Malifaux: Pirate Gunslinger WIP Part 2

I've got some more work done on the pirate gunslinger:

I've added the jacket, and the epaulettes.  That's going to be a medal on his chest when it's painted.

The back of the coat needs a little more smoothing out so that's next on the list.  After that, I think I might be done with one.

Malifaux: Pirate Gunslinger WIP Part 1

The Convict Gunslinger is pretty cool.  He's got cool rules, he's good in game, and anyone can hire him.  The model is nice and chunky, and he looks pretty bad ass.  The only thing I'm not so keen on is his head.  His face looks a bit odd, and I really not a fan of his little mohawk.

So I knew I wanted to change this and kind of make him a bit more bad ass.  My initial thought was to make him look a bit like Sirius Black in his wanted poster:

So he needed new hair first up.  First thing that went was the mohawk, then the greenstuff hair went on.  I was largely making this up as I went along, so I went with adding an eye patch as I was on a roll.  This gave him a Snake Plissken sort of look.  But then I hit on what I was really leaning towards... a pirate!

First thing a pirate needs:  a tricorn hat.  Second thing:  Big beard.  Here we go:

I'm liking the look.  The hat might stand a bit more smoothing out with some liquid GS, but I guess a pirate convict would have a fairly battered hat anyway.  He's probably going to get some form of coat next, maybe some epaulettes.

WIP Gun Servitors

I'm hoping to acutally get a game in with my Witch Hunters this week, but I was short of two gun servitors for the list I wanted to use.

Last night, I went on a bitz box raid and threw together some bitz to make some cheap and easy gun servitors:


They're still WIP, as I'm going to add some tubes and other gubbins with green stuff later. These were a fairly easy kit bash using bitz from the Empire flagellant sprues, Immolator and zombie sprues, plus a few other bitz I found.

Easy stuff, plus it saves a few quid on paying the price of the GW servitors.

WIP: Wings in Progress

This is a WIP shot of one of the wings from my Nurgle Daemon Prince (here's some earlier WIP shots of him during the conversion phase). The wings are fairly heavily cut down ones from the LoTR balrog.

The "fingers" are just basecoated currently, I'll be highlighting them a little lighter when I get chance. I really happy with the way the wing membrane has come out, as this was a little experiment using stippling, something I've never tried before.

I wanted the wings to have a mottled, organic feel to them so I thought stippling would look a little more natural than trying to blend the two colour together.

The wing was basecoated with Kommando Khaki in several thin coats as on such a large, visible area I wanted the paint to be as smooth as possible. Next, a wash with Devlan Mud to try and pick out the ridges in the wing folds. At this point I was unsure of where to go with it, and it was then I hit upon the stippling idea.

I used an old small drybrush to do this, but GW do make a nylon stippling brush. Really, it just needs to be a relatively stiff brush. Beware than doing this will ruin brushes as you'll end up splaying the bristles out

I started by stippling the area close the wing fingers with Bestial Brown, so this was the lighter of the two browns. Once this was done, I then repeated the process with Scorched Earth, this time going even closer to the finger. When stippling, take off most of the paint before you put it on the model, otherwise it'll just blob on to it, not stipple.

The final step was a quick drybrush of the whole wing with Kommando Khaki to pick up the ridges of the skin.

The final result looks pretty pleasing for me, I'll definitely try this again. This could be a good way of adding textures to any organic surface, for example a Tyranid carapace.

Slaanesh Chaos Sorcerer WIP

Ever since I saw Christian Byrne's snake bodied Slaanesh Lord in WD a while ago, I wanted to do one myself. As a change from painting Nurgle stuff and as I want to use it in a future tournament, I thought I'd put a Slaanesh model together and so it was a perfect opportunity to do the worm/snake body.





The worm body looks a bit fat in place, so I'll sand some of that off to make it a bit smoother. I'm not sure what detail (if any) to add to the worm body though, whether I should leave it smooth or put some scales on it or something. The whip is taken from a VC corpse cart and goes pretty well with the Lash of Submission power he will ineviatbly be using.

