Christmas projects 2012

It is Christmas and I have a lot of time to spend on different projects. The first one is a Cathedral based on the bunkers I had left over from the myrmidon project. These will then be combined with some ruined city models to get a nice tabletop center peace. I have also pained some more of the Dark Vengeance model in a pre heresy Dark Angel color scheme. I just realized how many models are in the Box and if I paint all of them as Dark Angel I will have quite a substantial base for a DA army, and as the DA will be released in the beginning of 2013 I might paint up some of the new models in the old colors.
I have also made a dive into the bit boxes under my work table and pulled up some parts that I have built a new demon prince. I only have to sculpt the back of the model and fill in some gaps nut all in all it is a quite simple build.
Apart from these new projects I am continuing my work on the myrmidons. It is taking shape and will lock grate with my titans.

 

So now I will go back to my hobby space and a wait my Christmas present from my wife, a hell drake directly from the bowels of GW.

Pre Heresy Dark Angel prt2

A small update on my Dark Vengeance Pre Heresy Dark Angels....

I have finished my Pre Heresy DA DW. I am happy with the look of the model, it is a bit sad that is not a real pre heresy model, but it will do. I have also painted one of the cultists as a DA serf, wearing the withe robes of the Dark Angels with the red chapter symbols. It does tie in incely with the Dark Angels look. I can but help to notice the similarities of the pre heresy Dark Angels and the Black Templars. The colors are the same and both legion and chapter is based on European medieval knights. I do wonder what will happen with the new DA codex, will they keep the ties with the native Americans or if they will have a stronger tie with the Hourus Heresy books...   we will see.

I have also gotten a new display place for my models. I must say that I have a most understanding wife as they are now displayed in an enlarged cabinet wall in the center of the new hose. I still have not put all the models in but the Northern Ghost titan legion has taken up residence. Now I will have space for some of my early work as well as the new models.

Pre Heresy Dark Angel

I am playing around with some of the marines in the Dark Vengeance box. I already have a quite substantial Dark Angels army so I though that I would have a go at the pre heresy colors. Painting black is harder than it would seam. I want to test it before I might get some pre heresy models to go with the colors. The model is not done yet but I thought I would shoe the black and see if anyone has any suggestions.

Forge Mauler Finished

The Forge Mauler is finished. It did turn out ok, almost as I had in mind. This time I started out painting it an over all metal, adding different red toned inks to give it a rusted and whether beaten look. After that I added black patches on the armor plates, in recesses or on plates that would be protected, the idea being that most of the paint had been worn off or flaked away during the beasts battles. I also tried a method that I have read about where you add a light color edge between the metal and the paint to give it a raised look. I actually like the result. I think it would have been hard to make it look realistic with out it as there are about equal parts black and metal and just leaving the edges un-markt made it look very flat.

Over all I enjoyed the build, it was straight forward, the model is excellent  much detail and easy to assemble, the cannons on the back was an easy swap job that did not demand any major cutting or green stuffing. I can however imagine that you will have to limit the number of these in your army as the pose is the same for all of them and the sculpting is such that it is hard to change it with out some serious green stuff work.
I have also bought the Dark Vengeance box, so that I have some easy to assemble models to paint over Christmas  I still have my mechanicum walkers to model and paint, but DV models will be thing to paint while I wait for the mechanicum models to get done. I will get back on both fronts telling you about my progress.

On another note, this blog started out as a WIP blog about me building a trio of FW titans. During these posts I posted a lot of pictures of unfinished peaces where one could see how I progressed and what the parts looked like while I painted. This was quite natural as it took me a bit over a year to finish them. In my later posts I have mostly posted pictures of the finished models, as I will usually finish one model between pots. If you have any preferences of what kind of pictures of my work you would like to see, WIP, finished, more angles etc, please leave a comment. Lighting and pic quality is rather limited now as it is perpetually dark this time of year and I am using a small pocked cam.

Until next time then...

Forge Mauler

My work on the Forge Mauler Fiend continues. For this model I wanted to try something new. My previous models had been painted in a worn color and then battle damaged. This time I wanted to try it the other way around, make a bare rusted metal and then apply a flaked paint scheme to this.. So I stared out with a black base coat, then I drybrushed it white metal. After this I applied some inks to get a deeper rusted colors as a base. Then I added the brons trim to the edges. After this I drybrushed the whole model from a dark  tin bitz all through to mitrhil silver. Once at this point I had a model looking suitably rusted metal. Then I applied some chaos black in patchy areas on the armor plating. This was then painted in the edges with codex grey and fortress grey to make it look like flaked black paint, pealing of from the bare metal beneath. Later on I decided that the demon flesh should be red. This will tie it together with my Khorne berserkers and my Fallen Dark Angels.

