Giant Space Elf War Robot

So I went and did it. When nobody was looking, I blew £200 on a big model of a space elf war robot with mahoosive guns. But I NEEDED one so it had to be done.

I have, as you can well imagine, browsed the internets at length as to how to build and paint one of these monsters, and became increasingly more and more apprehensive. There was lots of stuff about pinning and drilling and airbrushing and posing and working with resin and other things that seemed very scary indeed.
But fear not, intrepid reader, because, actually, it's really not that scary. To give you some background:

• I have painted quite a lot of minis in my time. I'm going to post about my first original space marine minis another day. That was in 1988.
• I have never wielded an airbrush, or even seen one in real life until I started this
• I have never wielded a dremel / other mini rotary tool, or even seen one in real life until I started this
• I have never built a resin model (unless you count superglueing the heads on some Finecast wraithguards last month)
• I have never done pinning. Except in textiles classes at school. But don't judge me.

So AS WELL as the giant space elf war robot I had to splash out on mini drill thingy, an airbrush and compressor, and have a bit of a practice with them. So I bought a Fire Prism and practiced airbrushing on that. Good job I did to be fair, because it went waaaaay too pink on my first try. I would have been a bit scared if I'd made my titan that pink.

Anyway. Despite the initial panic at potentially ruining a pretty expensive model, I cracked on with it.

Here are the bits after scrubbing and scraping:

An attractive tea towel and no mistake.
Some stuff I read is definitely true. You need a plan. Definitely need an idea of how you want the thing posing, and, first off, how you're going to base it. I made up some spurious excuse at work to a tech in the technology department about me needing a 5" roundel of 3/4" mdf. He made one for me, and I managed it without revealing my Warhammer secret. Though I suspect he may have once dabbled at least, because he looks like a cross between a viking and Bugman. Anyway, that's what I used.

I bought brass rods from the internet too, you definitely need them otherwise I reckon bits will snap and fall over once the model starts getting tall. But pinning is pretty easy: I put the pose together using blu tack and then marked out angles and things on the joints, drilled and glued bits of brass rod in the holes. Seemed to work pretty well.

Because I wanted to paint all the parts before assembly (I've never used an airbrush before, remember), I didn't glue any bits together yet. Which was a bit frustrating, because I really really wanted to see what it was going to look like in all its tall, prancy, shooty glory. But I was very restrained.

Then, after spraying the black undercoat, (both on the model and on my flat wall, rather stupidly), it was time to mask. After watching lots of airbrushing videos on youtube, I was getting a bit bored, and decided it was time to take the plunge. Now don't get me wrong, airbrushing is an artform. But for getting simple gradients, I reckon its pretty easy. I mixed and thinned my different paints first (I used GW ones, and all but the bone colour seemed fine once I had watered them down), and then just sort of went for it.

Blu tack was my friend here. It's really good for masking. I treated it like green stuff and used a wet sculpting tool to push it into place. Here are the leg bits with undercoat and mask:

And here are the leg bits on the base with paint on. I quite like how they turned out really. Still needs the gemstones finishing off, but looks alright.

Still no glue because I needed to paint the base. Which I did. It matches my table (which I will post on another day). I did the torso and head next, which took a LOT of careful blu tack masking shennanegans, but got there in the end:

And then did the brushwork on the head and torso:

And that's where I'm at to date. I'll try and learn to take better pictures. because some of these are ropy.
But I guess my message of the day is; don't be scared of similar projects like I was. It's not as hard as you might think. Here endeth the first lesson.