Simple Battle Sister Conversions

One of the major drawbacks of playing Witch Hunters is that Sisters of Battle are a) expensive b) metal and c) have fairly limited poses. This means that conversion possibilities are fairly limited with the basic Battle Sister boxed set, but there are a few things I've been doing to add some conversions in, add a small amount of variety and, most importantly, save some cash.

The basic BSS box comes with 7 standard sisters, one with a flamer, one with a storm bolter and a veteran sister superior armed with a plasma pistol and a chainsword/eviscerator. My army list requires one with a melta gun, one with a heavy flamer and one veteran with a bolter and the Book of St Lucius which is not what the box comes with.

Firstly, here's a simple conversion of a flamer sister into a meltagun toting sister:



This is actually a conversion I've done before, only this time I decided to leave off the tubing underneath the gun. It's just a case of removing the flame cannister from underneath the gun and filing off the flamer tubing round the barrel. Once that's done, just bulk out the nozzle with green stuff and you're done.

Continuing with the special weapon theme, here's a sister armed with a heavy flamer:


This pose is about the only one where it's possible to do weapon swaps without destroying the whole model. I've swapped her bolter for a heavy flamer taken from an Immolator and cut down a bit. I've added some tanks to her back (from a Cadian) and linked the heavy flamer and the tanks using guitar string. It's not the best conversion, as the heavy flamer is a little over balanced, but as this one is going to save me £9 (the price of one, yes one, sister with a heavy flamer) I can live with it.

Finally, here's my VSS:

This one is a simpe weapon swap from the plasma pistol to a bolter, and replacing the other hand with a hand holding a book. The book I used is taken from an Empire priest (I'd previously used the priest model as an Inquisitorial acolyte) which is handy as the hand on the book is a left hand. Alternatively, the canoness model comes with a hand holding a book, though its a right hand so a little work will be needed to move the thumb over.

All in all, these conversion save me some cash (though I've now lost an ordinary sister to be the heavy flamer sister), and add some variation to my squads.

WIP Nurgle Doomsday Device

This is the complete build of my Doomsday Device for this weekends Apocalypse game. As you can see it's not painted yet, and probably won't be before then.

There's not much guidance on the Doomsday Device datasheet as to how big one of these things acutally is or even what it might look like. I guessed it must be pretty sizable, given it's a super heavy, AV14 all round and has 3 structure points. You can see I've included a Plague Marine to give you an idea of the magnitude:


Pretty monstrous. I wanted to give the idea of a giant cauldron of pus and filth which would erupt is a geyser of unplesantness once it was activated. I thought a cauldron on it's own would be too small so I've made it into a big cauldron on top of a Nurgly tower. The materials used are a sweet jar, a washing liquid ball, a ton of GS and milliput, some bitz, guitar wire and cocktail sticks.

I've got as far as undercoating it, though the undercoat looks like it needs a touch up in places:


Hopefully, it going to cause some serious devastation in the Apocalypse game.

WIP Nurgle Troops

Some more WIP shots. First up is my next completed Plague Marine squads, done in my Blind Dead Plague Monk army style:



They're made from standard Chaos Space Marines and green stuff. I've used the Renegade Milita heads on these from Pig Iron Industries and they're a little on the small side for the bloated bodies. I had to bulk out the heads using GS which is covered by the hoods.

These last ones are nothing special, just 20 zombies I'm going to use as summoned lesser daemons:

What could be cooler than having your army summon a zombie army to the battle field? :)

WIP Nurgle Daemon Prince

Things have been pretty manic this last couple of weeks as I've been living with my in-laws whilst we were having some home improvement stuff done. I've managed to get a bit of modelling work in, so I thought I'd share some pictures.

First up, this is my all new Nurgle Daemon Prince:



He's still a little WIP, so I need to smooth out some of the green stuff around his waist. It's really there as I had alot of trouble pinning the top half to the bottom half (I cocked it up somewhere along the process) so the GS on the waist is just giving that joint more support.