This model will be played as an alternative between a mauler and forge fiend, depending on what is needed. Later on I would probably add a pure Forge fiend if my funding allows. I really like these models, highly detailed and great looking. However, the pose is static so one would not have to many of them with out it starting to look odd, or one would have some serious modeling to do to alter the pose.

Mauler Fiend

Well, well, well....   so I am late with my blogg update again. Now we have moved into our new house and have started to unpack our boxes, however far from everything is unpacked, and that goes for my figures and a lot of my spare parts. I have however set up my new work space  it is somewhat smaller than my old one, strange how that is, you move from 103 square meters to 120 and your hobby space shrinks. Now, it was some time since I last painted so I felt that it was time. I could however not find any suitable model that was ready for paint. Now, in my absens there has been some developments on the mini front. Dark vengeance has been released and a lot of new nice chaos minis. So on my way home today I dropped by one of the local hobby stores and bought me a Mauler/Forge Fiend. I love the Mauler pose and the Forge Fined Hades cannons. I planned this to be a quick build, no mods and no green stuff so that I can start painting. But in the end I could not hold off, I did not like the smokestacks on the back of the model and since i liked the Mauler posed the most I build the model as a Mauler but I replaced the smoke stacks for the Hades cannons. I have not bothered to green stuff the joints yet, they will not be visible but I might still do it just because I know that they are there. Well it was a quick build and I like it, now I can start painting again. Once all the mechanicum stuff is out of the boxes I will continue with green stuff and so to get them into charter before paint.
I do have to watch my self though as there are so many new nice models out there and I still have quite a substantial amount of mechs to paint so, this Mauler will be a short side track.
I also post a pic of the CCW knight with a scitarii heavy weapons trooper standing on the carapace. I am happy with the look of the model, however, it is quite unstable.

Well this is it for now, I will be back with pics as I start painting.

CCW Knight assembled

Somewhat unexpectedly I have found some time to paint on my CCW knight. The process of building our house is starting to tell, so I am not sleeping very well and with two cats that wake me around 4 am I have found that since I can not fall a sleep again I can paint. So during some nights lately I have been chipping away at my CCW Knight and now it is starting to get ready for assembly  It is still not in its final pose but it is close. There might still be somethings that I have forgotten to paint and some things that might not have turned out 100% on a early morning shift of painting.

So now I will see if I have to start a myrmidon or something so that I have something to do instead of sleeping.

CCW knight update

This is just a short update on my CCW knight. I am mostly done with the green parts and are starting out on the rust and weathering. Painting is going slow due to other engagements but I am hope full to finish it with in a couple of weeks.

Until later.

Slow going

Hi again, I am not gone, but I am otherwise occupied so my updates on this blog is some what slow going at the moment. I try to get some painting in now and then, but most of my hobby space and stuff is packed up for our move to the new house. I have started to paint the CCW knight. After doing some GS work on the armor to tie it in with the Titans I decided that it is as much as I can do at this moment. I might have to go back and rework it later, but this is as good as it gets with all the other stuff going on. In the pics I have just arranged the parts to resemble the way it will go together but the pose and exact positions are not the final way things will be. So until later then, enjoy.

Summer update

Hi there!

Once again I have been on a brake from the painting hobby and the maintenance of this blog. It has been summer and I have been hard at work building a new home for the family together with my wife and so hobby time has been reduced. But I have still gotten a few hours of painting and a bit of green stuffing.
In the beginning of summer I was hard at work on my first raptor. I thought that the build came out all right but after painting I does not seam to fit the over all army so I will probably sit tight on the parts for the rest for a while before deciding if I should build more. I do have some alternative plans but they involve some more defilers ha hammerheads so it will have to wait.
Apart from finishing up the raptor I also started to work on the CCW knight. I had to exchange some of the face plates because I needed it for something else. In stead of using the side leg armor from the defiler as a face plate I used the front arm armor since it was not needed in the build elsewhere. It turned out ok, the head/cockpit is now a bit stubbier. Once the kitbashing, cutting up and gluing together was done a long period of green stuff work started. I decided that I would add a lot of sculpted chaos growth to this knight, and from experience I have learned not to work on more than one surface at a time.
The idea with the knight was to have a lance of two medium knights and the leader in the CC knight. Now, after working on it for some time I think it looks more like a army commanders knight than a simple lance leader so I am thinking about rethinking the project some what. If I change the lance leader to an army leader then the lance needs a new knight to take its place, I do not have parts for it now but it might tie in nicely with  the change in plans for the raptor parts.
 
