From the Desk: Forsaken Conversion, part 6

Another quick update on the Forsaken project. I got a bit more painting done tonight. The flesh is mostly done, and most parts are base coated now. At this point things should move along a little more quickly provided I can carve out painting time. I have to admit, now that I've got paint on the majority of the model the concern I had about the proportions is dramatically diminished.

From the Desk: Forsaken Conversion, part 5

I finally got my converted Forsaken primed and started on it tonight. Please note the special guest: Thrullg. Anyway, the painting so far is pretty minimal of course, but I wanted to go ahead and get a picture up, even if it's a terribly saturated picture.

I also wrapped up the pair of Stingers the other night, but we have family visiting and my photo setup is torn down while the guest room is in use for the next couple weeks, so they will just have to wait before I get pictures of them up.

From the Desk: Forsaken Conversion, part 4

My new drill bits arrived and I wrapped up the assembly. The drill bits I got were not so great. Note to others: Make sure when you order bits online that they are rated for metal, otherwise you'll be drilling for a long time. However, no point whining about it now. I pinned everything together and did some minor greenstuff work. There's definitely some additional GS work that I'd like to do, but I need everything to set properly before I do anything further.

I snapped 3 pictures to give an idea of what it looks like from different angles. There's definitely some oddness to the proportions. There are really only 2 options to deal it: either resculpt it somehow, or paint cleverly. Since my skills are stronger on the painting side, I'm going to purposefully not try to adjust the proportions and see if I can use color to affect the appearance of the proportions.

The next step is to prime and paint, which may take a while for me to get to. However I will definitely post an update as I make progress.

From the Desk: Chaos and Tragedy

Quick post to share the status of my desk. First, the tragic news: I broke my last smaller drill bit. I've been trying to find new bits for a while (and in fact have an order on its way currently), but I'm having a heck of a time finding a good source of micro drill bits that work well on metal. I was tempted to pick up the only set of bits at the local hobby store, but paying $15 for a set of bits that only had one in the whole set that I wanted seemed silly. So, work on the Forsaken bodging is on hold temporarily while I wait for the new bits to come in.

Now the chaotic news: This is a picture of what's currently on my desk. This is just the active stuff. Now normally I only work on 1-2 projects at a time (it's my process and what works for me). But somehow I got into a mode where I was working on a bunch of things all at once and some stuff started jumping ahead in the queue. The 2 Ravagores (partially assembled) jumped up in the queue so that I could have them for an upcoming Mangled Metal tournament at my LGS this coming Saturday. The Forsaken of course is an active bodging project. The Harriers and Stingers have been sitting in their current state for a couple weeks now (since I finished the Teraph). Corbeau has been in her state for even longer, and is in danger of getting demoted back into the storage container soon. The Sorceress was a recent assembly completion, even though I'm deluding myself into thinking I'll start painting her soon. And Thrullg is something I was hoping to just start throwing washes on, but again, mere delusion I suspect. Not pictured are a primed McBain, 3 Spell Martyrs, and a half assembled Absylonia which I have demoted off of my desk and back into the storage bin. I'm trying to stay purely focused on my Legion force just to stay focused, even though I'd love to start finishing out the lingering couple of models for all the other factions that I have.

Anyway, that's it for tonight. Apologies to those looking forward to the next installment of the Forsaken bodging. It'll probably be a few more days until I'm back to work on it.

From the Desk: Forsaken Conversion, part 3

Another small update before sleep claims me. Tonight I started putting pieces together. Well, just 2 pieces, but I wanted to use this step to provide a couple tips I've learned along the way. Now I should point out that I'm going to real extremes for pinning and joining here. The first tip is that it really helps to score the joining surfaces with a utility knife before putting them together. This creates a rougher surface which allows the greenstuff to really do its job. Here I've scored the surface of the legs as well as drilled a hole for a pin.

The next tip is to do a dry fit. With these pieces in particular it was helpful to do a dry fit and get an idea of how to line them up. I knew ahead of time that the scale of these pieces was off, but this helped me get an idea of how to deal with that. I decided that if I put the torso at an angle, I could offset the difference and create a slightly more dynamic look to the model. However I knew this wouldn't be a perfect fit no matter what I did. Hence I would need to do a little greenstuff work.

Now, you'll notice there's no green here. That's because I'm using the GF9 "grey-stuff" product for the first time. My first use of this seems to perform pretty much identical to greenstuff (and for the purposes of this post, I'll continue to refer to it as greenstuff). When doing this join, I initially used more greenstuff than necessary and then carved away the parts that I didn't need. I find this technique works best so that I'm not trying to add more as I go and having to smooth out the additions. The join here isn't great, and I may put a little further effort into sculpting in some details later, but I need this batch of greenstuff to dry before moving on.

