Sprue Whispering

So I was trucking along quite nicely, almost finishing off the Bloodclaws, when I hit a little hitch, a little bump in the road. Namely, the shoulders pads. After a few weeks of vacillating, I finally fixed the yellow of the shoulder pads. I then laid down a stripe of black, blocked in white then painted red. But unfortunately it just did not come out a crisply as I would have liked. This is leaving me with a real conundrum. What to do ? Mask it off and airbrush the stripe forgoing the need for the black, maybe? At least I would have a crisp line. I will need to think about this one. Procrastinate a little on this. Apologies for the  picture, this is a true WIP picture, but you will be able to see that the line work is not crisp enough, for my liking.     More to come on this one.   

I finally got around to laying down the base coats on the Sanguinary Chaplain, whilst waiting for the paint to dry on the Stormwolf. I started out with a primer coat of Vallejo Polyurethane Grey, then I sprayed Vallejo Model Air Mahogany Brown. Washed with a coat of Vallejo Wash Sepia.     I then blocked in the black, using Vallejo Model Air Black, and the gold, using Vallejo Game Color Brass         More to come on this one.

I had a chance to progress the pilot from the Storm Wolf. Firstly I started painting the gold, starting with Vallejo Game Color Brass, with a wash of Vallejo Wash Sepia Tone.   Next I worked on the interior of the cockpit.        Touching up the interior highlighting some dials, adding scopes.             Adding him to the cockpit.     Now I have to go find the shoulder pads, paint them and stick them onto the pilot.     More to come..

Work continues on making the power claw, utilizing the claws from Bjorn, a whole bunch of plastruct plasticard, some left over acupuncture needle wire and some left over green stuff tentacle. From above, notice the shortened sections of acupuncture wire and green stuff tentacles    From below. I added a tab on the end so it could slot into the wrist of the Dreadknight arm.     Assembled and attached to the arm, this is how it looks from above.     I have left off a gap filling/bridging piece of plasticard so you can see how it joins to the wrist section.    More to come, as this project nears the build completion.

Logan Grimnar on Storm Rider .. or Santa and his sleigh ..  If there is any single model that will split the audience on likeability, Santa and his sleigh would rate high on most people's lists.   Grimnar, current 6.5 ed. stats aside, is now a Lord of War, and probably rarely makes it to most people's tables, aside from a fluffy narrative.   But when he does land on the table, your opponent will either die from fits of laughter at the stupidity of the model or go, "wow! cool model."   Personally, I have a fondness for the silliness of the model. It's like a pug dog. Ugly as sin but so lovable. The very definition of cute. But for the practicalities of the table top, I'd like Logan to be a bit more hard core. Riding the rarest of bad ass Fenrisian beasts, a Storm rider, flanked by his very protective Thunderwolf buddies. So in essence, it plays the same as the current model. But looks a lot more bad ass!   So, what should t...

After assembling the body of my converted Space Wolves Dreadnought, I thought I would take some time out to assemble an actual Grey Knight Dreadknight. My thinking was more to check the Dreadknight out against the Dreadnought, for scaling purposes. And Grey Knights have an easy paint scheme so I should be able to smash it out quickly. I did switch out the heavy Psy-cannon tip for the heavy Gatling Psilencer, mainly because I like the look a lot more, and I will simply play 'count-as' if I do hit the tables.   Overall, I find the Dreadknight kit pretty fun to put together. You will notice that I have left the armor plates and chest harness off. This is mainly due to the fact I paint basic work via air-brush. So they will be attached later. Now getting to real point of the post. Checking the scaling. The Dreadknight is only a shade taller than the Dreadknight, a touch over a 1/4 inch taller or one centimeter in metric.   If I left the ...

Painting continues ... and apologies for the poor lighting. I continued blocking in the colors on Harald Deathwolf, laying down the first highlight coat of Vallejo Game Air Wolf Grey over the Vallejo Game Air Sombre Grey blacklined base coat. I also began laying down a base coat of Vallejo Game Air Brass, to start building up the gold embellishments. Because I was in a batch painting mood I then moved onto the Bloodclaw pack. Laying down the first highlight of Vallejo Game Air Wolf Grey on the armor plates, Brass on the ornate portions and Bleached Bone on the bone fetishes. In addition, I washed in some Army Painter Dark Tone, to bring a darker shade to the gold and bone.     On a side note, it was a balmy 110degF here in California, so my paints were drying on my wet palette a little too quickly.    More to come, when the temperature drops to a more acceptable level.