Since the knights and myrmidons are quite large projects I have also squeezed in some scitarii models in-between working on the larger kits. These are mostly necrons remodeled into more humanoid warriors with their weapons attached directly to the one arm, swinging an ax in the other. I had planed to make squads of eight models since then I could get three squads from two boxes. But I love the new necron models and I just had to by some of the new once and try to work them in to the squads, so instead of eight models there are now ten, I added a heavy and a special weapon to the squad as well as exchanged the sergeant for a more imposing model. I also gave the sergeant some robes to tie it in with the mechanicum look. I also painted it the same way as the engine seer / tech priests, with a brownish red armor and deep red robes making the troopers green and characters/officers red.

Mechanicum update

Kill your darlings...  and nurture them. Some times you end up at a position where you have two ideas that are not compatible. You have one build you like and then there is another build, equally appealing.but they are both utilizing the same parts and can not exist at the same time without incurring the cost of a new setup of original models. So what to do? Find some adaptation of the builds so that they can coexist, and give me two models instead of one. So what am I talking about. Well initially I had the Idea of building a heavy myrmidon with four large plasma lances mounted on a Phirana body on a defiler chassis. Once I started to put things together I realized that the Phirana body was to small compared to the weapons. This led me to mount the weapons on the original defiler body which turned out great. So I decided to store the Phirana for a later date. I also had one spare Plasma lance that I thought to have on a raptor. Well, to get some space on my work table I stacked some parts on top of each other to get them out of the way. Then I realized that the Plasma lance on top of the Phirana on top of the defiler chassis was actually looking very nice indeed. So now I had two builds utilizing the same parts that both looked good but which to keep and which to scrap. Or was there some way to both keep the cookie and eat it? Doing a mental inventory of the amount of legs available to me I realized that I could build a four legged body for the Heavy Myrmidon then I could keep the scorpion (Phirana build). So now I have two Plasma lance carrying defilers. I will keep the Heavy Myrmidon for the Mechaniccum but the Phirana build will be donated to my Desert Eagles.

Apart from this small rearrangement of parts I have also be fiddling around with the raptor build. The raptors are not based on any fluff as far as I know. They are just a way for med to build something with the spare parts. I do however think that they do fit in. They are very fast scouts, like hunting dogs, flushing out prey for the Knights to kill. There will eventually be three of them and they will be armed but so far I have just the body and legs done. I am thinking of giving them heavy flamers for arm weapons and twin linked assault cannons on the back. But we will see...

Assault Knight

I am currently in the middle of a building frenzy. Al the ideas that I have thought about regarding my Mechanicum army are trying to get out at the same time. This we I had to build the Heavy Assault Knight. I have had this idea of taking the Defiler Knight and clothe it in heavy armor and equip it with the CCW arms from the Defiler kit. Since I bought two sets of Imperial strongholds, I have a lot of aegis defense lines to work with. I have seen some Knights on line that have used Aegis parts for the shoulders, but I think they look a bit unbalanced as the shoulders tend to look to large. My idea was to use more shield and use them both for arm and leg plates as well as for the shoulders. As this will make the Knight more heavy I have decided to use a more sturdy build for the legs using the defiler CCW instead of the slimmer back legs that I used before. I have made a basic assembly partially glued and partially held together by blue tack. I am quite happy with the result. It is distinct from the lighter Knight that I built before but there are still enough of a resemblance to tie them together. I will keep on building the different models for this project before starting with green stuff and later on, painting. In this way I can change the design and have the changes go through to all the models.

Myrmidon update

After playing around a bit with the Phirana body for my heavy Myrmidon I came to the conclusion that the body was to small and it was completely obscured by the weapon  arrays. So I decided to use the original defiler upper body as it is more massive. I also decided to use the shield over the front as in mordian7ths version of the myrmidon. This will also help tie the ordinary myrmidons to the heavy one. I also decided to use the battle cannon in its original position instead of putting a head in the front. It did however look a bit lonely so a added the twin linked autocannons to the same mount. I am quite pleased with how it turned out. The weapons arrays  are immense and I have decided that they are plasma lances instead of ordinary solid shell cannons. Well now it is just to finish it up, fill in the gapes with green stuff, add some insignia etc...  and then I have two smaller myrmidons to do...

Cannon building

A report from my first initial work. Apart from the boxes I bought I also bout some hammerhead weapon sprues. The thought is to use these to build some field artillery to be mounted on the heavy myrmidon and on one of the raptors. I had made some initial tries using the sprue pictures from the GW website and paint to see how one might remodel the peaces into something less tau. Now, you can not remove the origins totally but I think they turned out ok.
 

I also started to assemble the Phirana that will make up the main upper body of my heavy myrmidon. I will mount two twin mounted artillery guns to this. I have not decided exactly how they will be attached but I will have to wait with this until I get the body on to the legs so I can get the proportions right. So now I will just have to build another twin set and assemble the legs of a defiler to carry it around. Then It will be time for some plasticard  and green stuff to fill in the gaps and ad some nice details.