Ghost walk

Once again it has been some time since my last update. It was not intentional but it just happened as the summer vacation did not turn out as I had planed it. Idea was to work in the garden during days and on Opus in the evenings. But the weather gods did not agree, so instead of working in the garden (due to rain) I got stuck in the lounge set under awning reading Gaunt's Ghosts (all the omnibuses). That meant I have not much to show in terms of hobby results.

I did however manage a photo shoot with the ghosts before the weather turned bad. I needed to add a holding pin in the waist of Varangian, to stop any similar mishaps that I had with Fenrir, and to get to Varangian I needed to remove the rest of the titans from the display. And as I were working on paving the driveway and had a nice pile of gravel that would make for a nice backdrop I decided to make a thing of it. It really is difficult to get all the models in one shot without getting the house or any other thing in the shot as well.

I also took some pictures of the Northern Knights as well...

Varangian

Fenrir

Joluns Modh

Ylgjar Ergir

Uthola

King in the north

The Ronin

The Quarterbacks

The Younglings

We Walk

Fenrir done

Well, well. After the near disaster the other day I reassembled Fenrir and got him set up for a photo shoot. I really like how this came out, and from some angles he looks down right mean. The hip bones and the shoulder cables with the extensions of the armour has closed up some gaps in the design, making the titan look more solid. Now, if FW only would release the AT carapace weapons for 28 mm I think this titan design could become more in line with the ascetics of the newer titans.

I am also happy with how a lot of the details turned out. I have not been as throughout as I could have been with the GS sculpting but I think it is ok. Next time I might use the scalpel more to make sharper edges and add some more definition to at least some of the sculpts.

So, even if this was intended to be a quick build and paintjob with just the addition of the back mounted laser blaster it turned out to be a massive project where almost every bit has some modification or sculpting. But I am so pleased with the result. 

See you all for the next titan, Surtr.

Weapon armour for Fenrir...

Finally, this week I finished the last pieces for Fenrir, the armour plating's for the arm weapons. I am really happy with how the extensions worked. But the next time I do something like this I will cut away the bottom of the armour trim so that I get a single plate rather than the divider at the middle.

I am really starting to like the look of the chaos growths coming up through the armour rather than just sitting on top. This does however take longer both to sculpt and to paint so I will probably be a bit restrictive with this.

Well, that is it then, Fenrir is done? Well, noop, not really. As I was mounting the last laser blaster to the titan, Fenrir decided to take a nose dive, and not only onto the table, but the floor. That meant that instead of having a completed titan I now have a titan in its constituent pieces. Luckily no resin parts broke, some of my GS work got a beating and broke of, but other wise it was just the glue joints that came apart. Also the paint job was mostly undamaged, There are some small chips on the edges that hit the floor first. So now I need to go over all the parts, fix the shipping and re-glue the model.

As this is the second time it does exactly the same stunt I need to re-evaluate the waist joint. So far I have relied on a strong magnet to keep things in place, and it has worked when the model has been sitting by itself, but when I have interacted with he arm joints things has gone badly. The problem with magnets are that if they are subjected to a torque/leverage they quickly come apart if they can not stay flat against its mate (that is how you normally separate strong magnets). To counter this I used a steering pin in the centre of the magnet to prevent it from tilting and coming loose. However, lately I have come to trust in the magnets inherent strength and skipped this pin (I found larger and stronger magnets). So after Fenrirs first nose dive I re-introduced a pin for the waist magnet, but it was just sitting in the lower part and was not fixed to the upper part. So when I accidentally tilted the upper body it just rose up and of the pin and then rapidly onto the floor. Now I have glued the pin to the top part so that it can not lift of the pin, and the pin needs to be lifted out of the bottom part and that can only be done straight up (have not tested if I can separate the waist at all now).

Now, this has me worried about Varangian, that has a similar design in the waist and arms. I will need to take him apart and introduce pins to the magnets here also to prevent him from also collapsing. And I think for the future I need to come up with a better way of fixing the body to the legs and the arms to the body with out relying to much on magnets. 

It would have been nice if the models could have been designed with this in mind, as the AT titans are prepared for magnets.

As soon as I can reliably get Fenrir together again I will take some finished picture.

Fenrir armour WIP

In the last few days I finished the leg and knee armour as well as the carapace for the back mounted laser blaster. The leg piece turned out well and I am happy with the over all look. Now that Fenrir as armour on both legs as well as the beginnings of shoulder armour he starts looking more beef.

As for the carapace of the laser blaster it turned out a bit messy with the flaked chevrons and the bone breaking through the armour. This made me a bit unsure about my plans to have the shoulder plates also with blue white chevrons...  will see how it turns out. Only fore pieces left to go.