Being a closet Kickstarter trawler, I acquired a few Basius2 negatives, more importantly I got my hands on the number 08 - Warpath plate.   So what is Basius ?  Essentially is a resin negative.      Now what you do with it is as follows: Make a ball of green stuff, keep it damp. Place your green stuff onto a base. Grab your Basius negative and wet the section you're interested in. You wet the mold so the green stuff takes the molding but doesn't stick to the Basius negative. Press your base, loaded with the damp green stuff, and press it into the newly wetted Basius plate. Et Voila! So here is what the relief would look like, courtesy of the Wargames Bakery site.      I choose a section that I thought would be most interesting.      Now there is a few things to note about making negative impression relief molds, or less convoluted, press-fit bases.  It uses a fair amount of ...

Bjorn gets his Fell-hand .. Well construction on Bjorn's power claw has begun. After many weeks of agonizing over whether to make it articulated, or just stick the original claw onto the wrist.   While I was assembling and modeling the claw, I found a few left over acupuncturist needle shafts, and started to build out spring cylinders for later attachment to the claw.   Below is a close detail of the wrist attachment mock-up. I am still not happy with the angling, but it may just work for this miniature. Still need to add detailing and embellishments to the claw cylinder, most likely from the spring casings mentioned above.      What do you think thus far ? Let me know your thoughts.

Straight off the back of playing with the Tentacle Maker, I built a few tentacles a set them out to dry for about an hour. I needed to do this to get them to harden up whilst also still being pliable for what I had in mind. Now if you have a good idea of the curves you want to make, you can make them straight off the bat, with the Tentacle maker, simply make the cable, lay it down on a wet surface and bend into the curve you want, leaving it to dry. Unfortunately for the work I was trying to do, I had to roll out cables, wait for them to dry, trim to length, then dry fit them to the miniature. Super gluing them when I found the correct, or most aesthetically pleasing positioning.   I found that the ribbed cabling gave a more industrial cooling aesthetic which fit with the cooling and amniotic fluid vibe that the sarcophagus was supposed to convey. This is how it turned out on the assembled miniature. Spoilers!! I will cover, in later articles, the few spoil...

I have been sitting on my Space Wolf Dreadnought for a few weeks now, wondering how I could make some piping from the chest sarcophagus back into the torso chassis. Trawling around I came across this product, The Tentacle Maker, made and sold by Green Stuff Industries . So what is it ? Well essentially the Tentacle Maker it is a press fit system that rolls out sausages of green stuff and forms them into undulating cylinders for modeling.   Three different profiles come in the current V2 kit, Vex-040, Saw-020 and Saw-050.     There are plenty of tutorials available on YouTube to how it actually works, it is pretty simple, just remember to wet your tentacle maker with a little water. Roll a sausage of only a small amount of green stuff, and you're off to the races. Here are a few test rolled tentacles I made with the SAW-050 profile. Stay tuned to what I did next. 

I think I fixed the Wolves!! After the Ghost tint debacle, I went back, black washed all the wolves, and re-sprayed the transition from black, to grey, to white. Before, with my hopeless effort at using Ghost tint.   Urgh, that wet shiny look, brings to mind a McBain saying..      So moving forward, this is how they turned out.    Much better on the eyes, right ? And the detail has come back too. I still need to tidy the wolves up, add detailing for the mouths, paw and claws, and finish the basing off, off course. But all told, I think I nearing completion on these wolves. More to come, soon.

As I was black lining the Storm Wolf pilot. I thought this would be a good excuse to finish black lining my Bloodclaw pack. It has taken a while to finish this squad up, I will admit, the main issue being the yellow. I am not having much luck getting down a smooth layer of yellow, either via airbrush, or by hand paint. Given they are Bloodclaws, Red wouldn't necessarily be a bad color, but the fluff traditionally has the Bloodclaws with yellow shoulder pads, with red markings. Such as below:       Getting pack to the Bloodclaws, this is how the black lining is looking, with the initial coat of yellow, and flesh washes down.      And the full pack, which you may have seen before, with initial color blocking and black lining. Next up, I will take them back to the 'grey' look, and away from the bluish version. I have to get some discipline and really nail down finishing this squad. More to come on this.