4 Heads in a Duffle Bag

Aaaaaand I'm back. Sorry about the wait. Got sidetracked with having nothing worth posting about. But that is past. I have now finished and attached 4 pairs of arms to 4 bodies - with much consternation (did GW test fit the marines' before they released them? Or am I retarded?)


I am now working on some heads to go with all of this. Heads are easy, not much detail to pick out past highlighting and very few colors involved.

Also, this week is "Bad Movie Title Pun and/or Joke" week. The title of each post will be some modification of a movie title that fits the status of my progress or Helpful Handy Hint.

We Interupt Our regularly Scheduled Progress...

For a visit from Angie's parents. Got a little bit done. Not much. Unless you include eating a bunch of delicious food. Also, I got my command squad and Razorback. Wooo! So without further ado shots of two marines in progress.


I am fully into the next two sets of arms and really looking forward to heads.

(Lack of) Progess [Le Sigh]

Yeah, the title says it all. Got caught up trying to glue a pair of arms on a marine - it took half an hour before I finally removed the gun from the arm. I was having all kinds of issues with positioning. Specifically, I couldn't get the arms to match up to cradle the weapon properly and all kinds of stuff.

I did however prep the next two arms. I decided to paint the weapons separately and attache them when the arms are ready to go on, rather than pre-painting. Hope this works out.

And AGAIN superherogameland has sent my order to the wrong address. That's two diff'rent orders in a row.

My Disdain of GW Decals

I hate 'em. There, I said it. They suck. They have all kinds of failings.

1.) They're too thin. When they dry, the color of the paint the decal is on shows through. In my case, green - so everything looks green. In the case of red decals, it looks pink.

2.) They have too much 'flash' around them. Yep the decal's borders extend too far past the actual art. When it goes on, there is this large, ugly band around the decal.

3.) The decals specifically meant to go on shoulder pads aren't shaped for it. So, when it goes on, the decal intedned for a curved surface (that is actually made for flat surface) bunches up and further looks like shit.

I have found that in order to make the decals look acceptable, I have to trim the flash around the image and then stick it on. Once its on, but still wet, I trim off any remaining flash. Once its dry, i then paint ove them using the original image as a pattern. I wouldn;t even bother at all, if it weren't for all the ridiculous freehand that would entail.

Oh, right.. progress update. I've got three of the four arms done. I'll finish the last one tonight and then start the next batch.

That is all.

Hghlights and Such

Man, I am really scraping the bottom of the barrel for titles. Maybe I'll get lucky once I move on past this con-sarn-it tactical squad. If any one missed a fuzzy photo of some boring parts in progress yesterday, here's one for today:


I've gotten the first highlight on the green done and all of the gray. Tomorrow I'll get the green done and start work on details. At the very least, I plan to have the left arms finished - decals and all.

OOH! And now a fun surprize! I am acutely aware that showing pictures of various marine parts is boring. So here is a photo of one of my more recent Khador models.

This is my converted Destroyer. It also happens to be my favorite. The yellow color is not nearly as out-of-control as the photo suggests. Chalk it up to my ineptness with my camera. Anyway, this little guy has seen his fair share of battles.

Delayed Arms Shipment

No pictures today - it just be another boring shot of some arms. The graininess of the primer is proving to be easy to work around, but it's still flaking off and getting into things.

My Rhino and veterans boxes are delayed. Apparently it was too much trouble for the people at superherogameland.com to read my shipping address and copy it exactly onto a shipping label. Go figure. According to the tracking info, the correct address has been found. I'll see my package on Monday. Woo. Oh well, not like I was gonna be able to start any of those things yet anyway.

It also turns out that I don't have the parts for an apothecary yet, either. Gonna need to grab a command squad box for the sole purpose of grabbing one arm and one backpack. Probably get that when I order a Razorback.

[bitch, bitch, bitch]

Full Bodied Flavor

Awesome! I got the torsos done earlier today. Got 'em glued to the legs as well. The models are starting to look like actual marines.


Now, I've begun work on the arms. Taking a bit of a departure on how I'm gonna do them. Gonna do 'em in pairs rather than as a a run of 4 of each part. So, I've got two sets of arms primed and started.


Sorry for the blurriness of this shot. I ran into a bit of trouble on the priming, though. For some reason, large areas of the primer came out 'grainy' and textured. had to sand 'em a bit. I ran into a bit of this on the torsos, but I was able to overcome. Bow, looks like I've maybe got some bad primer. I'll have to switch from my Armory White to my Citadel White.