As you can see from the first shot, he's got a pretty majestic wing span. The wings are from the LOTR balrog, and those things are huge. They were a little too big for the skinny Nightbringer body, so I used my dremel to reduce them a little. I cut off a big chunk around the base of the wings, the part which joins to the body, and carved away some of the wing membranes to reduce them down and make the wing look a little more spiky. The wings are still pretty big, but they do look like they'd actually be able to lift his body if this were life size.

The arms are taken from the chaos spawn kit, and I was going for an insectoid look for him. My original plan had been to retain the scythe arm the Nightbringer comes with, but with that on, he still looked too much like the Nightbringer and that was what I was trying to avoid. After rooting through my bitz box and trying out various combinations with blu-tac I went for the insect legs.

The face and eyes are still WIP, I might flatten the eyes out. The eyes are intentionally two different sizes, and I was going for the fly-like compound eye effect. The mouth tube has come out slightly differently than I had originally envisioned, but I'm reasonably pleased with it. He kind of looks like the Imperial Spy from Star Wars...

...which is a look I quite like :)

The remaining steps are to neaten up the waist GS, smooth the eyes or make them into more rounded domes, and then he's ready to be painted.

Feverish hobbying

Please don't confuse my lack of blog updates with a lack of hobbying, quite the contrary in fact. I'm trying to get ready for an upcoming Apocalypse game on 7th November with my all Nurgle Chaos Space Marine army, so I've been building and converting as much as possible over the past 10 days or so.

So far I've built:
-20 zombies which will be my summoned lesser daemons
-Converted 7 Plague Marines in my Blind Dead style (more on these below)
-Half finished a daemon prince conversion
-Started building my doomsday device
-Clipped off and cleaned up enough parts for another 7 Plague Marines

So I've made some pretty solid progress, and I'll definitely have all of them finished and built by the 7th, but I'm just not going to have time to get them all painted.

The zombie kit is a nice kit and there's plenty of bitz in their to use for future Nurgle conversions.

For the first squad on Plague Marines, I've bought some of the Renegade milita heads from Pig Iron Industries. I'd seen last week or so an excellent Lord conversion over at Santa Cruz warhammer which used the heads from Pig Iron so I picked some up. They look really nice, and I got 20 for £4.40 which is pretty reasonable. The only thing I've found with them is that they are a bit on the small side for my Plague Marines, especially as I'd bulked out the bodies of them so much. I've build up the head a bit more with GS but a couple still look a little small.

The daemon prince is based on the Necron Nightbringer which is a pretty popular conversion basis for one of these things. He's winged with the balrog wings from GW, which are absolutley vast. These are great is you've got a big model to put them on (like the sweet Nurgle DP over at Dark Future Games) but the Nightbringer is a skinny fella, so some wing customization was necessary. I've also used different arms and there will be some substantial GS work on him.

Nothing is really in a state for pictures yet, but I'll share some photos once they get a bit further down the line.

On my painting table

Just some work in progress shots of what I'm doing at the moment. I tend to work on modelling a few things at once before I get on to painting them.

First up, a lightly converted Nurgle Rhino:



Second up, the first vehicle for my Battle Sisters, a rhino. I've left the turret loose on this one, so I can swap it for an Immolator turret at some point in the future:


And finally, nothing special with this one, an Eversor assassin:

Naturally, they'll be pics when they're painted.

Two simple Battle Sister Conversions

I'm trying to get a ten woman squad of Sisters together in case I decide to take them to the upcoming 500 points doubles tournament. I was justing going to put them together as straight Sisters, no conversions, so I could get them done quickly, but once I got them out of the box I couldn't resist a bit of converting.

First up: flamer to melta. The standard box comes with one Sister with a flamer and one with a storm bolter. My evetual 1500 point list requires a melta and a heavy flamer in each squad. The heavy flamer model I will buy at a later date, but I thought I'd be able to convert the flamer over to a melta. Here's the result:

Pretty straight forward. I cut off the flamer tank thing from underneath the gun and drilled two holes for the tubing. The tubing is a guitar string, which is something I've not used before. They were cheap (£1.49 for 6 strings and 3 plectrums inc P+P from ebay). This one is a D string. I also filed of the flamer nozzles from around the barrel. Apart from that I just added some green stuff to resculpt some of the detail that was lost as I hacked off the flamer parts and to fill out the front nozzle.