Well that's enough for tonight, and I'm trying to get my Ravagores assembled so I'll hang up the tools for now and work on it some more over the weekend.

From the Desk: Forsaken Conversion, part 2

I had intended to get work done on my Ravagores, but my dremel's battery was dead so while it charges I figured I'd get some more work done on the Forsaken conversion.

After trimming all the pieces, the first big step was to start cutting off what I didn't need. I took out my trusty jeweler's saw and cut away at Cylena, severing out her midsection. I decided to keep the belt and cut everything off below that. I had debated whether to keep the little waist-cape, but that would have required much more cutting for little gain. I also tried to cut her head off as close to the shoulder level as possible.

Next was the easy task of cleaning up unnecessary metal around the Forsaken head's neck as well as splitting up the spine into the pieces I needed. Note that the "spine" of the Forsaken sculpt actually forms the top and back of the head as well, so it was necessary to keep that top part. The bottom part of the spine turns into the tail which was, of course, quite necessary. I'm honestly debating making the tail longer with a minor amount of GS work, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

At this point it's starting to be possible to visualize where the project is going. Laying out the pieces I noticed a couple points of concern. First is that the midsection is noticeably smaller than the legs are, which will give some odd proportions. Second is that the arms look like they are going to work out quite well, provided that I pin them properly.

Ok, that's today's update. Not a huge amount of work, but this step really helped me to get a handle on where this is headed. I should note that although there's no picture here, I went ahead and GS'd the head and spine top together to get a jump on that bit of work. Next time I plan on focusing on getting the torso and legs put together.

From the Desk: Forsaken Conversion, part 1

When I first decided to start building a Legion list, I was only focused on models that I really honestly wanted to paint. Then I started playing Legion more seriously and started to pick up models that I was less interested in painting due to their need on the battlefield. The Forsaken quickly came up as a necessity for Fury management. However the sculpt leaves much to be desired for me. I'm not a fan of the static pose making him look like a 1920's gentlemen vampire. Hence I began hatching a plan to bodge together my own version of a Forsaken. This is the first in a series of posts on this bodging project.

The first step was to figure out how to construct my alternate Forsaken. I didn't want to do much sculpting myself so I went to the PP parts store and started searching around. Today my resulting bits order arrived. Now I should note that according to the PP conversions policies, I'm borderline at best and may have picked bits that will not actually qualify as a legal conversion, but I tried to follow the spirit of those rules.

I decided to keep the claw arm from the original model, along with the head and the spine. The spine will likely get cut up into pieces though. For the wing arm, I opted to use Absylonia's wing arm. For the legs, the Incubi lower body was a great swap since it kept the feet in the same style as the original Forsaken. That left me with the challenge of a torso. I wanted to find a female torso, so that quickly limited my options. I wanted to find something in a similar style to the normal blighted Nyss so that it matched the army. Cylena fit the bill nicely, although it will require some serious cutting and chopping to make it work.

Well, that's enough for this first post. I'm juggling multiple projects, but hopefully I can stay on this one to keep the updates rolling.

Teraph

Another quick post since I'm trading time for blogging to have more time for painting. I wrapped this guy up just this morning. It's a great model except that the head angle is a little weird. In hindsight, I probably should have fixed that.

For the base, I decided to keep with my rock theme for beasts, but I wanted to give a hint of the dig in ability that he has, so I sculpted a little fake mud on the rocks where his feat are placed. I know, I know... you can't dig into rock. You know what? Artist's prerogative.

This guy also has a tone of little spines all over him. I ended up taking some shortcuts on them to get him wrapped up.

Last note, his 7 appendages made it that much harder to reach all of the spines, the chitin, and the skin. There were a number of little mistakes that I had to clean up afterwards. Don't get me wrong, I still liked painting this model. It was just challenging and others out there that have a Teraph in their queue to paint should be aware of the challenges to reach all the parts of the model if you fully assemble it and attach it to the base before painting.

A Horrible Horrible Destructotron

Ultra-quick battle report time! Pardon the terrible pictures. It was also a heavily proxied game, particularly on my side.

