Catchup Work

I finished up some minor things today, as well as doing some prep work. I put the replacement chains on the Harbinger, and put replacement pipes on the Castigator. The Castigator pics are on my photobucket gallery, but they are pretty poor pictures all things considered. Here's the final Harbinger pic though.

I just finished priming Herne, Jonne, and the Reclaimer. The Herne and Jonne models are super cool, so I'm promoting them to ahead of the Daughters.

Harbinger Finished! (Almost)

All the painting is done. Just handling the last bits of assembly now, excluding the chains. There's a minor bit of unfortunateness around the assembly. Instead of the one Acolyte being too far forward, instead it's the Harbinger who's too far back. The side cloths didn't fit very well, but a little creative bending and pinning has them roughly in place. It's not the best assembly I could have asked for, but it's good enough. Given how bad I am at the "modeling" aspect of the hobby, I'm not going to pitch a fit. No pictures tonight though. I'm going to try and finish the last assembly and get chains on it first.

Harbinger Status: Minor Disaster

So today I started assembling more of the Harbinger and managed to do something not so clever. I mounted all the Acolytes to the base, but one of them is too far forward and so the chain won't reach. I'm now left with a couple options: order more chains from the parts service and somehow attach two chains together, or create my own chains. For now I'm going to opt for option b and see how it turns out.

On the plus side I got nearly 3 more hours of painting in, which has the banner very close to completed now, and the side cloths basecoated. I'm probably looking at another 4 hours or so to finish up painting and then a couple more hours of assembly. If I were smart, I'd start prepping the second Bokur, but I'm very intent on staying focused on the Harbinger for now.

More Harbinger Progress

I made alot of progress today, catching up to where I wanted to be by yesterday. The work week was really ridiculous with 2 14+ hour days, which pretty much blocked out much chance of painting. I probably got about 6 hours of painting in today and finished up the main body and shoulder armour for the Harbinger. There's also a bit more progress on the banner as well, but nothing worth mentioning really. Tally for getting to this point: about 8 hours.

The real challenge at this point is going to be the assembly. My plan at this point is to attach the acolytes next, then the side cloths, and then the chains. I had intended to do the chains first, but after pondering it and looking at various pictures of the fully assembled model, going with chains last is the only good option. The banner and shoulder armour can definately go on very last.

I applied a tip that I'd read somewhere else (probably the PP forums but I forget, sorry): I superglued a screw nut to the bottom of the base. There's 2 reasons for this. First, it is glued right up against the pin for the main body of the Harbinger. Second, (and this is the original tip I'd read) I can use the nut to provide a way to anchor the model inside a box for safer transportation. I'm planning to get an Army Transport case but I'm afraid that it won't be able to safely accomodate this very delicate and spindly model.

Acolyte Pics

Finally found a break in the storm to post these pics. I uploaded them this morning but my job is pretty much kicking my ass full time, so I didn't get a break until now. Anywho, here's pics of the Harbinger's Acolytes as they are now. They aren't attached to the main base yet of course since I need to fit all the pieces together.

Acolyte1











Acolyte2











Acolyte3












A little under 8 hours to paint these 3. The camera washed out alot of the white shading unfortunately. I've sort of resigned myself to this medium-level photography for now. I'm not that great of a painter that I need badass pics anyway.

On the equipment front, I found a really kick-ass arm lamp with built in magnifying glass the other day. They had to order more unfortunately, but the magnifying glass seems like it will actually work well, unlike almost all other once I've seen before. Once it comes in and I get that bad boy home I'll post a pic of it.

And now, time for some rambling. I'm stuck at work for another half hour or so while they finish up a code release so I have some time to burn. I'm getting pretty exhausted with work. The manager transition is really rough when I'm still being used as a coding resource. Especially when I'm routinely double-booked as a coding resource AND have to do my manager duties as well. It's sort of like having 3 jobs. Today in the downstairs hallway I bumped into a couple people and they were confused to see me there. I explained that they cloned me and that when they go upstairs, they will probably run into my clone. There was much more joking after that around how to tell the clone apart from the original. The sad thing is, I could really use a copy of myself right now. I'm very hopeful that things will even out over the next few weeks as I get a handle on the situation. Well, enough whining. Time to get things wrapped up and head home.

Harbinger Acolytes

The 3 acolytes are done now. Spent about 7ish hours on them. I'm fairly happy with them, although I did cut a couple corners that I'll probably not cut when doing the Harbinger herself. They aren't really in a state to take pics of right now, but perhaps tomorrow I'll get some pics of them. The next couple bits are primed, but the weather here is very cold so I've got very narrow windows to do priming when I get home. Urgh, I'm exhausted. Pics later... sleep now.

Harbinger Progress (part 2)

I meant to keep more detailed steps of the harbinger progress, but 1) I got lazy, and 2) I'm lucky to get an entire uninterrupted hour of work at a time on it. Here's some completely terrible pics of the progress so far.

First, I managed to reinforce the banner pole. The pole on many examples I've seen gets very week between the join point on the Harbinger's hood, and the base of the flag itself. The big problem here was that the pole is thin and flat, so simply drilling it out from the hand and replacing it with brass rod was not really a good option for my minimal conversion skills. While at my LGS, I was discussing with a couple people there about the problem and the idea came up to reinforce it with some brass rod glued to the side of the existing pole. I further extended on this idea by bending the brass rod to form sort of a hand guard over the Harbinger's hand. This will provide the necessary reinforcement to the banner pole so that it will survive a bit better on the game table. It's still delicate, but it's better than nothing.

Next I got the Harbinger's torso and legs attached together so that they are quite strongly bonded. This will probably be the second piece I work on after the Acolytes are finished.

And finally, I've started painting the Acolytes. The picture here is terrible but basically I've got 2.5 hours on them so far and only have base coats for the robes finished, along with faces pretty much finished. The Khadric and Midlund Flesh P3 paints are really nice tones. Even without any washes or such the skin looks pretty decent. I'm still terrible with eyes, but in all fairness, these guys are squinting and obscured. No one will be looking at their eyes.

This project is incredibly huge and challenging, and I've resolved to try and do the best painting job I can on it. I'm still debating robe colors for the Harbinger herself, but at this point I'm heavily leaning towards sticking to whites. Anyway, there's my latest progress. Hopefully in a couple more weeks when my home and work situations settle back down I'll have alot more time to work on this.

The Unpleasantness

With painting miniatures also comes the work of prepping miniatures. There's all these steps before a model can be primed for painting and, for the most part, I don't like any of them. One of the few remaining Warmachine miniatures I have left to paint at this point is the Harbinger. I'm going to chronicle the entire effort of assembling and painting her, just for fun. Attached is a picture of the 13 pieces she comes in (excluding base). These are the pieces before I have done anything with them, with the one exception of straightening the banner pole. I'm going to guess this will end up being a 40+ hour project. Let the pain begin!