Giant Space Elf War RObot pt5

So. Nearly there.... only got highlights on the gemstones to do, and a bit of gloss varnishing on the shiny bits. And then I will learn to take decent photos and post some proper ones up!

Giant Space Elf War Robot pt4

Didn't get too much done this weekend, lots of RL stuff to do. Like Mother's Day and all that. If I missed that because I was playing with little plastic men, I would have been unpopular to say the least.
Anyway, I did get some stuff done; arms are now fully painted and glued in, the main engines are finished and on, and I did the pauldrons too. All that's left now are the 4 shieldy bits that go round the waist area, and the smaller waist level engines. Then its a coat of  matt varnish and some gloss on the gemstones.
I had a bit of a word with myself about the base too: I think it needs a bit more doing to it; it looks a bit... unfinished somehow. I think it needs to be kept simple to show off the Titan, but it's a bit TOO minimalist at the moment I reckon....

 

 

I did manage to build a couple of his little brothers too. The Wraithseer that I talked about in my last post, and another CC Wraithlord. I like the way they both turned out: but probably the Wraithlord is better posed than the seer. They should both look Ok painted though:

 

The two together:

 

Wraithseer:

 

 

CC Wraithlord:

He needs a bit of green stuff in his joint; I wonder if I can paint these in two weeks....

Giant Space Elf War Robot pt3

So, more progress on the Revenant this weekend. Nowhere near as much as I would have liked though. Airbrushes. What a splendid tool, and what an utter, utter pain in the arse.

No paint came out. Or when it did, it came out in lumps. So I did what I was supposed to do and stripped it down and washed it out. Twice. It still didn't work. And now there were air bubbles streaming up through the gravity feed pot. Aaaaaarrrrgh!!

Thanks to this site:
https://sites.google.com/site/donsairbrushtips/home
I managed to resolve the problem with nothing more than a spot of the missus' lip balm. Two lessons learned: thin your paint properly (otherwise it can dry on the needle) and if there are bubbles in your paintpot, it means that air is blowing back from the tip somehow: either the nozzle is blocked with paint, or, as in my case this weekend, the seal between the nozzle and the brush housing is not working. A bit of vaseline (or indeed cherry flavoured lip balm) on the threads fixes this a treat. All that did take a few hours though, and a trip to a chemist to get some of those tiny interdental brushes which are a lot cheaper than the airbrush cleaning kits I've seen for sale, and work very well.

Anyway. Here's where I'm at now. Lots of this is blu-tacked, and the paint on the newer parts isn't finished, but I am getting quite excited to see what this beast will finally look like. And I need to hurry up because I will have a Wraithseer to paint by the end of the week....

Airbrushed bits (finally)

 

 

Blu tacked side shot (those pulsars are really huge when you put them together...)

Blu tacked front shot:

Giant Space Elf War Robot pt2

Just a very quick update on the old paint job. Pretty much done the torso, head and holo fins: next up is those chunky engine thingies: this weekend I hope. ...

Gaming table: Mancunia in the Albion System

So I wanted a proper, good looking gaming table for 40K. We have a pretty good fantasy one, but with the arrival of 6th, and a renewed interest in sci-fi space elf vs. fishmen gaming amongst our gaming group of 2, I thought it was about time that we stopped playing futuristic shooting in a medieval landscape.

I wanted:

• Something that looked really cool. As far as a wargaming table can ever be cool. But power to the geek and all that.
• Something that was modular, not necessarily for transportation, more for the ability to vary layout.
• Something that could be easily expanded to apocalypse size.

So. I decided on a system of 2' by 2' tiles that could be used to make up a 6' by 4' table, but could be added to later. I wanted to use some GW buildings, because I like them, and I wanted a decayed, abandoned urban wasteland style look and feel. Probably abandoned after an old war sort of thing.#

I decided that very rusty metal buildings on a concrete base would be a good look (and pretty easy to paint too), so that is what I went for. The one thing that I was unsure of was how I was going to tie the edges of the tiles together in a way that made them all completely interchangeable...

Roads! That was the answer. If I edged all sides of each tile with half a road, I would create a sort of city-grid system. Which I thought would be pretty Imperial really. That's how I'd do it if I was Albion's Planetary Governor anyway.

So I used 3mm fibreboard (for the tile bases), self adhesive flooring tiles (for the road sections), and lots of builders' sand and pva glue. I didn't glue the buildings to the board for storage purposes, but I did try and paint rusty stains (as 'twere) on the baseboards to tie the buildings into the base. I think it worked: you can judge for yourself in the photos. Incidentally, on the subject of painting, I bought a GW spray gun to do this lot. Effing useless. I wouldn't bother. I reverted to decorating brushes and saved myself a whole lot of faffing.
The buildings were painted brown, stippled with orange, and then drybrushed with gunmental colour. I used black spray and grey paint on the rest, and found some yellow spray paint to do my road markings...

And here are some WIP's and a final finished shot. Plus an in-game pic of my Killer Space Elves being beaten by Mark's Fishboyz. Bloomin 6th edition shooting. grrr..
Actually, it is probably worth saying that the play experience is MASSIVELY enhanced by having a good bit of scenery. I reckon anyway.

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.