Second, I decide to convert the Sister Superior. She is supplied with a plasma pistol and a chainsword (or possibly an eviscerator), which I can't see I'm ever going to choose. I decided to swap this for a Brazier of Holy Fire (basically a one shot flamer and CCW), and swap the plasma pistol for a bolter. Here she is:


The Brazier is built from Empire Flagellant parts, consisting of a spiked club and the brazier I cut off the top of one of the heads on those sprues. I drilled her hand through and glued the club apart half way in to leave room at the bottom and then attach the brazier to the top. The backpack is a backpack from a canoness which has a little tank on the back so I drilled this and attached another length of guitar string. Finally, I just added a little GS around the hole where the string met the tank.

The bolter looks a little weird in the picture as I had to cut of the bullets from the bottom to make it fit. I've re-attached them to the side of the weapon so it's more like a WW2 sten gun.

I'll be using alot more guitar string in future. Main thing I learnt from these two minis is to bend the string into the shape you want it before you glue it in. Other than that it is pretty easy to work with.

AoBR Dreadnought to Nurgle Dreadnought Conversion

I've been working away for most of this week, so I have managed to get anything painted, however, I did take my tool box with me and got some conversion work done. I picked up this Assault on Black Reach dreadnought from ebay pretty cheaply:


I was pretty surprised by the model, it's really well detailed. I'd definitely buy a load of these if I was doing a Space Marine chapter. Of course, I'm not, so this was going to fall to the power of Nurgle :)

The first thing I needed to decide on was the weapons. It comes with a multi-melta, but I also wanted to have the option of taking a plasma cannon. These are the standard arms:
I thought I could probably get away with just changing the barrels on the MM arm for a plasma cannon barrel as plasma cannons sort of have pipes and stuff like that on them. With some conversion work I managed to get them magnetized, and got the front part of a 2nd edition era plasma cannon also magnetized. Here's a close up:

As you can see I cut off the front part of the MM and drilled it and fitted two magnets (2mm wide by 1mm deep). I also drilled corresponding holes in the arm and fitted 2 more magnets with reversed polarity. It was pretty important at this point to make sure they stuck together. I then painted my arm magnets with a bit of orange paint and pressed the plasma cannon piece to them to give me two marks to drill and fit magnets to. I then drilled and fitted magnets to that piece (two 1mm holes took me 20 minutes each with a pin vice, I need to get a Dremel...). This method also means I could add other parts in the future by magnetizing the barrels. I have a spare twin linked lascannon that would probably fit for example.

From that points it was on with the green stuff. Here's the final finished product with multi-melta:


....and with plasma cannon:

The helmet and daemon mouth are Defiler parts, and the whole thing has plenty of green stuff applied. I didn't magentize the arms, they're just on the pegs they come with. I might have magentized them had I got any magnets big enough.

I particularly pleased with the close combat arm:

This was done using horns from the Chaos Spawn box and then using a flat needle file to file a flat section at the thick end. These were then glued to the fingers of the power fist and the joints smoothed over with green stuff. I did briefly consider trying to magnetize the bolter and having a heavy flamer option, but I couldn't work out an easy way of doing it.

I also found a bit of time to work on a squad of Nurgle Chosen. I only got time for the first 4, so here they are, they just need 3 more to go with them:

Edit 8/6/09: The dreadnought is now painted and you can see the finished model elsewhere on the blog.

Progress update and other stuff

It's been a pretty busy week with the family over Easter, so I've not had much hobby time. I have managed to make a start on painting my Nurgle Sorcerer, he's undercoated and I've got most of the way through painting his armour. I'm hoping to finish him this week as I'm painting him for the 40k Radio Freebootaz Motivational Challenge they're running on the forums. I've also finished my Inquisitor conversion, and in fact he looks pretty much the same as the WIP. I've also cleaned up and based 2 Servo skulls, a Cherubim, an Acolyte and a sage for his retinue. For good measure I put together an AoBR Ork Nob I got free with White Dwarf a few months ago.

