Dark commune banner and some Opus

Well, well. Once again I have been neglecting my updates. Not that there has been much to post lately as I have been traveling and doing other stuff than hobbying (like sleeping). But once in a while I have been dragging my self into the hobby room to ship away at the pile of things to do.

One of the things that has been sitting on my desk it the Dark Commune that I got for Christmas from my wife. These are gorgeous models with a lot of detail and a lot of small fragile details. That means that they have to be painted in sub-assemblies and then put together and a lot of touch ups where the glue melts things off or were the colours do not match. That means it takes some time to do these models justice.

I choose to paint them up to match the Dark Apostle I got earlier, which meant that I went for a grey and purple look for robes and pants of the models. The metal parts got the usual rusted treatment. I also tried my hand at some OSL from the flames, but I think I need to go back and enhance it a bit. I also thinking about doing this on the Apostel model to match. Not sure yet if I can pull it off.

I have also been working on the Opus, and it is slow work as it so big. I am currently working on the hangar bay. I decide that it would be better to add an internal skin of panels rather than trying to detail all the external parts internally. Now all miss matches will be cowered in the area in-between and will hopefully not be visible. To help with the detailing I bought the Necromunda columns and walls kit. This will be applied at various places but primarily for the access arches to the  gun ports and as emergency dividing walls for the different sections of the bay.

I also started out on the flooring. At the moment it is one large piece to make sure it all lines up along the hull. I might cut it up at some point (depending on how the details end up) to make it into more manageable sections. Once I hade it and the walls in place I put some of the flight wing into the storage to see how many I could fit, and it turned out to be 8-9 aircraft, a bit depending on how I want to treat the elevators. This is more or less what I did expect. With the second floor I guess I could fit another 6-8 craft which would mean that all craft I have fit inside except for the heavy fighter who are to tall to fit on the levels. I could probably get two of them onto some elevators and park them at an intermediate level, but that would seriously limit the space on the second floor.

So I think that the storage area in the hull is not meant to store all craft, but just a way to make space on the deck for flight operations. If the Opus needs to be lifted into orbit or the deck cleared for other reasons the craft would just have to relocate to a land based base instead.

Monster Tauros done

A new year has begun and I really would have liket to finish this model before Christmas, as it was almost done. However, a lot of other things came in-between, and the hobby time I did manage to spend really did not lead up to anything worth postning so far (mostly Opus stuff and the Christmas project from my wife, more on that in a later post).

However, the last couple of days I have manged to get some time in on this build and now I am feeling like it is finished. Over all I love how this turned out. The use of the cargo-8 undercarriage really helps sell the conversion as it is highly visible and it would have looked really strange to do some home brew stuff here. I am also fairly happy with the internals. I could probably have spent some more time adding details to the extension but since it will not be generally visible I do not think it is a big deal. I am also happily surprised that the flaring over the wheels turned out to give the Tauros the same width as the doser blade.

The paint jobb was fairly simple as per the Desert rats recipe. It is basically a monochrome beige with some sponge chipping and details. It would probably have been possible to do some nice camo version or so but I like the unitary colour. One new thing I "discovered" was that if I do patterning in the base colour before dry brushing they stay and fade into to over all colour (doser blade and rear mudflaps). This is something I will need to remember.

I still have a ridge runner and a venator to paint for this army but that will have to wait a bit. I am also tempted to get the tempestus-aquilons to go with this mobile force. A Rogal Dorn would also be an interesting addition. But this is what I have so far.

But all that will be for later, now I need to finish the Christmas project from the wifey.

Opus wheels and turrets

When I am not painting I am slowly shipping away on opus in the background. Lately I have been working on the wheels for the flight wing and some extra weapons turrets for Opus (as you can never have to much guns).

The wheels have been something I have been going back and forth with for some time. The aircrafts are originally VTOL and as such only came equipped with landing pads. As I am building a carrier with a flight deck and an angled recovery strip I have been thinking that they should have wheels instead of the pads. But the big question has always been where to get the wheels, and in quantities that I need. In the end I ended up making them from scratch. I took 0.3 mm plasticard stripes and made 5 mm wide rolls. I then sanded them flat on each side and rounded of the edges using sand paper and a power drill. In the end I ended up making 28 wheels to make the main landing gears. Now I just need to make another 18 smaller versions for the tail wheels. Once the wheels were done I made some struts using palsticard rods. I angled them slightly form the wheel hubs as I thought that made them look more dynamic. Over all I am very pleased with them.

I then set about mounting them to the aircraft. On the main fighters I used two of the mounting points for the downward jet nozzles which turned out to look great. I also added some nozzles behind them to improve handling. These aircraft have the main gears at the front and will have a tail wheel.

On the fighter bombers I made the main gears at the back and a small dual carriage at the front, in a more modern set up. I really hope that the wheels will be able to take the weight of the craft as they have quite a slope (I was inspired by the F18 superhornet set up).

The remaining wheels will go onto the close air support planes that I just started to assemble. These will be mounted similarly to the AH64 Apache set up.

For the Opus I made to new cannon turrets for the front battlements. I had the turret bodies and some barrels left over and was initially thinking about mounting them on the main island but it is already very cramped with the main battle cannon turrets and all the AA emplacements. So when playing around I just tested some alternate positions and this turned out to look very good. It also solves the problem that I had with the horns on the flightdeck. With these to the sides the horns does not look so bad. Just need to beef them up a bit. I also had some heavy bolter sonsons left over as well as some las cannons, so I decided to make some underslung turrets for the battlements. I think they turned out ok and will complement what is already there.

I also made some progress on the main island where I added some lights and speakers to the siding. Still need to go in and clean them up a bit. I am also thinking about adding another row at the bottom but I am not sure. 

