just get the remaining two pieces below deck rebuilt I think I might actually get it done at some point.

Vex Machinator, Arch Lord Discordant, WIP

 Now this is an interesting figure. I absolutely love the demon/machine blend on this model. So from the first time I saw it I knew I need to paint it. So as soon as it was released I bought it, and it has been sitting in the do do pile ever since. Not that I was not tempted, but I felt that I did not have the right inspiration to take this model on at that time, but now I got the flow.

The model itself must be the most complex GW sculpt that I have tackled to date. It is crammed full of details and small parts that are partially or completely hided behind each other, so the only way I see to paint it is to break it down into sub assemblies. But not even that was enough for some parts, especially around the head. It is almost as if you need to paint, at least parts, of it while it is still on the frame to be able to get to all the small hidden parts (which I did not do).

So far I have only worked on the Helstalker. The paint scheme on this is pretty straight forward but requires a lot of time. I started with the metal underside and tail which got more or less my standard treatment for metal, trying to get a large variety of tones in to break it up and give it more life. Next step was to paint the armor black. I have several recipes on black that I have used on several different models. For this one I went with my pre-heresy DA scheme which gives a blue grey tone to the black. My Helldrak and Forge fiend has a similar scheme but a more grayish black so I hope that they will not look to much out of place next to each other. The reason for choosing this one though is that it gives a more vibrant tone to the black, more like a beetle than the more dull grey of my previous models. After that it was just to add the border trim, which was very difficult to get right as there are so much other stuff overhanging the areas so it was difficult o get to all parts with the dry brush. The organic parts of the model got the standard zombie flesh that I have used on previous chaos models.

That is as far as I got with it this week, we will see if I can finish it in the coming week but it is competing with my newfound enthusiasm for Fenrir (I will make a post on that later). I have not decided on the lord discordant himself, what color he should have on his armor but I am leaning towards the purple that I did for my raptors just to get some contrast to the Helstalker.

Dreadtober stretch goals done.

This week I finally got the last part of the stretch goal done for my Deadtober challenge. It was not really that much painting to be done, just some concrete and rusted metal parts that I could add to the bases of my Armiger Hellverinsbefore gluing down some gravel.  I just wanted to break up the large empty parts of the round bases an dgive them some more life. But I think it is important that the base does not overshadow the model and if one makes a large addition to the base, as on the Preceptors base,  that it is interacting with the model in such a way that it adds to the it rather than distract from it. 

I have been working on this detechment of Armigers since they were released some 2? years ago and it feels good to finally have the first parts done. The fact that I had to build the interior for all of them and make the pilots can explain why it has taken me so long. But then again the models are quite large and detailed so they take a few days each to paint. Now I just need to finish another six Armiger Warglaives to fill out this super heavy detachment, which requires quite a lot of modeling too. We will see if they turn up for next years Dreadtober challenge or if it will be something else.

Armor plates were done for the last Hellverin.

All in all this year was fun even if I got carried away and finished my main challenge early. But there is always more models hanging around in their boxes so filling out the time is not a problem.

Bases done.

Now I need to go back to my titans and see if I can get some progress there also. I have restarted the work on Fenrir, which will require much more GS work than I originally thought. I also need to get started on the build process of the internals for Surtr.