Wednesday 17 June 2015

Chosen Diorama

Busy and yet not busy at the same time. School has been closed for the last week and will be until next Monday - well......closed to students, yet we teachers must still come in and sit in our offices. Mercifully I get to go home at lunchtime but sitting at a desk all morning is soul crushing. Anyways, due to this and also the wife is and has been away in Australia visiting friends till Sunday, I have gotten an inordinate amount of painting and modeling done in the last week.
Am working on the DV csm squad - 'The Chosen' for Paradigm's monthly painting comp over on DakkaDakka. These are seriously gorgeous figs. There is 6 of them in total, 2 of which are duplicates so it's five different and really awesome sculpts. If GW got rid of the standard CSM models and instead released a box akin to these Chosen - the whole Chaos contingent would be so much better. Anywho - The Chosen  - stunning sculpts of marines who have had their armour also start to be affected by Chaos; we've got daemonic faces growing out of armour plates, just the right amount of spikey and more vintage looking weapons. Such lovely figs deserve a diorama I thought, so have been building one for them as well. Biggest one I've made so far. As I built it I suddenly realised that it was really reminding me of the little campos or campiellos of Venice. I must be missing Italy again!! Anyways - here's a few WiP shots of what is going on. The Chosen are much further ahead now than shown here but I haven't gotten around to taking newer shots yet. I wanted to try and show their tabbards are having been made of flayed skin. They're very clean looking the now but I will be dirtying, bloodying and weathering them up at bit in final details.
Hope you like 'em
Cheers
Irish
 
 
 

 

 

 
 

Thursday 11 June 2015

Of Knights and Men

On to what's on the painting mat at the mo. (And this is what my workplace is like....nah that's a bit of a lie....it's rarely this tidy lol)



After the wedding, I decided I needed a wee treat (hahahaaha) - still had a wee bit of savings left in my Irish account so a quick (online) trip to Orctown and that was that. Two antsy days later and my (2nd) favourite korean (after 'The Wife' of course ;) ) knocked on my door and delivered this......


The current Knight Warden kit and the new AdMech Tech-Priest Dominus and some sundry supplies incl the new leadbelcher spray. Lovely jubbly!!!!!
Now then - the Tech-Priest is a little on the pricey side.....W40,000 I think. Bloody clampack prices. Everything else (imho) GW does model wise is priced fine for what you get as far as I'm concerned. However, clampack figs take the piss somewhat. However.......the priest fig is GLORIOUS!! He's backbenched for now though.
And on the knight. This kit is huge!!! The 3 original large sprues plus the new upgrade sprue and it's all bloody lovely!!!
Have spent a fair bit of time on YouTube checking out the tuts there as from the start was intending to fully magnetise the bugger.
Getting the appropriate size of magnets over here in Korea (without having to spend a fortune or order from another country) has required a little shopping around and imagination. Here's where I am thus far....

      
 
 

Body and hip joint first. This joint is going to be bearing a lot of weight so I found these 20mm (I think) ND mags in the local Arts'n'Crafts store for the job. The mags have a hole throught he middle and one side is concave. Absolutely perfect for the pillar on the hip joint to fit into and get the full movement. These 20mms fit exactly into the bowl cap piece of the hip joint (forgot to take a photo of that) super glued them in place and then built up some green stuff around the one in the main body.

Works perfectly. The magnets are so strong that there is not slippage of movement when the model is assembled even with the full weapons loadout.



Arms and weapons took a little more time. Especially the upper arm pieces that fit onto the shoulder mounts. For these I had to first file off the ridge that would normally clip into the upper weapon housing and then carve down into the piece (didnt have a 6mm drillbit, so out came the carving tools. Obviously the weapon arms have a bit of weight to them so need a bigger magnet than the little 3mm ones I broght back from Ireland with with me. Looked everywhere......nothing.......until........I found these fridge type magets with 6mm ND inside them. Bought a few packs of those and hacked them apart back at home!! Fitted all the arm and weapons out with 6mm mags and sealed them in with GS and somtimes a bit of cut down sprue as well (the well inside a few of the weapons is pretty deep). Anyways that's the weapons all done and interchangeable. They all fit really snuggly and the 6mm mags are pretty strong so again no slippage. Theonly tricky bit was the carving out of the upper arm pieces. BE CAREFUL or you could ass the whole piece up.



Did manage to give the wee 3mm mags some love though. The 2 carapace weapons are maglocked using 3mm pairs (2 in the weapon and 2 drilled into the hole on the carapace) I also decided to make the face plates interchangeable too. This was more to fit the fluff I'm making for this knight; I want him to have his original imperial knight's house face plate and then a 'vengeance mask' which was gifted to him by an AdMech forge world.......more on that fluff stuff later, laaaattter!!! The masks are fitted using the wee 3mm mags. Simple enough to do.


And so......all the pieces are now cleaned, trimmed, filed, smoothed and magged. Next came priming and basecoating........No way in the warp was I going to be basecoating this monster by brush!!!!  Primed everything with a light coat of Chaos Black spray and then got busy with the new Leadbelcher spray. Was a little nervous as the Skull White spray can be ........odd at times and hadn't heard anything about how the LB spray behaved. But it went on as smooth as silk. beautiful coat. I will say though that the LB spray is somewhat lighter and shinier than the LB paint from a pot.....not by much though, but it sure is quite silvery shiiinny (oh, Shiny!!) I also coated the outside of the armour plates with the Skull White spray, which decided that today was the day that it was going to go on smooth and silky (relief). So, the whole bugger is now primed and basecoated and ready for paint..........well, after I get these DV Chosen and their dio finished up for this month's DakkaDakka competion!!!!!

Anyways, that's where the new Knight is at. The magnetising wasn't that much of a bitch at all and has come together really solidly - no disco wobble at all!! Any questions or anything about the build - just drop me a line in the comments

Cheers

Irish


Ravenwinged it!

Double post again today as I have been a bit remiss at posting (not at painting though of course ;) )
First up - The DV Ravenwing detachment. Finally got them done and entered in the Dakka monthly contest (May). Think I came 5th or so. Which was totally fair enough as some of the entries were bloody excellent. Wasn't able to get a huge amount of painting done last month as the family all arrived from foreign shores and then we had the wedding on the 23rd.
Ravenwing.......yeah.....really don't think I'll be buying/painting anymore of those guys. Not the most fun figs to paint at all. The sculpts and poses are fine but they are just dull to pain. Way too much black coverage and just ....meh!!! Still, got them done (have a few wee tweaks I want to do ....at some point) adn dusted. Hope y'like them

Irish

Ravenwing Attack Squadron Arion

Ravenwing Sergeant Arion

Ravenwing Brother Gethal

Ravenwing Brother Arias