Well that was some updates on the Opus Magna. There is so much that needs to be build for this model. I am seriously starting to wounder if it will ever be done.

Taurox 02

This week has been a mix of building on Opus and getting some base layers done on the Taurox. So far it has mainly been drybrushing and washing. Not to much to say really. I am happy with how it is turning out. Once I am done with theses layers I will go in with some sponge weathering and add rust and grime. I think it will look great with the other Desert rats. 

Out rider smurfs

After finishing the rats monster truck and the Dreadtober challenge I needed to clean my pallet and just do something quick and dirty. This meant bringing out the smurfs. I do not know why they have become my go to army for cleansing. I guess it is because the paint scheme is really really easy and all the figures are from the starter kits so they are either pushfit our monopose, so there really is no option to modify them , just build as is and paint. As such I am not expecting anything great from them. This time around I played abit with the way I paint them. I still start out with a black base coat and drybrush cupper and white metals until I have a nice zenital highlight and somewhat smooth blends from dark to light. Then I used two shades of blue instead of one when washing them. Previously I have been using either Kantor blue or Altdorf guard blue. The later gives a bit of a lighter blue shade while the former is darker. I have by mistake used both versions on my normal troops, so they have slightly different shades. But not as different as one might think by looking at the colours. Any way, this time I decided (inspired buy the way I did the Obliteratos), to use the the lighter blue towards the top of the surfaces and the darker at the bottom, giving a more pronounced shading effect. I think it worked out great and this is probably how I need to do it with this technique on larger models. I will also try this on some troops later to see if it improves how they look. 

I did however mess up the freehand on these and since the base colours are layered up I cant repaint with out restarting the whole model. I really need to get a new brush, the Dreadtober challenge and painting with dried up paints really messed it up. But from some distance they are ok. I don't know why I do not use transfers, but I guess it is some though about getting better at this free hand stuff.

Well that is it for now. I am continuing to add things the Opus at a glacial rate and when I get tiered I am painting on the monster truck. We will see if there will be a WIP on that or if I will finish it before showing it of.

Wheeled Taurox for the rats

Hi there. So I have built something completely different again. This time in the form of a Taurox for my desert rats. I have been super keen on building one of these since the Taurox was released and people around the net started converting them, getting rid of the track units and adding proper wheels. I know there are some conversion kits out there and I have thought about buying some for some time. But I never got around to it. But I really wanted to do this at some point so when I decided to do the Deseret rats I bought the start collecting box as it both contained the Scion models but also a Taurox for a decent price. I painted infantry some time ago and added a squad of bikers based on the Necromunda models. But the Taurox just sat there and as I could not commit to ordering a conversion kit and the wheels I bought needed some serious work to get on. 

Then the Cargo-8 came around, and the trailer kits. They had some really nicely sculpted undercarriages and had eight nice big wheels (enough to make a six wheeler), and I thought that it would be nice to use this to convert a wheeled Taurox using only GW parts and some plasticard. On paper this looked like a good idea, so I bought a fule/chemical trailer (with the intention of suing the upper parts of the trailer for the Opus build). The scale of the wheels were nice, but the undercarriage that I fell for was way wider than the Taurox and would need some serious cutting to fit to the original body size. Instead of doing this I narrowed them down as much as I could without destroying the linkarms etc. Instead I added some wheel arc extensions to cover the wheels. In the end I think I prefer this look to just adding the wheels to the original body. I also ended upp adding some custom chocks to fill out the void between the body and linkarms. Make it look a bit like a monstertruck.

I also needed to extend the body to fit six wheels, one could have cone for two but I like the truck look, and I have a ridge runner to act as a four wheel transport. Vell, that meant adding some new panelling, shifting the roof backwards and making a new filler piece. I also added some interior detail.

On the outside I added some boxes, tow cables and tools just to make it look a little bit more cluttered. I also gave it two areals for long-range communication and a banner. On the back I mounted the missile rack but turned it upside down to show the structuring on the missile tubes. The front got a dozer blade, which strangely fit perfectly with my trimmed width of the Cargo-8 undercarriage.

All in all I am very happy with this version and I am looking forward to painting it. Just need to finish some ultra smurf outriders that are nearly done.

Fighter bomber

Sometimes it is best to re-do stuff rather than keep on trucking. In this case I re-did the foldable wings for the fighter bomber /CAS fighter for the Opus flight wing. Originally I had a singel large joint in the wing. But since the wing is quite thick it did not fold on top of the fuselage with out major carving around the joint. Instead of a singel joint I am now using a double joint that allows the wing tip to fold back tighter to the wing, giving the air craft a tighter profile with the wing folded.

At the same time I also straightened the wing out so that the leading edge of the wing is now perpendicular to the body instead of being swept slightly forward. I also added a slope to the back edge of the wing to tie it in with the profile of the original part that attaches to the fusalage. This make the aircraft look a bit more like a modern aircraft an not so alien/sifi.

So all in all a worthy undertaking, even if it took way more time to do than I thought.

When I was all worked up about this I also decided to make the nose cone. I had already mocked it up with paper so I know pretty much what to do. Once I stated to see the general shape I adapted it a bit and added some lower panels creating a "mouth" structure below the nose. This will be filled with the main nose gun, just need to figure out how to fit it. I am really happy with how it turned out, it looks like a hybrid of the A6 intruder and the A7 corsair, just as intended.

I also decided that it was time to start the undercarriage project and set about making some wheel hubs with shock absorbers. I think they turned out great, Now I just need to see how they look with wheels. I also need to decide if I will make the undercarriage permanently deployed or if I will make it removable for flight. I am a bit uncertain about this as the risk is that they will not be sturdy enough or that I will lose them at some point.

The foldable wings works like a treat and I can stack the craft either along the side or just cram them in at the back.