Warpstone Flux has opened voting on his April Army List challenge which is themed around the Alpha Legion. You can read my entry on the blog there or my post here. Why not head over and cast a vote? There's 4 great lists on there.

Not related to gaming, I took my oldest son (who is 3 and a half) to see Monsters Vs Aliens yesterday at our local cinema. We both really enjoyed it, and if you've got kids I'd recommend going. It's got a real classic sci-fi vibe to it, and there are several parts which are really funny.

Inquisitor Lord WIP

Here's a shot of my Coteaz based Inquisitor conversion:




As I already mentioned in a previous post, he fully magentized with 6 different weapon options.

I've done some GS work on the magnetized arms so they fit a bit closer to the body when they're magnetized together. I've also tried to GS the add-on arms so the armour blends a bit closer to the original arm. This is WIP still.

The green stuff work on the face was challenging, and I really learnt alot from Klaus over at the DEI GRECI blog, who is the daddy when it comes to green stuff. Check out his post here for tips. The main things I've learnt about GS are:

1) Look at what you need to green stuff, get the green stuff ready, and then halve it. I always over-estimate what I need and let it go on too thick.
2) Do a bit and let it dry, otherwise you ruin something you've already done. I worked on this model whilst doing my Nurgle sorcerer so one could be drying whilst the other was being worked on. This is a lesson I've had to learn the hard way on many occasions.
3) Never buy cheap, crappy GS, it ends up lumpy even when you cut the middle out. Trust me, I know I've got another 24" of the stuff.


The rest of the retinue is still WIP. I've got a Gun Servitor magnetized and based, and a sage. I've still got to convert up a torturer for the retinue so thats next.

Nurgle Sorcerer WIP

I've been working on a Nurgle Sorcerer this week, and here he is, now completed, ready for painting:




The core of the model is actually an AoBR terminator, with Chaos Lord arms and spawn bits (the greatest kit for Chaos conversions) on the head. The head is supposed to resemble a Plague Bearer.

Equally, I think I could pass him off as a Lord as well. For the weapons I went for a spear rather than the usual Nurgley sycthe, mainly because I don't have an plasticcard for making a sycthe :)

More pics when he's painted.

My first attempt at magnetizing a miniature

(Sorry about the layout in this post, couldn't get the pictures to go right with the text).

Some progress updates on my first attempt at using magents with miniatures. It's a great idea, I only wish I had known about it sooner. I'm not going to tell you how to magentize stuff, as I'm only a novice, but the best tutorial I've seen is over at All Things 40K (under Hobby on the left column). I got the magnets on ebay for about £2 for 50.

My first attempt was a gun servitor, firstly with heavy bolter:



...and then with multi-melta:



I used 3mmx0.5mm magents for these. There will be a heavy plasma gun as well, but the weapon needs some work before it can be used. The multi-melta points down as it turns out they're heavier at the front. I may put some green stuff on the back of the gun to balance it out.

Flushed with success, I went ambitious and went to magentize my Inquisitor Lord Coteaz based conversion.

First up, here he is with plasma pistol and power stake:



...and now with power stake and combi-plasma...



..power stake and bolter....






...and my personal favourite, combi-flamer and power sword.






The Inquisitor was a bit harder, as I was using 2mm x 1mm magnets which were more difficult to work with than the 3mm ones I'd used on the servitor. The hardest piece to magentize was the combi-plasma as it was too narrow for the magent. To get round it, I inserted a piece of wire into the gun instead to get it to magnetize. Overall, easy and enjoyable, I wish I'd known about it sooner.

