Public apperance

"The morning mist was starting to lift, the ground trembled under his feet, the wind was rushing past his armored hide. Unbearable Desire was running free. He was scouting ahead of the main force, looking for an intercept point. As he cleared the woods a small gathering of houses appeared, a cross road. Slowly he walked up to the intersection , head swinging back and forth, sensors sweeping the area. No enemy forces around, but he could smell them on the wind, they where heading this way. This would make an excellent battle field. He chanted the coordinates back to command. To bad he was not allowed to stay and rip into the loyalist scums, but there were other things to take care of. He started to run again, picking up speed...  he was running free, sensors seeping ahead looking for the next objective."

So today Unbearable Desire made his first public appearance. There was a apocalypse game on at one of the local stores and I thought that I would bring him along. I did not have time to stay for the whole battle so Unbearable Desire had to sit this one out, just scouting a head before the main battle begun. I think he was appreciated, at least there was no direct bad comments about his appearance, apart for him skipping out on the battle. We will see if he can find another engagement to participate in at some future date (I will have to read up on the rules a bit before that).

Apart form bring Unbearable Desire out for a walk I have worked on the Reaver. Another panel has been painted. I have also pinned the back parts and shoulders. I am doing revers pinning as I first glue the parts in to place, then I drill holes into the parts and fix them in place with metal rods. The rods themselves are quite thin and I have no illusion's that they will hold any great loads but they will stand up for the moderate loads of the weapons and reinforce the glue, I am more worried about the resin in this case. I have noticed that Unbearable desire is starting to lose its pose due to resin warpage. The feet are no longer flat on the surface so I will have to keep track of this development so that he does not take a nosedive of his shelf. I am currently working on the insides of the Reaver and I hope to come back with some more picture once I get them painted in a day or two.

Defiler knight

Parallel to the Titan project I am working on a Defiler Knight. The aim of this project was to make a Knight out of the Defiler kit and the Sentinel kit. The assembly of the model was a fairly straight forward affair as I had had a lot of thought about how to do it. But what I did not realize was that the model could be viewed in two ways, maybe more. In my mind the model was a mini version of the reaver, with the cockpit sticking out in front, and a long body behind with a missile launcher on the back. However, once I started painting the model it changed character. The missile launcher was no longer on the back but became the head of a humanoid with a cockpit sticking out of its chest. Now I see both versions which is a bit disconcerting. I might have to make some changes to the concept on the next one. As far as this one goes I will have to play along...

... so I will paint the amour over the missile launcher bone white as with the heads on the Warhound...  and we will see how it goes.

Reaver panel

I am back, again! =) Well after the last post I had to take care of some real life stuff, like work and such things. But now I am slowly starting to roll again. I have once again started to paint on the reaver. I started out with the inside panels with the weapon servitor. I will do the reaver as I did the warhound, first paint the insides, then put it all together and then paint it. But first I had to put some of the minor parts into bigger blocks for painting. One of the things I needed to assemble was the back parts of the reaver, i.e the reactor parts. Compared to the warhound the fit of the parts are generally much more snug and it has a more intricate design to lock all the paces in place. This however makes it much more sensitive to warpage of the parts. I had assembled the parts, dry fitting it and it looked ok and everything seamd to be aligned. To make the glue stick better to the rater flat surfaces that needed to be glued I used a modeling knife to score the surface to make the glue adhere better. However once I started to apply glue and try to stick the parts together I realized the sides where not as flat as they looked. I also attached the parts, with out glue, to the center part of the upper body. One I did this I realized that the parts did not fit quite right on to the center part. After some serious manhandling of the model I managed to get all the parts in to the right place. However the seams where not quite meeting up at this point. The solution to this was ducktape. Squeezing the model together and then wrapping it hard in ducktape made all the joints come together. I sincerely advise that if you are going to have the back part  separate for painting that you assemble it on the central part to get every thing aligned, it is not enough to mount the parts to each other with out fitting. After it was all glued together I pined it at several places to reinforce the glued joints. Next up is filling in the gaps with green stuff.

