The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Awesome illustration

Zsoulless has recently found the time to complete the wonderful sketch that inspired this model, and I think it only fair to share it with all of you, as it is extraordinarily cool.

I've every intention of trying to colorize this awesome piece of artwork, but my time is very limited at the moment thanks to the pressures of law school. I'll be putting it up as soon as I have.

Grot assistant, now in color!

Some more pictures here. Grot's been painted, and Booma's been touched up a bit (see: lens color and the 'crosshairs'). The only thing I am still working on a bit is making those hammer glyphs a bit more defined.

 

What do you guys think? The grot needs a catchy name. I liked 'Fixit', but that's the same as the grot that rides along with the Ork character Wazzdakka.

Painting progress – nearly done

Been painting in leaps and bounds today, and I think Booma's 99% done, barring a couple touch-ups. I've glued him back togther (since I was painting him in pieces) and promptly got snap-happy with the camera because I like how he came out.

Here's a bunch of photos.

 

Since these photos were taken, I've worked on tuning him up a bit more, particularly the goggle lens and some of the straps. I'll have more pictures of him later, but for now, I'm going to move on to the grot.

Brushing it on

After what has been an exciting few days, I'm back and paintin'. I worked a bit on cleaning my Big Mek up before priming this morning, primarily greenstuffing closed any gaps or seams on the model and giving the banner waver a bionic eye.

As far as priming goes, I've been experimenting a little bit recently with white instead of black. The reason for this is that I've just started to get the hang of washes, now that the new Citadel ones are out, and I've discovered that layering on thin washes of darker colors over white primer does a really nice job with ork skin. Additionally, I've decided to skip trying any NMM shenanigans with this model - as much as I would love to have him up to presentation standards like that, Booma's primarily a model for me to play with, and my previous attempts at NMM have been below average. However, metallics look a bit poor over white primer, meaning I needed a black undercoat for the detail parts.

I set out this morning with a can of black and white primer and had at the model. I've left the parts mostly separate on the model, so I can pull them off, prime them, and paint them with ease. What I basically did this morning was spray items like the backpack and grot's robotic arm down with black primer, while doing the rest up in white. After priming white, I grabbed a brush, thinned out some black paint, and started blacking in the darker parts of the model so I would have a suitable undercoat...

Since priming, I've devoted most of my efforts to his head and face just to try and get the skintones approximately right. This is basically just thinned down Vallejo Dark Green, applied in three coats, followed by a little wash of the Citadel Thraka Green. I'm pretty happy with the way his skin looks.

 

The one big lens is giving me a bit of trouble because I am trying to get a smooth gradient from dark blue to light and it's a bit... evasive. It's not as exaggerated as I pictured when I was throwing the colors onto it - I need it to be a bit more contrasty. I'll probably try it again. Other than that, I like how he looks, so I'm going to get a start on painting the rest of him tomorrow

Bosspole and backpack

So I've recently had the chance to come back to this mini, and I wanted to finish him off and get to painting. I scratched my head for a little while as to what to do with his backpack before I decided it needed to look more complicated, so I grabbed a pair of three-coil bits off a warmachines mini and slapped them on there to help bulk it out a little bit. I've also been working on getting him a nice base to pose on - it's got a gear and a cable sticking out a bit, which I think is plenty. I'm keeping him on a 25mm base so that I can eventually make a SAG on a separate 60mm one and have him mountable onto it.

 

There's a bit of a gap in the area between the top of the shoulders and the backpack, and I've been thinking about what to do with that area. Since I normally stick Booma in with a pile of lootas, who have terrible leadership, a bosspole would be an appropriate upgrade to help keep them from scattering off the field. A character like Booma needs a nicer bosspole than the stock one the Big Meks come with, so I spent a bit of time doodling out various glyph ideas.

I liked the one in the bottom right the most, so I went ahead and tried making it. It turned out a bit big, but I suppose that's okay.

 

After visualizing the bosspole on Booma, however, I wasn't too keen on it. A number of folks I showed it to suggested I use an ancillary model to represent the bosspole instead. Since I like Booma's overall silhouette too much to go ruining it with a banner sticking out of 'em, I quicly banged together a grot helper who has been mildly cyborked to carry it. I'm going to go ahead and sculpt a bionic eye on him later - that, or goggles.

 

At this point it's just a matter of finishing touches on Booma and getting the grot done. Booma's backpack needs a couple more worky bits like dials and gauges, and the grot needs to be properly based. I will unfortunately have to get to finishing him in a few days' time, as I am going abroad for the next five. I'm looking forward to getting back and painting them both up, which is entirely uncharacteristic of me, but I suppose I should take advantage while it lasts.

Exhaustive detailing

Time for an update.

Not much happened with Booma himself in the past few days, as I've been quite busy with other things. Still, I have done a little bit - I've tried to add the 'exhaust' pipes like what is in the illustration. I took a bit of artistic lisence as far as their angling, but it was the easiest way to implement them. I'm not actually sure I love the way they look, but it may grow on me.