The torsos are rockin' along pretty good as you can see:


All the big stuff is good to go. Just a final highlight on the green and detail work on the eagles. Then into arms.

I've also got a Dark Angels veteran squad box and a Rhino on the way. Once I get this squad done, my guys have transport and some leadership. The chaos lord, while fun and exciting (and a pit expensive in parts) is a speed bump in my already slow pace. He's shelved.

Yesterdays post and Marine L'eggs

I got drunk last night and missed a post. Sorry to make your collective worlds less fun and filled with updates about my tedious progress.

Moving right along: I finnlay finished the 4 pairs of legs I was working on. They're also affixed to my custom bases.


Now, I can start work on the previously mentioned, totally normal, disembodies torsos.

Hopefully these wont take as long. They're already primed and I have today and tomorrow off from work.

All Quiet on the Western Front and HHH #2

Lets see... worked on the 4 pairs of legs AGAIN. Weeee. Got all of the main highlighting and touching up done. If I'm lucky, I can be done by tomorrow and have the legs glued to bases. Just gotta do purity seals and company markings. No update picture as a third boring picture of legs might be too much boringness.

HOWEVER, we have

Helpful Handy Hint #2

All of the pictures of the aforementioned legs have shown them to be attached to a wooden thing. This wooden thing is what i think is called a painting rig.

Pros:
It makes base coating a breeze and is a handy way to store a bunch of parts while working on them. You can pick the rig up and get to all kinds of hard to get to areas (for a more even coat) and it keeps works in progress offa the grunge on the work area while keeping the paint safe.

Cons:
It's really only helpful if you do a lot of pinning, like me. This is because you have to have a length of rod attached to the model in order to set it in the rig.

Construction:
Simply get two lengths of dowel rod (or whatever wood you have - square rods would work too) and screw them together in a 'T' shape. I found that it was helpful to pre-drill the hole before screwing the rods together - prevented splitting. It was also helpful to do a little notch on the top of the 'T' for stability. Once its built, simply drill a number of holes on the surface for sticking rods in.

Boring Progress Update

Worked a little on some stuff today. Saturday and Sunday are usually a wash as far as progress goes. I have a weird work schedule and so I work on these days - much earlier than the rest of my work week. So, I get home Butt-ass tired and then take a long nap - further confounding my internal clock.

Anywho, I dull and gloss coated my artsy-f artsy chaos base (its like the last picture - only shiny!) and worked on some highlights for the continuing saga of the Dark Angle legs. The rack of disembodied limbs is kinda started to seem grotesque. I must finish and move on to perfectly normal disembodied torsos.

Based in Evil

The Dark Angel squad has officially slowed to a crawl. I highlighted a little bit on the gray and tweaked my highlight scheme.. thats about it. I've been fairly distracted with the Chaos Lord as well various naps to and Hercules: the Legendary Journeys viewings.

I also contemplated how awesome the 20 man Black Templar crusader squads are. 20 dudes is a lot of dudes. All kinds of close combat stabby action. Give 'em a chaplain and they get all fearless and super stabby. I may have to explore this later.

What I actually worked on today was the base for my Chaos Lord. There was a picture of it a dat or two previous that showed the 40mm base with the green-stuff rolled onto it and the star pattern cut into it. It is now fully painted and awaiting some dull coat and then layers of gloss coat to look all marble-y. So far I'm really happy with the way its been going.

(this is a fairly dark picture of the base - its a tad brighter and more vibrant in real life)
I think I'll finish the Dark Angel legs I've been procrastinating on and then paint the Chaos Lord.

Naughty Bitz

Well, I haven't really worked on my Dark Angels in a couple of days (though I did touch up some shading). However, I have made great progress on my Chaos Lord - actually, most of it yesterday as I didn't really work on anything at all today. He's ready to be primed once the green stuff fully cures. then I can move on to painting him up proper.

I'm extremely happy witht he way he's turning out. The actual conversion process took the better part of a day - due to hand tools. If only I had a Dremel. (note to self: buy Dremel at earliest convenience).

I decided to try something new with the base. I rolled some green-stuff across the top and carved a suitably evil pattern in to it. My plan is to paint it all marble or metal like and then make it glossy. Might be coll, might not. We'll see.

Have a chaos-tastic day!