Nurgle Objective Markers Part 2

Following on from my earlier post, I've painted up my "Tree of Decay" Nurgle objective marker, and here's the finished result:

I'm really pleased with the outcome of this one. With the paint job, I was going for the look of intestines rising up from the ground, hence the grey-ish colour. It was an easy paint job to do:

-Black undercoat
-Astronomican Grey base coat
-2 washes of Devlan Mud
-Fortress Grey drybrush
-1:1 Fortress Grey and Skull White drybrush
-Skull White drybrush on the tips of the tentacles
-Glaze of Leviathan Purple on the tips of the tentacles

Both the modelling and painting method have worked out well and I am going to use them again in the future.

I've also started on my second objective marker, entitled "Arrival of the Great Unclean One":

Summoned Greater Daemons arrive in game by possessing the body of an Aspiring Champion which is what I've tried to capture here.

My inspiration for this came partly from around the FtW blogosphere:

1- The rock he's lying on is a bit of bark chipping from the garden, idea courtesy of Ron over at From the Warp
2- The fallen marine idea I robbed from Cawshis Clay from Adepticus Prime and his really nice fallen terminator objective. I didn't think Chaos Space Marines would bother going back for a fallen solider, but I liked the idea of modelling something like this
3- The CSM Codex has a piece of fiction (page 62-63) of the arrival from the warp of a Keeper of Secrets and it says the aspiring champion "gorily exploded with shards of armour and bone scattering across the rocky ground". Sounds gross, so I had to make this :D

The model was easy enough to do:

-The leaning "stone" (bark chip) was PVA glued to the base
-The CSM, which is a pretty old model, had his feet cut abit so he looked like he was lying down rather than standing. I then put a pin through from the bark, through the backpack and into the body and glued it all together.
-The arm was pinned into place. The arm is from the Chaos Spawn box.
-Green stuff was then applied. He's robed and modelled in the same way as the rest of the my CSM force. I added some green stuff guts and gribbly bits.

More pics once he's painted up.

Nurgle objective marker

I've modelled the first of my Nurgle objective markers, and I'm pretty pleased with it, though as usual with my conversions it doesn't quite look like it did when I was imagining it. I'm not 100% sure what it is, but I'm calling it the Tree of Decay.

Here's a step by step guide to how I made it. It's pretty simple to do:

1 - I got some wire, drilled a hole in a base and inserted the wire. I then clothed the wire in milliput to bulk it out, and added a blob underneath the base to secure the wire. I prefer to use milliput for this kind of bulk work, but there's no reason you couldn't use green stuff instead. There's some wire sticking out of the top here which I cut off later. Here's how it looks (slightly phallic at this stage...)


2 - Next, stop to add in your gribbly bits. This is pretty simple, just roll long sausages of green stuff and wrap them around the core. Make sure the sausages are thinner at each end. As it's tree-ish, it'll need to be wider at the base (for the roots) and at the top (for the branches). Keep going until you are happy with the look. Here's mine at this stage:


3 - Add details as you see fit. You could leave it smooth, but I added some texture to each tentacle with the sharp point of a modelling tool. You could also add boils, warts, etc. Here's the finished product, ready for the paintbrush:


And there we are, a nice simple conversion. You could use this technique for other uses. Scaled up with more wire, you could make some Chaos-y trees for scenery for either 40k or Fantasy. Scale this down and you can use it as replacement limbs for Nurgle champions, daemon princes by replacing the arm or leg with something like this and keeping the original foot or hand.

I'll post more pictures when it's painted.

Back in the saddle

Given it's been two months since my last update, I guess this one is overdue. I've not been doing much painting recently with Christmas and New Year and work. I'm also back playing City of Heroes, an MMO which dominated my free time for several years. I'd taken a break of almost two years, but I reactivated my account before Christmas. It's still an awesome game.

Anyway, on the painting front, I find it hard to get motivated for painting when the work I'm producing is total crap. I just find it de-moralizing. All I've managed up until this week was to build, convert and undercoat a Chaos Vindicator (this was over a two month period). This week I've started putting some work into my Sisters of Battle Canoness, and I think she's looking pretty good. Since I suck at painting faces (see my Seraphim below for evidence), I've spent some time on the face for this one and it's really made a difference. There's a good painting article in the current issue of White Dwarf (UK WD350) which goes over some techniques that I have found really useful. I'll post pics when she's done.