Eldar - Wraith Knight (Work in Progress)

This is my work in progress wraith knight. I prepped him to play at the Ordo Fanaticus Club Challenge 2013 in Vancouver, WA. I felt like I got him upto a good level of paint, however he is by no means finished. I was kind of crazy. I decided it would be a reward to paint this monster after finishing the rest of my army. So with one week till tounament time I primed him and set out to make him: 

1) Playable 

2) Match my army 

3) Look good on the table

4) All the rest is bonus work

The face troubled me for some time, only 3 redo's till I settled on the 8/10 pic. I may still repaint it again, but I am at least happy with it.

I was very happy with the purple on the Heavy D-Cannons. I borrowed teh star twinkel from my origional D-Cannons scheme.

New Eldar Dire Avengers

New squad of 10 Dire Avengers painted up for OFCC 2013. Mostly happy with how they turned out. Still need to figure out what I am going to do with the shoulder targeter.

WarpSpiders won the interesing to paint award, and held my attention the longest.

Turns out the WarpSpiders were a lot more interesting to paint, and there were only 4 of them so they progressed a lot faster than the unit of 10 Avengers I am also working on.

Details of the spiders. They are plastic guardians w/ a little dynamic posing and the Spider Exarch shell.
The pinners are made from the storm guardian gun bits along with the tip from the exarch dual spinner, both cut to fit.



Below is all 10 spiders. Batch 2 is still sticky-tacked onto old paint pots.
The main differences are the shrine specific decals on the heads, and the eye color, a few missing final highlights, and bases are not finished yet.

Eldar at the top of the paint queue

The time has finally arrived, after years of being on the shelf, passed by for other projects, The new Eldar codex has elevated in the painting queue a few projects I really have wanted to do for a long time. Here is a sneek peek at what I am working on. A full 10man squad of Dire Avengers and 4 custom built warp spiders. One didn't make the photo... it was actually my test model and has a really bad paint job that will be re-worked, into what became my actual spider standard paint job.

Cause I know some might be curious about the spiders, they are build from the second generation gaurdian plastics, combined with the metal spider exarch back pack. not really shown here they also have new custom spinners using the stock bit from metal flamer or fusion gaurdian gun, combined with half (cause the exarch has two) of the metal spider exarch's twin linked spinners. The spiders were actually modeled and assembled back before GW closed down their metal bitz service. This gives you a hint on how long they have actually been on the "shelf". If you have not seen the 6 spiders I have been running reciently, you'll just have to wait and watch these 3(4) develop. 

Pre-Heresy Thousand Sons Prototype update 2

Have a few basic colors applies to the model as a color test.
Bolter is a stand in (puttied on for the photo)
The build what is really going on here.

• Arms legs and chest - goal was the distinctive gold trim
• Scarab and Gem work - goal add some scarabs and gems around. I feel it makes a good break up of the model and is unique and easy to green stuff them on. Also kind of using them as a replacement to purity seal.
• Shoulderpads - Switching up to a more of a white trim, this is referenced in the book often in the descriptions.My white still is only one layer thus it looks crappy right now.
• Backpack - Since this is a base of a chaos marine, I just cut down the chaos back pack. Putting the exhaust up was just to make them slightly different than standard marines.
• Sash - My green stuff attempt at adding a little more flair to them like pic 2 below
• Helmet - This was I think the key to the model. Will have a few variants moving forward but liked this look.

The primary goal was to try and match some of the existing art that is out there depicting the pre-heresy thousand sons.

Pre-Heresy Thousand Sons (30k style)

(Are you surprised to see me? I foresaw this day would come long ago...)

After a few days of messing with bits finally assembled my prototype Thousand Sons Marine. Still need a bolter and CC weapon or item of choice for right hand.

(40k) Building an Iron man ( a lesson in painting red)

A friend of mine has been building a really cool themed space marine list for some time now. This year he decided to go all out and bring this army to the next level. I volunteered to try my hand at making an iron man for his list.



































The New fast red paint job details:  (Enter the new Cidital base coat paint color: Mephiston Red)

Now the proccess is quite simple:
1) Prime black (dupicolor sandable black primer) is my preferred poison
2) Paint Mephiston Red
3) Black wash
4) Bring up with classic cidital blood red
5) Blood Red and Burnt Orange 50:50 mix for final highlights and reflections.
6) if needed add a tiny bit of white or bone white to get one more level, not too much (don't want it to go pink on you)

