Legs legs legs

Legs, I have been painting legs.Now I have one set of warhound legs, one set of reaver legs and one set of knight legs. Most of the work is touch-up and complementary parts but not that much new that has not been shown before. But this means that I can move on towards paining the upper body of the warhound. I also painted the kneecap with the face on the reaver. Here I tried to go for a look of a face appearing beneath the old knee paint and slowly breaking through. The patterns where made using masking tape and drybrushing in several layers. The boarders of the plate needs to be painted and I might do some thing more to the lower left quarter, I am not quit happy with this. Well I will be back when I have some thing more substantial to show.

Bluetack

So, I have kept working on the knight and now the legs are assembled. I could not resist to bluetack the rest of the knight together to have a look at what it will look like. And as it was assembled I thought that I would take some pictures and present here so that you all know what it is that I am working on now. There are still a lot of green stuff work to do in order to fill all gaps an so but I think it is starting to look the part. For those of you that are conscerned that I have given up on the titans, you can all take it easy. The reavers legs are now painted and I will move on to the pelvis as well as continue with the green stuff work. I put a death guard in the picture to give a sense of scale. The model is part of my pre-heresy possessed space marines. These guys are all loyal legionaries that has been possessed either in or after death.

The Agis Knight project

So I made a detour. I got myself a defiler and a sentinel for my birthday and I promptly got to work, cutting it up.My main goal with this "small" project is to make it out of what is in these two kits, not raiding my bits box, except my be for the pilot. I have been surfing the net, looking at what people do with these conversions and I have got some ideas of what to do and what not to do. The biggest part to figure out is the legs. Most people seams to use the front arms as legs, using the claws as feet. The problem as I see it is that the front claws has to many joints and they tend to make quite long and spider like legs. They also tend to log very chaos, which is not wrong in a chaos army, but my guys are new converts and I would like to have a more imperial look to the knight. The other problem is the pelvic area. If you use the defiler lower body as it is you tend to have very far between the legs.So my solution to these problems where to use the middle and rear leg instead of the front claws. To pull this of I had to cut the model up, separating the legs at the joints using a small jeweler saw. I also decided to use the back leg claws to make the feet. The pelvic was made using only the joints, cutting them of from the body and gluing them together. In this way I got the width of the pelvic to become smaller so that I could use more human looking leg construction. All in all there are quite a lot of parts that has been cut up and re modeled. I have not used the parts of the models as they are, but I cut them up and re-assembled them to fit my purpose. At the moment there is not much to see, just a lot of parts that will be assembled. Well I will just present a picture of the parts and I will have to get back on the details later on.

The upper body will consist of the defiler upper body with the sentinel cockpit attached up front. I used the rear of the defiler lower body to make a new engine assembly to put on the back. Cutting up the lower body also provided me with the shoulder mounts for the arms. The battle canon was made in to a handheld six shooter version with a drum magazine. Well we will see how this develops, it is a fun project to play around with in-between painting sessions. I am not to strict about the rules so the armament will be a battle cannon in the right hand, a twin linked auto cannon in the left and a missile launcher on the back but no direct close combat weapons. If it will be played I´ll probably be using as a defiler and claim kicking as close combat attacks. =) Well now it is just to glue it together in reasonable chunks, green stuff all the holes and miss match and then paint it up in the same color as the titans.

Green stuff

Life caught up with me. I know it would sooner or later. Things could not last and I have to realize that things will go slightly slower from here on. But to be honest I was a bit surprised about the pace of this project. But now its been two weeks since last and I have not done that much painting. The other day I did the metallic borders on one of the Reaver feet and it took me three evenings to finish. I cant remember that its taken that long to do before, or I did not notice? I have however made some progress with the green stuff. This is the grate thing about this project, I can switch between all manner of task, painting, sculpting and assembly.

My idea with this trio of titans is that they are new converts to the ruinous powers and as such has not fully mutated to the true chaos look. But the FW models are a bit to "pure", they have the chaos iconography but it is not a full chaos mutation. In-between the chaos icons unblemished armor is visible. On the imperial titans these areas are covered with imperial insignia. If the titans are newly converted there should still be some imperial signs left, unless someone has taken a plasma torch to them and removed them from the titans. 

With this in mind I decided that I would ad some imperial eagles and mechanicum cog-skulls to the empty armor plates in-between the chaos icons, or beneath them. The first ones I did on the warhound leg armors was free handed and the result was, well individual. After some thinking a came to the conclusion that first drawing a outline on the pace would help me get the green stuff to the right shape. However once again the pattern was fee hand and a bit unsymmetrical. Then I got the idea to use paper cut outs as patterns and then copying them on to the armor. This was then used to ad some imperial icons beneath the chaos icons, leaving cracks and missing parts where the chaos growth had forced their way through the imperial ones.

Once I got around to the Reaver I added the same marks to the armor using the same templates as on the warhounds but I did not get around to add the green stuff. So the Reaver just sat around while I painted its legs. Then I got the idea to  make some alterations to the Rever head. It already has a quite evil look, a bit more sinister then the imperial counterpart, but it still has a lot of flat surfaces. So I wanted to ad a bit more of a skull look since they will be painted in the same bone color as I already painted Unbearable Desires skull in. This took me some more time than i thought it would as I could not get it to the shape I wanted. I am reasonably pleased with it but I might ad some more stuff later on, but it will do for now. Now I also have started with other imperial icons on the rest of the armor plates. I also when t back to the foot and leg armor and added a cog-skull on the leg, split between the three armor plates below the knee. But since I have started to paint the foot and the lower armor this meant that I had to sculpt over the paint. I hope things will not start falling of. I know this is not the way to do things but I did not want to repaint the foot. This might be something that comes back to hunt me later on, but I do not want to lose to much momentum with this project. There is enough temptations as it is and I do not need to ad a reason to switch focus. 

Speaking of distractions, as I had my birthday the other week end I treated myself to a present in the form of a defiler and a sentinel. These two kits will be joined together into a knight. I will not model it after one of the known night models used in the epic game since I can not reproduce the look. It will however be interesting to build. I have seen a lot of different versions of these conversions on the net but I will try to put my own twist on it. I will ad a new topic for this once I get going. So this will be it for now.