General updates

So I would like to repport on some general updates. It seems to me that I don't have as much time now to paint as I had during winter and spring, which is not so surprising realy, there are a number of other things that has priority at the moment. But I do manage to squeeze some time in for painting. I have painted and assembled the legs for the next war hound titan, Wolfish Perversion. This was a bit of a nostalgic moment as I was reminded of my first encounters with the titans about 10 months ago. It is a bit saddening to realize that I am starting to finish the titans, even if there is still much to do. I have also started with the interior. At the moment it has been painted green, inked brown, drybrushed three shades of green and inked brown again.

To prolong the titan task I have some smaller projects running parallel to the titans. Last week I did finish the first Knight prototype and this week I finished a space marine tank that has been sitting around half painted. As I currently have no other project running I got the idea to start something new. I have already started my scitarii battle constructs, and I will make some more of these and see if I can make something more of them. But I also need something more directly mechanicum so I decided to go for a battle adept controlling a group of robots. As there are currently no robot models for 40k I had to come up with a way to represent them. The Battle adepts are represented by the techprist enginseers from the imperial guard line, these are accompanied by a henchman from the ironbrother line from Micro Art studios.

The later addition was not planed, but as I searched the local hobby stores for the techpriests I found these and I have seen a lot of people using these models to represent mechanicum forces. As I have mentioned before in my blogs I do not intend my mechanicum to be an imperial guard army painted red, even if the models are slightly different so I will limit my self to using these kind of troops as commanding characters. It will be an army of robots, mechanized warriors, titans, knights and tanks. All the big funny stuff that one could not afford to build an army from before. Well enough about that. At the moment the robot is just roughly blue taced and it need some more tinkering and green stuff, but I think it will be ok. It is based on the tau crisis battle suit. As with the necron scitari, it is all about distracting the eye, remove the things that make it distincly tau/ necron/ what ever, and add your own mark, then you can ( hopefully) use other models to represent your special type of unit without it being distinctly tan/ necron... You just have to be careful to find a theme that is coherent for your army, this makes it much easier to pull this of. So to make my battle suit less tau and more mechanicum I removed the head, which is definently tau, the jump pack had to go, and where repositioned on to to make it more bulky.

The legs are mounded upside down to provide armor over the lower parts of the legs, which is a thing that is common for imperial stuff, the titans has it, dreadnoughts has it, the knight has it and so on. This helps tie it together. The tau feet also had to be replaced. I have not decided on the weapons yet but they will most likely be mounted under the arms or extending from them or directly from the shoulders. Mounting them on the out side would be to much tau. Well I will return on this topic once I have done some more tinkering with it.

Defilers

This week I have started to paint the legs of Wolfish Perversion, the second war hound. Since I have shown quite a lot of pictures of the war hound legs during the painting of Unbearable Desiere I will not post pictures of these until they are finished. So instead I will present my defiler knight that is now base painted. I will go over it at some point and add some final details. I will also keep it handy if I need to test some thing before putting it on the titans. I am quite happy with how it turned out. There are some things that I will change for the next one. The feet will be modified to get some more range of motion. I will also putt the driver cockpit further back in to the main body. The next version will also be a close combat version featuring power fists and an enclosed cockpit. I also have a more traditional Defieler that I painted some years ago. I thought that I would present it here as a comparison. This defiler has also been modified to some extent. I did not like the battle cannon sticking out of the chest so I made and arm of it together with the battle cannon from a leman russ. This defiler is part of my Khorne battle group, making up part of my mercenary chaos force. Well, I will be back with some more process photos from the titans later in the week.

Witch hunter inquisitor retinue - first henchman ready!

Hi all! I haven't painted for some time now, so Marcus's projects have filled the blog lately... But tonight I found a sudden spark - most likely due to the news of the new SoB coming out in just a few months! So I decided to finish my first inquisitor's henchman, which I've put together from pieces of three other models.

Now I must say I am slightly disappointed. I love the actual model, and I'm happy with the way I put it together. But after looking too much at other people's marvellous work I can't help but feel that my painting is... well... a bit crappy. But hey, I am what I am and at this point I couldn't have done better, so I guess I should be pleased anyways. And I did enjoy painting it!

So here it is, ready to be judged by cyberspace. Can anyone tell which three models I took the pieces from?

More insides

After a family night around the painting table I have some progress to show on the Reaver, I Finally managed to paint the last of the internal panels. I will probably not glue it together right now so that I can go back and work them over one more time before closing it up. Sadly the insides of the Reaver is not as accessible as the inside of the war hound. This means that once put together it will not be possible to view most of the work I have done on the insides, so it is good to have this blog so that I can go back and have a look at it in the future. I have also started to work on the legs of the next warhound. It is fascinating how much one can get done in an evening if one has several parallel things to paint on. The Knight also got some details painted but not enough to show yet. This will be all for now, until later then...

Evolution

Well, to day I thought that I would talk about evolution, both my own and the plastic space marine. Once upon a time in the mid 90´s I got involved in the 40K hobby. A friend of mine introduced my to the hobby and I soon got caught up with buying and painting models. Already from the start I fell for the space marines, I thought the models looked cool and the plastic marines offered a multitude of possibilities. So the first marines I got was the almost legendary plastic mk6 plastic marines, 30 to a box, multi part marines. This box was ideal as a starter kit since you got enough marines to start you of with a decent army in the Rough Trader days. This was before there where any codexes and you had to get your inspiration from the rule book or from white dwarf. For some reason that I don´t remember I choose Space Wolfs. Now this turned out to be a lucky choice as the Space wolfs where the first marines to get their own codex and a new range of models. The first painting technique that I learned was dry-brushing, I had built quite a few model airplanes and cars before using flat colors, but this was my first attempt at painting models with such levels of detail in this scale (I actually had made some tries with epic scale marines first) that should be shaded. The models where primed with a white spray paint, then they where base pained and heavily inked blue. They looked more like ultra marines at this point then space wolves. Then it was just a question of drybruching as hard as you could using two or three shades. Then slab on the final details and you had a marine.