Red has classicly been a harder than normal color to get right cause to do it well required either a lot of patients and thin coats of paint or priming white. Blood red is a glazing paint, that means that is is semi-transparent the color below it shows through. If you really want it to cover well it took lots of coats. Often this meant that your red looked gloppy or lumpy, (cause you didn't thin your paint enough, cause you were trying to cover with red) The real trick to this new method is a red that covers in 1+ coats. ( what do I mean by 1+?)  One coat should cover black primer, plus a little touch up where the paint was thin or black still peaking out a little.
1) In this case we want to prime black cause we don't want to have to do all the clean up work involved with priming white.
2) Put on a nice clean, thin, coat of Mephiston red over the areas that we want red. Add minor toughups where it needs it after dry.
3) Next step is letting the black wash do its magic. Put the wash on thin, let it dry all the way, if it needs to be darker in the deep shadows, hit it again with a thin wash. Letting those deep shadows create a high level of contrast is part of what make this work so well.
4) The part of  blood red paint that worked against us before is now going to be its most usful quality. Paint it on in thin coats over the wash, just in the areas that are not in shadow. Since it glazes so well, this will bring it slowly towards the end red we are looking for. Even a completely dry blend addition of blood red over the wash will make it seem like a wet blend transition.
5) Finally I did some very subtle highlighting using the Blood Red mixed 50:50 with Burnt Orange. This was only used on the rims of the shoulder-pads and other key places to really make those edges sharp.
6) I did not do step 6 on this model, as I ran out of time, but if I did I would have used is very sparingly on only a few key places.


Hope this was useful
(Special thanks to Josh for the initial Mephiston Red Tip)






The sculpting of iron man

Bits inventory:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fantasy Chaos Head (horns and skulls removed)
Grey Knight Terminator Torso (cleaned up)
Normal Terminator legs (stance adjusted)
(Right Arm) Storm bolter arm, with fist from GK terminator pole weapon
(Left Arm) terminator storm shield arm (w/o shield) Open hand from Terminator GK sprew

Assembled in a classic pose


Added green stuff to fill in gaps from re-posing

Sculpted the chest and head

Added abs and final touchups
Sanded down mold lines that you can still see in this pic

<pic at top>
Added an armorcast bit for the energy pulse "small muzzle flash"
Painted in mostly a classic color scheme
Wanted to do more of a gold than tan, but ran out of experimentation time and just had to finish for tournament.

Cygnar: Rangers Unit

I finished these up last week for my painting challenge entry. They were actually much more fun to paint than I expected. The two sculpts in particular were really fun to paint, the female with the range finder and the unit leader with beard. They just had so much personality it kept me painting.

I also tried out a new type of pre-formed static grass (buffalo grass). I was very happy with how it turned out.

Privateer Press: Objective Markers

I picked up a pack of the newish Privateer Press: Objective Markers. They are highly detailed a one piece resin kit. They are really nice and easy to work with. There was almost no clean up or flashing to clear out. I painted them up very closely to the studio scheme. There are two different angles of the same three models.

These markers are great especially if you are playing the 2012 steamroller mission pack, as they are used in most of the missions.

Cygnar: Arcane Tempest Gun Mages & Officer Unit

As part of this months painting challenge I have painted up the new sculpt of the Arcane Tempest Gun Mages plus "The Dude" Officer. I really enjoyed this sculpt is is such a huge improvement over the last set of models. They are all sized appropriately for the rest of the army, and have all those little extras. Each gun mage has two pistols modeled. One in hand and one in holster. The double holster is well sculpted and adds a lot to the models. Hats, OK any one who knows my previous army knows I am a sucker for cool hats on models and these are one of my new favorites. I painted them up differently than I originally thought I would but I really liked how they turned out, hope you enjoy.

Bonus: Since for the painting challenge I needed to make it to ten models I needed three additional models. I painted up the Unit Attachment for the Precursor Knights I painted up last months as well a solo that I play often.

Cygnar: Precursor Knights Officer and Standard, and the Cygnar: Solo: Squire

Cygnar: Precursor Knights

With inspiration from a local circle player and vomkrieg, in regards to basing, I give you my newly painted Precursor Knights, complete with Cygnar script bases. These guys were really fun to paint up. I started with more of a stock (codex) precursor look, but decided it was way to bland, so I spiced them up a bit with blue and tan.

Strider: Part 5 (Finish Line)

At long last my Storm Stider is painted. I have had it out for two or three games now under the generalship of Siege. I have been very happy with the results. I didn't think much of the secondary lightning bounces on paper but in game play they have been very effective.

Cygnar: Storm Strider Part 4 (Strider Riders)

Spent some time last night painting up the stormsmith's that ride on the strider. They still need a little work and some clean up, but I am happy with how they are coming along. I have to figure out what I am going to do with the storm control device in the left hand of the first guy, and the machine controls of the second.

I was thinking more about these photos. I was not particularly impressed with them. So after posting them I went home and shot some new ones to replace them. The new ones turned out very close to the same. Then I thought maybe it was my paint job on these was just not upto my normal level. So I used the photos to find the places I didn't like and wanted to touch up. What I found was these models are tiny, on the scale of the Black 13 (if you know what I mean). The areas I wanted to fix were barely visible when I went to find it under my spectrum light. I did fix some of the things I found but I decided that maybe I zoomed in on them a bit too much. I decided looking at them under good light with out vision enhancement, they look fine.

Cygnar: Storm Strider Part 3 (Solid base)

It has been awhile since I have posted an update for my strider. I have been working on the base as well as the top. Here is a quick update photo.

40k 2011 Tournament Lists

I have been asked by a number of people for a copy of the lists I used this tournament season. I happily give out my list to every opponent I play against so I guess there is no harm posting them here.

OFCC 2000pts

Astro 1500pts