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. 

Obliterators

These guys have been on my to do list for a long time. Initially I did not like the idea of the Obliterators, and the first iteration of the models were not were good. But then these came along, and I thought they looked really cool. I have been holding of painting them as I were waiting for inspiration. And after painting Vashtorr, with the blend of machine and corrupted flesh I finally felt that it was time.

I decided to paint them in the same scheme as my raptors (Crimson Angels), i.e. a purple metallic with white metal borders. This scheme came to be when I painted Gulliman as I came up with it for the chaos marine that he is standing on. As such I never put much thought into it, and I never developed any real method for painting charters this way. In stead it kind a looks a bit sloppy the way I previously painted it. So for these models I decided to put some more effort into shading to get some more depth to the armour plates. I think I managed quite well, so I will have to go back to the old figures and do some touch-ups to get them to the same level. The flesh was done as my usual chaos flesh with a green and brown wash to get a sickly done to the flesh. Love how the weapon feeds blend with the back muscles. When I added this lighter done to the models the armour plating's turned darker and got a stronger red tone which is a bit strange. Just go to show the adjacent colours do influence how a colour is perceived.

Over all I greatly enjoyed these models, they are highly detailed and the poses are quite different so it does note feel like painting two identical models. I do however not think it would be fun to do multiples of them as they are very distinctive and do not offer any options to make them individual or re-posable. I am actually quite surprised that such advanced models were provided in a boxed set (presumably for people new to the hobby). These usually tend to be more  simple monopose models. Well, now they are done. I still have the 10 chaos marines, so I might do them in the same scheme at some point.

Next up will be a transport option for my desert rats. I have been working on a wheeled tauros transport, but more about that in a later post.

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.

Abaddon the Despolier

Finished Abaddon and I am really happy with how he turned out. The over all palette is more muted and dark compared to the box art which really suits the model. I removed the burning torch as I realized that as the model is so dark, the bright flames stole to much focus from the rest, just leaving it as a black backdrop. The added skulls really pops, but still is inline with the rest of the base.

Hope you also like him.

I also brought out my old Abaddon model that I painted some 20 years ago. 

Abaddon WIP

This week I finally got some hobby time. I tried to work a bit on my Dominus knight but I was not in the mode for GS so it sort of stalled out. Instead I started work on Abaddon. I have had the model for some time now but have not been feeling the inspiration to paint him. But after finish the Triumph of Saint Katerine and the black green armor there I felt that it might try it on a larger scale.

I build the model as standard, only adding some extra skulls to the front of the base. Then I set about painting the armor. I did my standard recipe for metallic armor starting a black base coat, and dry-brushing bronze and three layers of silver metal. Then I washed the model in green ink and repeated the dry-brush befor a final wash of black. I also opted to paint the underlying parts as rusted as I thought that Abaddon eats, sleeps and make war in his armor and hence the inner parts would not get cleaned very often... and it looked great...  but it did not read Abaddon, just some rusted guy with black/green armor plates...   I took some test photos just to see what it look like and realized the the metallic plates look almost silver... so in the end I had something more like Perturabo than Abaddon. And even if the model had turned out ok I decided to lose the rust underneath and darken the plates significantly.



Now I just need to finish of all the small details and the cloak. But I think he is coming along even if a lot of the initial work is no longer visible.