All the parts for my Chaos Terminator Lord Of Tzeentch arrived today. So, now I have a new project. Should be fun. I got the idea from a games workshop online article. (here: http://uk.games-workshop.com/convershunklinic/40k-thousandsonsterminator/)

I really like the conversion, so I decided to try my hand at it. I'm going to use most of these bits:









(click for larger pics)

Into something resembling the model in the aforementioned article. I may even use some privateer press minis as well. I really like the ephemeral ghost elf and sword of Goreshade the Bastard.

I'm pretty sure the ghost-lady will end up being a familiar and I may end up sing the blade of of this guys weapon instead of the Ubshabti glaive. Who knows.

I've already cleaned the metal parts with some Simple Green and water to get rid of the mold releasing agent. So now I begin to modify parts (instead of finishing my tactical squad project.) The initial process of modifying the various parts for this conversion my result in multiple updates a day - for progress's sake.

For the record here is a list of all the stuff I got for this project:

• Chaos terminator head 5
• Chaos terminator Champion head 1
• Chaos terminator power mace
• Thousand Sons head sprue 2
• Thousand Sons bolter/cloth sprue
• Chaos vehicle accessory sprue
• Grey Knight terminator 2
• Grey Knight terminator storm bolter 2
• Grey Knight terminator nemesis halberd
  
• Grey Knight terminator shield sprue
• Ubshabti Glaive 2
• some 40mm bases.
• Goreshade the Bastard blister
  

Progress update and Helpful Handy Hint #1

Lets see, I've made a little bit of progress since last post. Got the remainder of the base-coating done on the legs and I've started shading. I might do more tonight. At any rate, my weekend starts tomorrow (technically today), so I'll have a couple of days to maybe finish the legs and move on to torsos.


Not much to look at I know, but you can kinda see some of the shading on the gray. I'll start touching that up once I add Shadow to the green.

On another note, I've gotten a better handle on my camera, and the pictures are starting to turn out much better. Still have a bit of graininess to purge and I'll be good to go. Now, on to...

Helpful handy Hint #1
So, whether or not anyone reads this, I'm going to start sharing some of the tricks I've picked up and find the useful. I'm no expert but, hey, I cans till share my insights.

For the first Helpful handy Hint, I'm going to talk about Tamiya Smoke. This stuff is great! It's best use is for making metal look all neat and weathered. Before I found this stuff, I used to use GW armor wash or black wash to take the edge of of metal paint's shininess and to add depth to armor and the like. This stuff is waaaay better at doing that.

Its a lot more transparent than inks and a little weird to work with at first (due to its thickness) and takes a bit to dry (about an hour), but its well worth it. Just dab some of this on over a metallic base coat and then highlight once its dry and you're set. You can re-apply to get darker and darker shades. Smoke is basically just a better way to make metal look good and operates on the same principals as washes and inks. I honestly don't know what I did before I found this.


Quick note, make sure you buy the acrylic version of the this. Tamiya makes some enamel paints as well, and they need special cleaning supplies and don't mix with any water-base paint you may be using.

Paul is the big winner

First of all: Congrats to Paul for realizing one of his secret desires. Way to go on the first comment to this blog EVER.

2nd: some pictures of my recently finished Dark Angels veteran sergeant. He's pretty much the pattern for robed figures in my army as well as the pattern for plasma guns and a number of other fancy, more elite unit type stuff.



I still haven't gotten the hang of photographing my minis yet, so bear with me on the wildly varying levels of color and focus. The left and center shots are the most accurate in terms of color. The symbol of the 7th company on the knee is hand painted, though smaller than I think i like.. or not. dunno yet. At the very least, I'm a fan of how it came out as far as shading and shape.

As of now, I'm working on painting the rest of the squad in batches of 4, piece by piece. The custom bases are done for the next four, and know the legs have been started.

Web 2.0: my experiment

I've broken down and decided to start a blog. Now I have a place to whine about my life and post spooky pictures of myself. Well, not really.

Mostly I'm just going to talk about my gaming hobbies. Right now, I'm going to focus on table top gaming and miniature painting. Hopefully, I'll get off my ass and post pictures and do tutorials and post links and and and... At any rate, I'll try to keep my piece of the blogosphere (sadly, a real term) focused and free of angsty musings.

Here is my first picture for this site and my current project:


This is a marine from my in progress Dark Angels army for Warhammer 40,000. This is a series of views of my test figure. I like the way it looks, so this is the pattern for the regular marines. I also have a robed sergeant done. Pics to follow at a later date.