As you can see I started early to converted my own characters using this kit. Well once the metals where out I bought and pained one of each, blood claws, grey hunters, long fangs and wolf guard as well as the characters. With this I had quite a substantial army for the time, over the years I added some vehicles and other support units. But that might be for another post. Now onwards. After slobbering away with a not to sophisticated drybrusching I realized that I could do better. At some time during the final stages of painting on the space wolf army I started to paint some Dark Angel auxiliaries, and they turned out better than the primary army. So I started a Dark Angel army, and once again, this was just before Codex Angel of Death was released so I got some new models to paint. Now most of this army is metal, and here we are talking about plastics. At this pint, GW made a strange move, they released new rules, which where in a box with marines and orks. 

The marines where two piece static pose marines that look slightly strange. I did paint some of them using the same method as I used on the metal marines. Now I had developed my painting technique to be a hybrid between painting shades and dry brushing. The models are base painted green and then inked black. Then I use different green paints to shade it and highligt edges etc, then I use a small dry brush to smooth the edges of the painted shades. I never really liked these models and the few that got painted got sidelined as much as possible. Then I remembered that I still had one of these old multipart plastics left and decided to make some Dark angels of them. Now I tried a new method again, this time the dry brushing is skipped altogether. 

The models are still based green and inked black, but before the ink has dried a paint on the shades and highlights, mixing the colors with the ink on the model and in this way get rather smooth transitions between shades. I also decided to give these dark angels a camouflage scheem as portrayed in the rough trader book. I like the appearance of these models. They have a spacial forces feel, no parade uniforms, more usable battlefield equipment and dynamic poses. 

Once again GW released new rules and this time it was spacemarines and dark eldar in the box. But this time is was multipart models. They where much better then the static mk7 marines released in the old rulebox and they reminded me of the old mk6 multipart kit. I decided to paint some of them and at this point I was quite tiered of painting green and the way of shading was to time consuming. So I retreated back to dry brushing. This time I did not ink the models as hard ( watering down the ink and using a lighter ink) as on the original space wolves, also had made some battle damaged to the models to give them some more texture. To enhance this I use a dark brown ink to black line all the features on the model before starting to dry-brush. I also did the dry brushing in two layers, going back to the darkest color once I reached the lightest one and starting over. After this final details and metallic damage is added. This technique is the same as I use on the titans, but in this case I also ink the model in-between the two layers of dry-brushing.

So as the plastic space marines evolved so did my painting methods. I find that I can not paint the same army for a long time, I need to change the palette once in a while and also the painting technique. Depending on what I am painting I choose different techniques some times on the same model, but that might be a topic for another post.

Reaver insides

There is much to do and not enough time to do it. I find myself constantly apologizing for not being able to do as much work on the titans as I would like to. There is however something called the real world out there and I do have other commitments, which will infringe on my time with the titans. So with this being said I will report on my progress. After the last post where I brought Unbearable Desire out for an outing I noticed that the legs had started to warp under the weight of the titan body. When I assembled the legs, feet and hips the feet and all the toes where firmly on the ground (after some fiddling that almost made my panic). Now however the back leg only touch the ground with a small part on the front of the middle toe. It does not feel unbalanced and it is standing steady but I am worrying  that the warpage will continue until it can not stand any longer and falls over. I am not quite sure what to do about it at the moment. I do not feel confident in warming up the resin and bending it back into position without seriously damaging the paint job. I could mount it on a base and "make sure" that the feet are firmly on the ground, but this is a last option as I see it as this would make it to clumsy in my opinion. Well I will have to think about it some more on it, or someone out there has a good suggestion on what to do. Until I have a good solution I think I will keep it dismantled as not to place to much strain on the legs.

Well that is that. I have also been working along on the Reaver, I have already posted some pictures of the interior panels, now I have pained the front end and the hallway. For some reason my camera does not like to photograph yellow, highlighted with white in a nice way. The black and yellow areas are not as bad as they look. I will however go back to these areas and see if I can improve on it, either with better painting or photography. My next task will be to paint the back area of the interior. This piece was assembled from three parts that fit nicely together well dry fitted, however as mentioned in a previous post the parts could not be assembled in this way and still fit on the hallway, so after gluing the pieces together on the hall way I was left with some rather large gaps which I needed to fill with green stuff. Now It is primed and ready for paint. Once the interior is finished, or at least base painted I will start on Wolfish Perversion, I have not give that much attention to this titan yet as I got caught up in finishing Unbearable Desire. Now however I need to get going on the legs and then on to the interior. I also plan to make some more green stuff modeling on Juluns Wrath as well as on Wolfish Perversion so I will try to keep from painting the armored out side just yet. I will try to post some more things from the ancient 90s, Space Wolves, Dark Angels, Imperial Guard or something else that I can find. I also plan to make something on my possessed marines, of which some has made an appearance in the other blog posts. Well I will see, if I can do some painting on the titans I will post this, if I cant make something new I will post something old instead. =) Until later then...