Me: eLylyth, 2 Ravagores, Seraph, Teraph, Shredder, Stinger, 2 Shepherds, Forsaken, 5 Raptors, Thrullg.
Henry: Gunnbjorn, Bomber, Slag, Impaler, 10 Pyg Bushwhacker, Champs, 3 Longriders, 4 Krielstone Bearers with UA, Fell Caller, Runebearer

We used the Warmachine Battlefield Generator to set up our board, and the trolls won the initiative which was painful for me. I used my feat on the first round to lay out scather templates on most of the Pygs and then rolled up Thrullg into melee and put Counterblast on the nearby Teraph to create a no-win situation for them. This configuration of pain was referred to as the "horrible horrible dustructotron". However the sneaky trolls managed to wriggle out of the situation. Later in the game, as I was backing up and shooting, I had a chance to try and drop Pin Cushion on Gunnbjorn through the Spell Martyr. Unfortunately the spell missed, otherwise it would have probably been game over.

Eventually I was just continuing to back up into the corner and was down to just eLylyth and the 2 Ravagores. A clever use of a Pyg for the Bomber to target, along with just enough ranged, let the Bomber drop a boosted blast damage on her and finish the job. If it wasn't for that, I could have eventually mopped up probably, but it would have been dangerous.

Honestly, I haven't laughed so hard during a game for quite some time. Even though I lost, I feel like I won because it was such a fun game. Plus, I got to test out the Ravagore which led me to purchase 2 of them today. They will undoubtedly jump up in my painting queue ahead of many other things. I have to give a hats off to Henry's dice: I can't recall seeing so many successful tough checks before! Some of those Pygs survived 3 or more tough checks! Anyway it was great to try out the Ravagore and get a little more practice with a number of models that I haven't had much experience with and feel moderately successful.

Scythean

Now this is what I call a beast! I can honestly say I had a great time painting the Scythean. With so much chiton, it afforded me lots of opportunity to put variations into the washing techniques that I use while not over-saturating the surfaces with paint. I threw in a variety of colors including dark greens, reds, blues and (of course) browns. I don't recall the exact order or colors unfortunately. However my general strategy was to give it a couple good washes of lighter browns (jack bone and bloodstone) and then throw in the dark primary color washes (red and green). Then I added some thinned blue and umber using 2BB to create more contrast at logical separations.

The rest of it was pretty straightforward. Underbelly blue and trollblood base are my 2 primary skin tones, and then I use flesh and sanguine tones to create more variation and shading. Once those two primary parts are done, the overall model just had little details left to do (spines, mouth, rune, claws, etc). I have to admit that the part that threw me off the most was doing the rune since I hadn't painted one in a very long time (August of 2009 in fact). It occurs to me now, looking back through my blog, that I totally failed to paint runes on the Seraph and Angelius. DOH! I may have to break my normal rule of not going back and touching up previous models and add runes in.

It's great to have this huge beastie done, especially since the Ravagore releases next week. I'm looking forward to painting another such monster.

On a side note, I picked up a Flip Video and have started experimenting with it a bit. If there's any interest out there in video samples of painting techniques (such as the 2-brush technique), I'd love to hear. It's just the sort of motivation I need to figure out this whole video posting thing. Until next time, paint like you have a pair!

From the Desk: Why I Love Painting Legion Beasts

Carving out time to paint with a six month old in the house has been a little challenging. However my desire to paint is strong, and I've managed to make it work pretty well so far. I spent a week getting a number of models assembled and primed, and now I'm finding that I'm making more progress than I expected. We'll see if it holds out. Here's a shot of the Scythean in progress. There's still a fair amount of detail work left, but the major areas are pretty much done. So far it has gone really fast, partly due to my Legion painting process. More on that down below.

Here's a shot of the other stuff that is started. I used some assembly line painting for the chiton on these guys while doing the Scythean to save me some time in the future, but set them aside so that I could focus on the big guy. The Teraph is where my eye is next since that model (along with the Raek) is what really lured me into starting Legion.

Now, as a quick aside, I want to reflect on why I personally really enjoy painting Legion. The models are striking to me personally, but that's not the main reason. It has to do with a combination of simplicity and opportunity.
The simplicity comes in the form of the sculpts. They have a simplicity in that they don't have a ton of little detailed items all over (unlike troll models I must say). Most of the beasts have 2-3 primary features (chiton, skin and armor) that covers 80% or more of the surface. What this means is that after doing the chiton and skin it feels like I've made a ton of progress. By coming up with a process that makes painting the chiton quick (washes over white primer), I can make large strides in a short amount of time.
The opportunity comes in the form of having a spacious "canvas" to work on. The larger muscled surfaces of the skin allow for me to experiment with shading and texturing surfaces. The chiton has plenty of detail to its surface which can be brought out using washes. Overall the sculpts create opportunities for me to practice new techniques and don't constraint what I "must" paint like other overly detailed sculpts do.
Well, that's enough of that prattle for tonight. Painting the Scythean definitely has me excited to paint the Ravagore once it releases!

