Knight armor WIP

This week I have focused on finishing the armor plating for the Gatling Knight. I did not get as far as I would have liked so there are still the shields for the fists and some other small plates left to do. But it is coming along nicely. I did try my hand at some free hand motifs on the shoulders, beneath the chaos growths. I tried to make it look like the designs are flaking of and giving them a worn look. The growths are however in the middle of it so it might be hard to see what it is meant to be. On the left shoulder it is supposed to be a shield and on the right a winged shield with a talon. One thing that is nice with painting it like it is flaking of is that I do not need to be as good with the free hand.
As i mounted the torso to the legs I noticed a clearances issue with the ammo bands and the knee on the right leg. This is something I will have to look into and see if I can fix in a good way. Well that is it for now.

Knight Warden WIP

This week I have once again been away from home so there has not been much time to paint. I did however manage to finish two more Electro priests while away and this week end I managed to get a few hours in on the knight with the gatling. Not much to say relay, it is still a work in progress and the pose might not be 100% as I just mocked it up to see what it looked like. Once the arms are done, I will do the leg armor and then I can make the final pose. I think it looks good so far, so I am happy.

Resent progress...

It has been some time since my last post. That does however not mean that I have not been working. There has been some holidays and family occasions which have taken a large chunk out of my hobby time but the most time consuming has been building my new models cabinet. Our house is shaped like an L which means that on the second floor the rafters are intersecting in the joint between the two house bodies. This area would normally just be a dead space in the wall, but instead of sealing it up we decided to build a shelf with some storage there instead. I had hopped that it would be an easy build but it turned out that the space was not just 45 and 90 degree angles so I have been running up back and forth between the garage and the hobby room trying to get everything to fit. It is not done yet but most of the difficult stuff has been done. Now I just need some lighting and some glass doors. The I need to see what will move from my glass cabinets to this new cabinet.

Since I have also be working this means I have been away from home a bit to, so I had time to finish my Kataphron destroyers. I like these models but I am not sure that they fit in with the mechanicum. For me Mechanicum are walkers, not tracked... . Here I thing GW/FW missed out an opportunity to make some really unique transports/tanks.

And at home I painted my first Tzaangor. Here I choose the same color palette as I used for Magnus and Ahriman. I think the multicolored metal I used of Magnus really works for these guys. Still have nine to go, and some sorcerers.
I have also been painting along on the inside panels for Varangian. I think they are turning out ok. I which there would have been an official inside for the Titan, but I guess this have to do.
I am also trying to finish of the Knight I have been working on for some time. Here it is mostly painting all the green parts and getting the pistons etc blocked in. As soon as that is done I will do the armor panels.

So even if there has not been that many posts about it I have not been idle. Hopefully I will get back to some more regular blogging now that the cabinet is coming along.

Ahriman Arch-Sorcerer of Tzeentch

Finished the disk for my Easter egg Ahirman. I really like this model apart from a few practical and aesthetic things. First of I don't like when they add things like smoke, magical effects, flames etc to the models. These things are hard to paint in a realistic way as they would need, in most cases, to be semi transparent, which they for natural reasons are not. I which they would add al these things as add-ons that are optional for the model. Second thing is an inevitable point of 3D CAD sculpting vs plastic castings. When they do large flowing objects like robes and capes etc. it might look fabulous in the CAD model but once you cut it up for casting it happens, like on this model that it turns out you need to cut pieces of the cape of to be able to cast it and then glue the pieces back together afterwards. This means that you need to green stuff the glued together pieces if you do not want edges in your large fabrics, which might be hard to do. In this case I must admit that I was lazy and just glued the model together and painted it, which means there are some unseemly seams to be seen. But apart from this the sculpt is really nice and there are tons of detail that does not really need to be "painted in" but shows up with some basic contrast in the color. So, even if I think the sculptors really should think more about the casting when sculpting I still enjoy this new era of plastic highly detailed quality models. In fact it might even come to a point when the models are to detailed so that it takes to long to paint them to actually make an army of many models. But that is a luxury problem that I will gladly live with.

Easter egg, WIP

So its been Easter. I managed to take some time off from work last week and set about working on some things needed for the house. These are things I have been postponing for close to a year now so it was time. This meant that I did not have much time to paint anything as most my time was taken be house work. Then, just before this weekend I got an Easter egg from my wife. In it was a lot of small plastic pieces and some heart shaped chocolate. After an initial survey I concluded that Ahriman was hiding in the egg, and as I had finished most of the things with the house that I set out to do I treated myself to some hobby time over the holidays. I am not quite done with him yet as I still need to finish the flying disc, but I thought I would show some WIP pictures. I decided to do him in a similar fashion to Magnus, with the multi color metals and pastel cloak instead of the blue armor of the original. I think it turned out ok, some of the colors are not as I intended as I realized a lot of my paints as gone bad and does not behave as they should. Hopefully I can finish him in the days to come.

Varangian first paint, WIP

And off we go...

Varangian WIP

I have finally gotten around to finishing of the green stuff work on the insides of Varangian, I also managed to get the chimera done and the base and the legs with armor. I have really been productive lately. Soon I can start the painting process on the internal panels. There are some minor work left to be done on the legs and feet but they can also soon go to paint. All in all I am very happy with the progress. I think that when I finally made up my mind about what needed to be done it was not that hard to do. I am also quite pleased with how the leg pose turned out. I am however a bit worried that I might have but the pelvis a bit to much forward and that it will put a lot of strain on the legs and that I might have similar problems as I have with my stalking warhound. Things might feel a bit more secure once the pelvis and ankle pistons are in and the leg-base triangle is closed. Well this is just a short update on my progress. There are some lessons learned in there somewhere but I will have to come back to that.