Lord Discordant done

I have somewhat mixed feeling for this model. It looks super but is a pain to build and paint. For some reason some of the parts don't come together completely and leaves large gaps in the model. This cold have been solved by fist building the model and filling any gaps with GS, but then it would have been impossible to paint. Already as it is it is very difficult do paint using dry brushing. There is just not enough space to move the brush around and that makes it hard to achieve nice shades. This combined with all the small thin fragile parts makes this the hardest GW model I have painted. Not that I do not like a challenge but here I think it when a bit over board. If the models are to be this detailed, and with such fragile parts they need to be designed to be painted in sub assemblies that are of a reasonable size to hold and work with with out breaking any of the smaller parts just by holding it. All this made me lose some steam mid way, it was just to fiddly to be enjoyable and hence ti took me some extra time to actually get around to finish it. How people are to transport it for games I don't know. Well, in the end I think it turned out ok. I could have made the banner better but I could just not get the motivation to make anything really advanced and already this simple design is not well executed.

    

Next up is to finish the armor plates for Fenrir, and hopefully get the last GS done on the main body so that I can start painting it. I also really should finish the legs as there really is not that much left to do. But that will be for later. I might sneak in some simple easy to assemble models from the Indomitus box just to clear my head after this model.

Random spurts of creativity

Since the Dreadtober challenge ended I have not been able to focus my hobby time. I started the Lord Discordant but have not been able to finish it. It is not much left but I am stuck. Not sure why but there it is. Instead my energy has been spent in a number of other unfinished projects. One of them is Fenrir, my Reaver titan that was supposed to be a "quick build" without to much conversion and scratch building. It turned out that it really requires a lot of GS work... and one I was done that road there was no turning back. So I have slowly trudged on as the inspiration has taken me but not forced it. Currently I am working on some of the upper body panels, the chest, beck and back armor to be precise. I decided to go for the bone poking out the skin look for this titan. I is actually quite fun to do all the sculpting when I have the inspiration. Other times I just look at it and wounder why I bother...  why not paint it as is, why do I need to do all these conversions?

When my mode has not been in for work on Fenrir I have tried building some "normal" models. Since I finished my Helverings for the dreadtober challenge I decided that it might be time to start on the rest of the armigers, the War glaives. But I was not really looking forward to doing six more of the same model but with other weapons so I thought that I might try to make them look a bit different (which I think GW really could have done with this model, it does not require that many "other" parts to make it distinctly different than the Helverin). I decided to cut away some of the side fairings on the top carapace to make it slimmer. I also put the pauldrons on the arms instead of the shoulders. I also made chain glaive into a pole arm and the plasma thing in to a shield. I also added a waist spacer and some clogs to the toes to make it taller. All in all I think it looks very different from the hunching stance of the Helverins.

And as if that was not enough, one of my very old projects reared its head and demanded my attention. Many Years ago I started a project I called the Opus Magna, which is an amphibious assault carrier. The main structure is many built but I did not do my homework good enough the first way around so all the sub components (needed for painting) did not interlock properly and I had some problems with structural integrity. This meant that I need to rebuild them to some extent and add another layer of super structure to keep everything where they should be. This set back realy brought me down and it has been hanging around my hobby room since then. But suddenly I got some inspiration to start working on it again and this time it was the bridge. I am using the imperial bunker thing as the base but to make it look less like a bunker and more like a carrier tower I needed to add some viewing galleries to the sides. My initial thought was to bridge the open space/windows with vertical bars to indicate window panes but I am sort of liking that they look like balconies hanging of the central tower. I will see how I proceed with this. If I can just get the remaining two pieces below deck rebuilt I think I might actually get it done at some point.

Vex Machinator, Arch Lord Discordant, WIP

 Now this is an interesting figure. I absolutely love the demon/machine blend on this model. So from the first time I saw it I knew I need to paint it. So as soon as it was released I bought it, and it has been sitting in the do do pile ever since. Not that I was not tempted, but I felt that I did not have the right inspiration to take this model on at that time, but now I got the flow.

The model itself must be the most complex GW sculpt that I have tackled to date. It is crammed full of details and small parts that are partially or completely hided behind each other, so the only way I see to paint it is to break it down into sub assemblies. But not even that was enough for some parts, especially around the head. It is almost as if you need to paint, at least parts, of it while it is still on the frame to be able to get to all the small hidden parts (which I did not do).

So far I have only worked on the Helstalker. The paint scheme on this is pretty straight forward but requires a lot of time. I started with the metal underside and tail which got more or less my standard treatment for metal, trying to get a large variety of tones in to break it up and give it more life. Next step was to paint the armor black. I have several recipes on black that I have used on several different models. For this one I went with my pre-heresy DA scheme which gives a blue grey tone to the black. My Helldrak and Forge fiend has a similar scheme but a more grayish black so I hope that they will not look to much out of place next to each other. The reason for choosing this one though is that it gives a more vibrant tone to the black, more like a beetle than the more dull grey of my previous models. After that it was just to add the border trim, which was very difficult to get right as there are so much other stuff overhanging the areas so it was difficult o get to all parts with the dry brush. The organic parts of the model got the standard zombie flesh that I have used on previous chaos models.

That is as far as I got with it this week, we will see if I can finish it in the coming week but it is competing with my newfound enthusiasm for Fenrir (I will make a post on that later). I have not decided on the lord discordant himself, what color he should have on his armor but I am leaning towards the purple that I did for my raptors just to get some contrast to the Helstalker.