Incubi, take 2

I'm not dead yet! Last night I managed to put the final work into this second set of Incubi and get them sealed. I've been working on them for a while now, but due to events in my life (described more below for those curious) I was unable to stay focused on them.



It is interesting to compare this set to the previous set. I think the bloodied flesh on the first ones came out better in color tone (although less smoothly blended), whereas the chiton on the heads definitely came out better on the new set. There are also some consistency differences between the two sets. I had forgotten how tedious these guys were to paint, with so many little details to work. If I wasn't painting a set of 5 at once, I could reasonable spend a lot of time on a single one.

On a side note, my recent lull in activity is due to other events in my life being pretty intense. My wife and I adopted a little boy which will likely prompt me to do a series of posts on making this hobby more kid safe. I'm actually pretty surprised that I was able to get any painting done given all the recent events in my life. Anyway, enough of that prattle. Today I need to run to my LGS to pick up more green stuff so that I can continue assembly of the Scythean.

Blighted Legionnaires

After being out of action for quite some time, I've finally managed to get back to the painting desk. The tournament 2 weeks ago got me juiced up to paint again. I was hesitant to get back into painting after a month long break by jumping into a 10-man squad. However, it worked out great and these guys were completely reasonable to do as a group of 10. In hindsight, I wish I had taken the time to do some conversion work in order to make them all different looking, or have gotten 2 boxes of 6, but I can always get more in the future. The picture quality here is unfortunately pretty sad since I didn't take the time to get my photo setup back to top quality.

I made heavy use of washes to speed these guys up. I painted the metals first which has become my standard method for any models with a fair amount of metal showing, and then moved on to the other more minimal areas.

Next up on the painting queue are my second set of Incubi. It was very entertaining to put 10 of them in my list at the tournament and I'm looking forward to doing that again in the upcoming Genesis event.

Testing New Toys

This post gets one of those obligatory "ignore this post" warnings. I'm experimenting with posting from my iPad. Also in the toy stack is having transferred the photo from my camera to the iPad using the new adapter, editing the photo using Photoshop.com mobile, and uploading it to a new Photoshop album.
This is a sample direct reference to an album photo.

This is a photo reference inserted into a lightbox link.

Bait and Switch

After being out of action for quite some time, I'm finally back to action. Yesterday I got to play in a local SR2010 tournament. It was originally supposed to be the Hordes Genesis event, but the LGS decided that due to the problems getting decks in, and the lack of books being out, they would delay the tournament until next month. So instead it got turned into a regular SR2010 event just a couple days beforehand.

Overall the tournament was very fun, but I'm going to skip details on most of it. I lost both games (due to sloppy playing) and got a by in the second round, so it wasn't very eventful. However, my first game deserves some highlighting...

An eButcher vs Thagrosh throwdown was just what I needed to get my enthusiasm back. This was an epic battle. eButcher busted his feat early on to rail into my army, but it didn't cut deep enough. I retaliated back, clearing out all his Doom Reavers and making a run on eButcher but coming up just short. In the picture above, you can see how the Carnivean came up about 1/2" short on his charge, and the Angelius made it there but couldn't finish the job on his own. In hindsight, I should have had the Angelius fly back and do a push power attack to give the Carnivean the necessary push to get there. eButcher retaliated and cut down both heavy beasts during his turn. After that, I made a run with Thagrosh but because I failed to measure my control area correctly during the charge, I left myself just out of Mutagenesis range of the War Dog, and left myself open. At the end we shook hands and both commented how it was one of the most fun games we'd played in a while.

Angelius

This one has been a long time coming. I can't believe KublaCon was almost a month ago. I just got my brush-on primer the other day and finished the last bits of work last night. The brush-on primer was something new for me and I have to say it exceeded my expectations. Certainly not something I plan to make a practice of using all the time, but definitely helpful. The particular kind I got was the Reaper Master Series, which of course only comes in white, although I can't honestly think of a time I'd want brush-on black primer.

Once I finished the prep work, the rest went quickly. The color matching on the repaired spots isn't perfect, but it's not obvious by any stretch. It was pretty easy to match since I've got a pretty set skin method for my Legion beasties now. I think the most annoying thing about finishing the cleanup work was that I didn't have the model stuck to a paint can for easy holding, so I had to actually hold the model itself in my hand which makes me a bit more nervous these days (I'm always worried about rubbing paint off). However, it went pretty smooth. The only real problem was cleaning up the bottom edge of the base where a bunch of paint had worn off.