I also painted up the tail that I made. In the end it turned out ok, but a bit small. If I had to redo it I would make it flow better with the rest of the body and make it larger. I need to think about it a bit and see if it stays or goes.

Fenrir GS WIP

So, I am getting close to the end of my Christmas vacation and will soon have to return to work. I have not been doing as much hobby work as I had thought but I have been spending time with the family and doing some wood working instead so all in all a productive and relaxing vacation. But I did get something done and most importantly is that is am finally done with the green stuff work for Fenrir and now it is "just" to paint up the last armour panels and he will finally be done.

For the right leg panels I tried to do something similar but updated to what I did on Joluns Modh, i.e. a pair of wings and some chaos growths. The knee pad is basically original with some piercings at the top.

The shoulder guards have been modified to have some extra plating going down in front of the arm socked to give some more protection and also give the titan a bit more bulk over the shoulders. I had to restart the modifications to the top once I the "bone" things I designed did not look good. Instead I reverted to a submerged chaos pattern of chaos growths splitting the skin of the armour. On the right shoulder I also added some scrollwork and a set of bone laurels to give it a bit more imperial vibe. I had initially made a pair of shields to go with the shoulder armour but decided to skip them as they altered the look of the Reaver to much.

The cowling for the back mounted laserblaster also had to be redone as the original design did not work out. Instead I went with the rib structure that I have used on other parts of Fenrir. From the top it looks a bit like a skeletal angel but I am not sure that this will come across in the end.

For the arm mounted laserblasters I modified the cowlings to have a lower part on the out side (which means that I now have a dedicated left and right hand weapon). Here I hade some great plans of making an advanced heraldic sculpt with a shield, laurels scrolls etc...  but in the end I ended up with two rather simple chaos patterns breaking through the skin. I will had the rest as freehand paint instead.

Most of the weapon and shoulder armour will get blue white chevron patterns to tie it in with the rest of the Northern Ghosts as Fenrir otherwise is predominantly green. We will see how that works with the growths. I did something similar for the cowling for Varangians volcano cannon.

Laser blasters for Fenrir

Recently I finished the two arm mounted Laser Blasters for Fenrir. All in all they are a straightforward paint job, similar to the back mounted Laser Blaster. I kept them in the yellowish basecoat with some black and yellow chevrons. The barrels where painted white metal with heat staining going from blue to brown. I choose not to make them "glowy" as I do not thing that is to realistic and does not fit my style of painting.

One thing that I notice while painting these where that there are noticeable 3D printing lines on the models, as well as casting lines. I guess that FW 3D prints the masters for the models and then cast them for customer. I would have guessed that FW would clean this up better before casting as it has a cheep fell to it when you buy something that expensive and it looks like something you could have printed yourself. The warlord Laser Blaster does however not show any of these ridges and is very smooth so I wonder if it is only the Battle Titan Laser Blasters that have this or if it is all the remodelled weapons.

This also makes me wonder why FW has not released all the AT weapon options for 28 mm. Since they are made in CAD, and if the masters are "just" 3D printed, then why not just offer them in scaled up versions as well?

Fenrir leg armour

This week I finished the green stuff sculpting on the left leg armour for Fenrir. This is the leg that has the demon face breaking through on the knee pad. This is a recurring theme on my titans. In this case I sculpted an actual face that had broken through the armour rather than having something beneath the skin as portrayed on the FW chaos Reaver and what I tried to emulate on my war lord. I think this turned out fine. This part was done some time ago and I might have already blogged it. 

What I had not figure out was what to do with the lower leg armour and how to tie this to the face. I was playing around with some ides of having spikes/horned ridges breaking trough the armour in some nice pattern but I could not settle on a nice design. Then I came up with the idea of having two great horns poking through just beneath the knee cap, similar to the horns on the Magnus model. So I set about sculpting these, and to cut back on the need for excessive amounts of GS I made the core from three layers of 2 mm plasticard that was shaped into a rough horn shape. This was then covered with GS in several layers adding more and more details.

Once I hade these done the thought struck me, what if I continue on the Magnus theme and let the horns come come from a chest and then the face could be the demon face on the knee. Then I just needed to add the rest of the rib case to the side armour together with some arms to fill up the space. I did this in the same way as the rib case on the chest panel, where the ribs are poking through the armour in places. To get the anatomy reasonably correct I actually use some reference images. All in all I am pleased with the result. I probably could have med the details a bit better and the transitions to the armour smoother but over all I am pleased.

Painting was pretty standard. I kept the base colours of the armour to the greens without adding any decorations so that it would not be to busy, except for the knee that always has the heraldic designs on them. Now I am working on the laser blasters for the arms. After that there is not much left, just need to finish the GS designs for the right leg, fix the shoulder amour and the weapon cowlings.