The Dark Commune and Apostle

I finally managed to finish the Dark commune by painting the demagogue. I am very happy with the result. The models are very nice to paint, not to much detail but still full of character. I tried to reverse the colour scheme on the demagogue, with purple leggings/shirt and grey over coat instead of a purple overcoat as I have on the rest of the models. This turned out nicely and emphasise her body a bit better. 

I also tried to tie them into the Dark Apostle that I painted some years ago. I think they go well together as they have the same design philosophy. 

Next up will probably be the other model I got for Christmas if I can finish the conversions and the base/bases. Otherwise it will be my birthday models (I am starting to realize that I no longer buy my models, my wife does).

Dark commune, and Opus Storm speeder

This spring has been crazy at work, so I apologize if I do not update as often and don't have the much to show. This means that what i usually do in a week I now do in a month. So this month I did the two guards for the Dark commune. These look more like some fantasy models rather than scifi models, but I do like them. The helmets are reminiscent of the Nazgul helmets from LoTR and the poses are equally threatening.

For colours I choose the same as for the standard bearers, grey under robes and purple over robes. The armour was done as rusted metal with some bronze. When taking the photos I realized I need to go back and work on the blades and hands a bit more. Nothing that will change anything drastically though. 

When not painting I have been building on the opus. This is also painfully slow. I have finally managed to get the internal panels pinned to the external, which means I can start with the details as they are now related to each other.

I have also started work on some gunboats, in the for of some Storm speeder. These will be defending the ground around the Opus and pick up any downed pilots, at least until I get a nice recovery ship (haven't figured out what would be best for this). The buy was a bit of a mistake. For some reason I still had the old Land speeders in my mind, and that was also what the opus was built for. So the loading bays on the sides, blew the deck, where I first intended to dock undock these is now to small and they can not fit through the doors. So I will have to find another purpose those.

Well, I did not really like some of more Primaris like designs of the storm speeders, so off course I had to make some alternations. First of was the air intakes for the jets. The grills were a bit to restrictive, so off they went. I will add some visible turbines inside that I have as leftovers from the aircrafts. I also added som cowlings to define the air intakes a bit more. Then I also added some larger exhausts for the jets as the original ones looked a bit small. Then I exchanged the winglets for some larger wings and added hinges to them so that I can fold them for storage. This meant that I could use to original wings as vertical stabilizers. I think these alterations brings a better balance to the model, less front heavy as there is now more going on at the back.  I will also remove the extra gunner from the turret and exchange him with some targeting arrays. It thought it would look strange with a guy sitting in there while it is in storage (I made the pilots removable). I also added some landing gears for the same reason. They can not just hover all the time. There is still more details to add but so far I like the build.

I guess that this version of the Storm speeder is more of a flyer that the standards ones, and it ties in better with the rest of the aircraft I have (it is also as big).  Even if it would have been nice with a canopy for the pilots. 

Dark commune banner and some Opus

Well, well. Once again I have been neglecting my updates. Not that there has been much to post lately as I have been traveling and doing other stuff than hobbying (like sleeping). But once in a while I have been dragging my self into the hobby room to ship away at the pile of things to do.

One of the things that has been sitting on my desk it the Dark Commune that I got for Christmas from my wife. These are gorgeous models with a lot of detail and a lot of small fragile details. That means that they have to be painted in sub-assemblies and then put together and a lot of touch ups where the glue melts things off or were the colours do not match. That means it takes some time to do these models justice.

I choose to paint them up to match the Dark Apostle I got earlier, which meant that I went for a grey and purple look for robes and pants of the models. The metal parts got the usual rusted treatment. I also tried my hand at some OSL from the flames, but I think I need to go back and enhance it a bit. I also thinking about doing this on the Apostel model to match. Not sure yet if I can pull it off.

I have also been working on the Opus, and it is slow work as it so big. I am currently working on the hangar bay. I decide that it would be better to add an internal skin of panels rather than trying to detail all the external parts internally. Now all miss matches will be cowered in the area in-between and will hopefully not be visible. To help with the detailing I bought the Necromunda columns and walls kit. This will be applied at various places but primarily for the access arches to the  gun ports and as emergency dividing walls for the different sections of the bay.

I also started out on the flooring. At the moment it is one large piece to make sure it all lines up along the hull. I might cut it up at some point (depending on how the details end up) to make it into more manageable sections. Once I hade it and the walls in place I put some of the flight wing into the storage to see how many I could fit, and it turned out to be 8-9 aircraft, a bit depending on how I want to treat the elevators. This is more or less what I did expect. With the second floor I guess I could fit another 6-8 craft which would mean that all craft I have fit inside except for the heavy fighter who are to tall to fit on the levels. I could probably get two of them onto some elevators and park them at an intermediate level, but that would seriously limit the space on the second floor.

So I think that the storage area in the hull is not meant to store all craft, but just a way to make space on the deck for flight operations. If the Opus needs to be lifted into orbit or the deck cleared for other reasons the craft would just have to relocate to a land based base instead.

Monster Tauros done

A new year has begun and I really would have liket to finish this model before Christmas, as it was almost done. However, a lot of other things came in-between, and the hobby time I did manage to spend really did not lead up to anything worth postning so far (mostly Opus stuff and the Christmas project from my wife, more on that in a later post).

However, the last couple of days I have manged to get some time in on this build and now I am feeling like it is finished. Over all I love how this turned out. The use of the cargo-8 undercarriage really helps sell the conversion as it is highly visible and it would have looked really strange to do some home brew stuff here. I am also fairly happy with the internals. I could probably have spent some more time adding details to the extension but since it will not be generally visible I do not think it is a big deal. I am also happily surprised that the flaring over the wheels turned out to give the Tauros the same width as the doser blade.

The paint jobb was fairly simple as per the Desert rats recipe. It is basically a monochrome beige with some sponge chipping and details. It would probably have been possible to do some nice camo version or so but I like the unitary colour. One new thing I "discovered" was that if I do patterning in the base colour before dry brushing they stay and fade into to over all colour (doser blade and rear mudflaps). This is something I will need to remember.

I still have a ridge runner and a venator to paint for this army but that will have to wait a bit. I am also tempted to get the tempestus-aquilons to go with this mobile force. A Rogal Dorn would also be an interesting addition. But this is what I have so far.

But all that will be for later, now I need to finish the Christmas project from the wifey.