Speaking of the base, I was a little shocked to discover that the 50mm metal base I purchased (from PP no less) isn't a full 50mm. I lined it up with a plastic large base and it's off by about 2-3mm. A little strange, but I'm not going to fret about it. All things considered, using the metal base helped a little more for stability of the model overall, which continues to please me.

Well, this will probably be the last post for a while. I've got some personal business outside the country for a couple weeks so it's unlikely that I'll be getting any painting done. Perhaps though I'll have some good reference photos once I get back.

Megalith

This model was a pretty significant departure from my normal line up of models to paint. Megalith has two predominant features, stone and wood, both of which are features I don't paint that much on such a larger scale. So, getting a chance to paint this one for my buddy Sean was an interesting challenge. I opted to use a combination of washes and 2BB for doing the stone, throwing in some additional reds and greens into the color to give it a little more lifelike feel. For the wood, I used a lot of controlled washes.

The runes turned out ok, but some of them could have definitely been better. I opted to paint the eyes like gems rather than glowing just because I thought it gave the runes a more specific theme to their purpose on the model. Overall I think the biggest struggle I had with this model was really more of a sense of mood since it's predominantly bright and doesn't have enough dark regions to create more contrast. Definitely one of those more holistic painting skills that I'm still working on.

From the Desk: More Megalith Progress

It's late, and I'm sleepy, so just a quick post of the progress on Megalith. The vines seemed to have worked out pretty well. I actually used the GW green wash as an intermediate step, and then used a light flesh tone (combined with olive green) to do the highlights. I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out so far, but there's still a long way to go.

Battle Report: 4 Player Madness

Better late than never! I finally got a chance to do this write up on the 4 player madness battle we played the other day.

The scenario was pretty crazy. Teams of 2 were randomly decided and each army's goal was to deliver a package to their team mate. The packages could only be carried by the warcasters' battlegroups, and could be handed off as a free action. Each player started on a different edge of the board with team mates being on opposite sides. We decided to go with a clockwise activation order rather than activating teams at a time. Little did we know the chaos this would end up causing.

I can't recall the details of the armies unfortunately, but here's a high-level summary. Team 1 was myself playing MacBain (!) and Aaron playing Stryker. Team 2 was Lance playing eAsphyxious and Henry playing Grissel. As it worked out, Aaron went first, followed by Lance, then myself, then Henry. The deployment was crazy, with people very close to each other right at the start of the game. More on that later.

This battle was crazy vicious. Cygnar and Cryx were mixing it up right on turn 1, with Satyxis boldly rushing in to cause chaos. MacBain used his feat on turn 1, and Stryker on turn 2 to avoid complete devastation. The terrain helped to funnel most things toward the middle as well, but with Cryx's speed, things tended to pour right into Cygnar's face. There was a crazy dual-caster-kill event that took place, with Stryker (actually the journeyman) killing eAsphyxious, and then a mob of Satyxis killing Stryker right afterwards.

In the end, MacBain was the last caster left on the table, but there were still random models running around (leftover Satyxis, a Brute Thrall, a Withershadow, a couple Troll Champs). We decided to play it out and in the end I just wasn't familiar enough with MacBain to get him loosened up and he went down. Total carnage!

All around, it was a seriously fun game. Afterwards we talked a bit about the scenario and came up with a couple ideas on how to alter it:
* Replace the "package" with an actual courier model who must be escorted. We had a lot of ideas on that as well, like giving him special actions he could use to increase his survivability.
* The clockwise turns worked out pretty well, but the deployment aspect was pretty vicious. It would definitely need some tweaking.

Anyway, good fun was had by all, and I'm definitely looking forward to tweaking and trying this again.

From the Desk: Getting Stoned with Megalith

More quick updates from the painting desk... I started painting Megalith for a friend last week. Unfortunately my work/life balance is pretty terrible, but I am making some progress. This is the first Wold I've painted, so it's a pretty significant amount of learning. I have to admit that stone isn't one of my best materials to simulate. We'll see how this guy turns out.

I also got to play in a 4 player game yesterday with an amusing scenario. I'll post pictures and a battle report tomorrow (hopefully) but here are a few quick highlights:

I played MacBain!

MacBain was the last caster alive!

The scenario was crazy fun!

Oh, and did I mention... I played MacBain!