 

The arm needs some more of those big screw heads like what's on the front - I had three on there this morning, but they popped off with a bit of rough handling, so I'm going to glue them back on with some tweezers. The backpack is also still temporary, but I think I'm going to build off it.

Tiny leap in progress

Alrighty! Here's some more progress for you guys to (hopefully) enjoy. I know I've been working slow recently, but between school and all of the Valentines day shenanigans going on I haven't had much free time.

First, the bionic arm is coming along. I basically decided to use the hand section of the power klaw, as building my own fingers proved too much of a headache, and scratchbuilt the rest of the forearm. I haven't put the exhausts on it just yet, but they're in the works. I started on what will optimistically be the 'gauge' on the arm, as well as a couple of nuts and bolts and the vent. I even put the little power-plug outlet in, though it is so infinitesimally small that I will have to paint it with a microscope.

 

I'm starting to really like the look of things now.

As far as the KFF goes, I've done some digging through my bitz bins and come up with some parts that may produce a workable Kustom Force Field...

Of particular interest is the metal bit with exhaust stacks coming off it. That part is from a Warzones miniature (non GW game, I know, but I'll get over it even if tournament-mongers don't. ). I believe the original model was some sort of battle suit, but whatever. It fits fairly nicely on Booma's back, so it's got my gears turning right now. Here's a shot with it just pinned on:

 

Z and I have been bouncing ideas back and fourth as to what we could make of it, because he wants his art to reflect the miniature and vice versa. Some more thought still has to go into it for the time being, particularly because I would love to be able to fit a tiny red LED somewhere in whatever ends up being made.

As a little bonus, I've noticed that Booma is actually nicely poseable now. For example:

He could be holding something (like a whirring gubbin or beakie helmet) up infront of him and eyeing it up for parts. Alternatively...

He could be cranking a valve wheel on a busted Dreadnought.

Obviously, I don't intend on him doing these things on the final, playable miniature, but I just found it entertaining that he could be posed to be a bit more interactive with things. If I had the patience, time, and parts, it'd be fun to make a couple versions of him just doing things to pose in pictures with my other conversions, but I obviously have none of the above. I can't really leave the arm free-swinging on the final model, either, as paint would chip, bits would get broken, and I couldn't sculpt to fill in the seam between his upper arm and torso. Still, it's fun to photograph.

Backup bionic arm

So, I had grand designs of coming home on Thursday and jumping right into modelling Booma but of course the teensy, weensy fact that it is Valentines day threw a wrench into that. Add onto that the fact that I have been enlisted to fix my father's ailing computer and I didn't find myself with much free time today.

Despite this, I have something I thought I might post. See, I found a rather nifty bit a while back. It comes from a miniature model line called Demonblade, which produced some rather unusual models until Games Workshop shut it down for copyright infringement. The Demonblade models had an 'orky' line that had a fair bit of crossover with GW's old second edition ork designs.

I managed to pick up a couple Demonblade minis off ebay with the intent of maybe mixing their parts discreetly in with the rest of my boyz, and this bit caught my attention right away. It's a completely bionic left arm!

 

I have been saving this for some time now with the mentality that perhaps it would look good on a Nob or what have you, but it seems to fit Booma fairly nicely.

Now! With that said, I want to make one thing clear: I do still intend on trying to scratchbuild Booma a proper styrene arm to match the phenomenal art that Zsoulless has been creating. The only reason I am showing photos of this other arm is because it will serve as a plan B of sorts. If I find that I simply can't scratchbuild such a small, fiddly little detail, this bit will serve as a backup way to actually finish Booma's model and get it on the table.

Having said that, I think I'm going to head off to bed so that I can wake up bright and early tomorrow morning and contemplate how I'm possibly going to build such tiny fingers.

Glyphs and a new sketch

Enough people on other forums complained to me enough times about the fact that the glyphs were a bit too recessed into the hammer that I popped them off and used a hole puncher to fill the middle of the ring in and push the glyphs out a little bit. There's some tiny gaps around the outside edges, but I'm working on melting those shut with a syringe and some Plastruct plastic weld.

I think this is where I leave it for the next few days while I am at school. Zsoulless also updated the sketch a little bit:

Flipside of the hammer

I vowed to finish the other side and the glyph before I had to head back to school, so here is the 'mork' side of the hammer.

 

I understand that aesthetically it might look a bit better if the glyph were farther out from the face of the hammer, but I need to also reiterate how infinitely small they are to begin with - the only reason I was able to really cut something that size is because I used thin card. Sanding the outer ring hubs down isn't really something I care to do right now, either, because they've been riveted already. The ring is the thickness it is because when I tried making rings that were any thinner, they would fall apart when I used a pin vice to drill the rivet holes. I made about 6-7 rings before I managed to get a pair that didn't fall apart under the stress!

Still, I think it looks good all the same.