Unbearable Desire

Unbearable Desire is finally painted, at least ground painted. Now I just have to go back over all individual peaces and do final detailing, weathering and so on. There are also the spinal spikes to do but it is now in a state that I can bring it to the battlefield to see what kind of damage it will do. Now I think it is time to move on to the other titans for a while. I am thinking about starting with the internals of Joluns Wrath (the reaver). I might also start out with the legs of Wolfish Perversion (second warhound), I have not decided. I also have to start with another project that I have been postponing for a while. This is however not a Wh40k thing so that will be posted on our other blog (agiscraft.blogspot.com). During this time my progress on the titans will probably somewhat limited, but fear not, I will not give up on them. I also have the Knight to finish, it is mostly painted but awaits some detailing.

Painting goes on

Painting goes on. Now I have finished to groin plate of Unbearable Desire. It turned out ok. The green stuff mods are quite simple but still makes it look a little more detailed. The green, bronze, grey and red of the armor plates give a nice contrast to the green legs. I was a bit worried that the armor plates would not pop and just melt into the background. It appears that this is not really the case. I have also painted the bronze borders of the rear reactor coverings and painted the void shield projectors. These are details and will not big breakthroughs but that is all I have to report right now. Taking pictures with my compact at night with sharp painting lights does not convey the colors in a good way. I am planing to have a real photo shoot with it later when it is more finished and post more pictures then. As for now you will have to make do with these.

Warhound progress

I am making progress. =) Unbearable Desire is starting to take shape. One can now see what it will look like when it is done. There are still a lot of details that needs to be fixed but the general paint scheme is there. I have also painted some of the green stuff mods that I made to the armor and body work. I am quite happy with the over all result. Sadly I do not have a camera to give a really fair representation of what the model looks like in real life. It comes across quite dark, but on a well lit table it really looks god if I may say so.


I have not done so much to the other models, I use the ´knight as a test bed for some techniques that I am trying out before applying them to the titans, mostly how to paint flaked motifs without them looking painted flaked. I am pleased with the blue with striping flaking that I do with masking tape. However this technique is not suitable to smaller motifs as I cant make the tape peaces small enough. So I have started to use paper cut outs as templates for the shape, then I use a brush and sort of dot on the paint so that it follows the out lines of the template but I can choose to leave some areas sparsely painted or not at all and still retain the appearance of the motif. I updated the kneepad of the Reaver to include the legion insignia which will be a black diamond with a white spade in the middle. I tried some fancier designs but they all look "unrealistic" and as I try to keep the paint scheme as real as possible I came up with this. I am not sure if I have seen it on some real military unit but its probably been used by some. My legion is however not connected to any real military unit and any likeness to such insignia is coincidental. =) I just like to have a simple insignia.


I am also thinking about using the paper cut out method to make base areas when free handing some more complicated designs.  I will then print an image that i like in multiple copies, then using a scalpel cut out the different colored areas, make some reference marks on them all for alignment. In this way I think it will be easier to transfer the image to the model and still keep the relative size of the fields even on curved or uneven surfaces. Well I have not tested this so I don´t know if it will work.

When painting on the model I have also thought a bit about how engine wars would be fought. In the fiction titans are portrayed as walking machines of mass destruction that will be on their own or in groups making war where ever they can find targets and that they only return to base to reload once in a while, but in general staying out for days or weeks. Well this all sounds fine in books, but when you look at the model you might start to think that things might be somewhat different. Sure, the magazines of the weapons are huge, but so are the barrels and hence the ammunition. Which would mean that a titan probably would empty the ammunition store with in minutes in a fire fight. This would mean that the titans would be running back and forth between the front-line and the reloading stations with some regularity. This would also make bringing a CCW more or less mandatory to fend of other titans once the bullets run out. One might also wounder how you reload titan weapons in the field. The weapons are after all siting a fair distance from the ground and as I sad before, the magazines are huge. Well I am sure they have solutions to this in the 41st milenium but there are no models for it as far as I know. It would be interesting with some titan support vehicles.

Well that was just a though. Now I will return to the titans and paint some more. I will post on the progress of the details and try to make more frequent posts.