Saturday 23 April 2011

Necron Warriors and Zombie Apoc Question

Afternoon readers, update time again

First up in a sudden burst of 40k mojo I've managed to finish 2 more Necron warriors:



These guys have come out slightly better than the test model I put up a while back, mainly because the energy effect on the gauss flayers is far neater :) I've used some white weathering powder on the bottoms of their legs to make it look like there is some snow stuck to them. I'm reasonably pleased with the effect as I'm normally not much of a fan of weathering powders :P

For anyone interested the Recipe for the snow on their bases is:

  • GW snow flock/powder
  • PVA glue
  • a small amount of granulated sugar
  • Water
mix it all up and it will become like a lumpy paste, spread that on to the ares you want, leave to dry and the combination of sugar and PVA gives it a bit of a glistening effect :) 
I plan to work on the Necron squad in between projects doing 2 or 3 at a time. I think if I tried to batch paint them all in one go I'd soon get bored of doing the metallics.

This brings me to the question of this update, some of you will remember that Last year I posted up a modern zombie for a zombie apoc game that I had converted from the Mantic plastics, well today I decided to continue with that project but have hit something of a brick wall, mainly with the scale of them compared to hasslefree models:

Size comparison Left to Right: Hasslefree, mantic, converted Hasslefree


the mantic zombie even without being on a base is still as tall as the 2 hasslefree models, on a base its about 1 and a half heads taller than them, which to me just doesn't look right. Theres little point in spending ages converting each zombie when they are that out of scale :(

This has led me to question whether the project is worth continuing with and this is mainly down to cost. Theres a big list of Hasslefree models I would like to get as I am a big fan of their work add to this that for zombies I would like to use the brilliant studio miniatures ones and it all adds up to being quite expensive what with them all being metal models.

Although I intend to sell off most of my GW stuff which could fund it, but then it will be competing with Heavy Gear too if I decide to go for that :(

So my question is what do you guys think I should do?

Wednesday 20 April 2011

Flames of War SS and Sketches

Evening Readers time for another update this time involving some small scale stuff and a few sketches.

I'm still pretty much on my hobby break but have been doing the odd bit of painting, mainly on my FoW SS force.

I've been updating one of my panzer grenadier platoons because frankly the orginal paint job I did on them a few years ago was so bad I'm not even goign to show it. So I have been repainting their summer and autumn oak leaf, adding the odd highlight to the skin and addign some extra details to the bases, so far I have the command stand and 2 infantry stands done for platoon 2( already fully updated the first platoon a while back):




Also I have started work on a Jagdpanther, I had got this model basecoated ages ago but never finished it so now I'm doing the details, will add some foliage to it as well as some decals if I can find the sheet :(





Now onto the sketches, been playing about with the tablet again, this time practising drawing female faces in my ever evolving style they are rough but they were fairly quick sketches. So what better place to look than games for inspiration so we have:

An Asari from the Mass Effect series, which is amongst my favourite series of games of all time as well as having some of the best alien designs out there. If you havent played it go get them! :P


Next up is Lady from Devil may cry 4, had the game for years but still haven't played it much on account of my Xbox breaking at the time I got it and then when I eventually got a new one me getting distracted with other games :( I plan to fix that soon though.

Plan on practicing male faces next which gives me a good excuse to draw some of the characters from Darksiders( also an awesome game)

Those with sharp eyes will notice I have added an extra banner to the top of the blog this is my crude skills with GIMP being put to use, it hasn't come out to badly but anyone with photoshop experience would be able to make something much better with ease. Decided to add it to try add some extra colour to the blog I plan on messing with some backgrounds at some point too.
All this is inspired by what LuckyNo.5 has done over on his Eye of Error blog, the extra touches he has added to the blog make it look really good, so I'm going to attempt to shamelessly copy them with likely inferior results :P

Also welcome to CMDante forgot to say this the past 2 updates which is rather dumb of me, cheers for the support dude :)

Well thats it for this update, as ever any comments and feed back is more than welcome :)



*Of course  the Asari is copyright of Bioware and Lady is copyright of Capcom

Thursday 14 April 2011

Colonel Straken finished

Well its update time again,

managed to finish off straken and must say I'm really happy with him, think he might be the best thing I've painted haha

heres the pics:

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doesnt show the digital camo to well and the photos have washed out the highlights on the glove and plasma pistol :( spotted a few areas that need tidying up too.

I'm going to have a bit of a break from painting and hobby stuff now, I'm finding 40k and GW stuff in general very uninspiring at the moment which has hit my mojo a bit. Shall have a week of so break then I will likely carry on with the gladiators and also my Flame of War force.

A possible future project has by chance landed in my lap too, got the normal newsletter off Wayland games, this time saying they will be U.K./E.U. distributors for game called heavy gear, so I had a look at the Heavy Gear site and have been really taken by their models(Who doesn't like mechs :P )

Depending on price of course, I think I might do a small combined arms force of them. As I think the small size of the infantry is a really good contrast to the mechs themselves :)

Well thats it for now as ever let me know what you think :)

Saturday 9 April 2011

Some Work in Progress stuff

Evening Readers its that time again where I talk nonsense :P

This post is largely WiP stuff some of it in a painting form as I continue to experiment with the wet palette and others are some bits of sculpting.

First up here are the WiP models painting wise.

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the second gladiator from the strike team, he doesn't need to much else doing to him to be honest. I'm particularly happy with the skin and OSL around the lens on his helmet

Next up we have the old Colonel Straken model:

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this guy is pretty heavily WiP only got the skin and bandanna finished so far. Though considering I only found him in a bits box this morning I'm pretty happy :P plan on trying to do digital camo on his combats not looking forward to that haha


Now onto the Sculpting stuff, been having a bit of a play around with Sons of Sek vets and doing some armour to make them stand out from the regular troopers:

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quite pleased with them both so far, the one on the left has a blocky breast plate similar to the Damogaurs. The one on the right is an experiment with chainmail I think it works well but feels more blood pact than sons of sek to me.

well thats it for now, as ever let me know what you think :)