The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Stormy weather

Well, after a bit more glue application, the 'smoke' is now rock-solid. I know because I've managed to drop at least two of the stormboyz this morning, and thankfully both the smoke and their fully-pinned assembly held up just fine, even the flight stems.

Here's how they looked when I was done.

And off they went to the garage for a coat of primer. I'm using gray for this one because I want to do a dark gray-blue on their uniforms, and I think it'll look better with the smoke when I'm done.

Please excuse my poor or inconsistent photography here. I've built myself a new workbench in the basement and I'm still sorting out proper lighting.

The tutorial I was using for the smoke suggests that after priming, one should light the smoke-flock ablaze with actual fire to burn off some of the fuzzies and char the smoke. I'm probably not going to do this because I do not like the idea of lighting my models on fire, and the cyanoacrylate glue I used did a pretty reasonable job at sticking the loose fuzzy bits down and together in smokey clumps.

Anyway, next up is paint. I'm probably going to start on the uniforms - I figure I'll do the bases last, in the event any of the wash drips off the suspended figure.

What the flock?

So I figured out an absolutely brilliant solution to my smoke dilemma, courtesy of the tutorial on this nice blog. Essentially, one takes bushy flocking material and glues it to the flight stem, and after repeated glue applications it resembles a fantastic smoke trail.

The flock was applied with cyanoacrylate superglue at first, giving me what resembled large bushes trailing behind my Stormboyz.

After two coats of watered-down Elmer's glue, they start looking less like flying shrubbery and more like smoke:

The trails are firm, but a coat or two more of the glue might be necessary before I'm entirely comfortable drybrushing it. I may actually try and find some thinner cyanoacrylate glue so I don't spend all of tomorrow sitting around waiting for this stuff to dry up. I think it's a vast improvement over my earlier wool or cotton options, though, as it has a much nicer texture to it.

Smoking is hazardous

So I've decided these guys are one of the first projects I want to catch up and finish off over the summer. I glued some sand and ballast down onto their bases for terrain, and before I prime them and paint 'em, I'm trying to figure out my options for smoke.

The left is steel wool, and the right is a cotton swab. Truthfully, I'm not too pleased with the appearance of either. The steel wool holds its shape reasonably well, but it's hard to pull apart and has a very dense look to it. The cotton's a bit better at looking wispy, but I think I'd have to use some sort of spray adhesive to get it to stay put well enough to paint. Neither smoke idea looks good enough that I want to really consider leaving it. The third option is to sculpt some sort of flames coming out of the nozzles, but I'm not too thrilled about the idea as I am poor at sculpting and painting fire would give me a headache. Alternatively, I could leave them smoke-less, but that feels like a bit of a cop-out.

I have seen things like armorcast's smoke bitz that are intended to give the same effect, but whatever I add needs to be able to fit around the wire that's holding the stormboyz up in the air. Plus, a metal smoke bit sticking out the back would seriously unbalance these guys, and I've gone to great pains to get them to sit stable.

On the bright side, I've figured out a nice recipe for a dark grey/blue military scheme that I'm going to be painting on all of their cloth and uniform parts, using primarily the citadel washes. Hopefully, once I sort the smoke out, I'll be able to get these guys painted and done with.

And then there were ten

So I've made ten, and I'm fresh outta Stormboyz!

Number 8 and 9, which are pretty boring to be honest:

 

I had a fun idea for number 10 - a loony stormboy who loves his boomsticks. I figured the zillion stikkbombz he'd be chucking would make up for the fact that I neglected to put them on most of the rest.

I'm fresh outta Stormboyz parts now, as I only bought enough for 10 to start with. I have to pick up another 10 at some point, and when I do I think I'll be doing some more fun things with them. I have an extra stormboy body, thanks to my Stormgrotz taking his place, so I may make a rokkit and have him hanging from it by a hand or something.

Anyway, I'm going to watch ebay for cheap stormboyz. In the meanwhile, I'll figure out how I want to base 'em and add some smoke and other finishing details. (I just noticed a slugga I forgot to drill out, and some mold lines)

Something seems runty…

Ain't nuffin' 'arder 'den a stormbo-...

 

Oi! 'Ow'd grotz get a rokkit!?

I figure the model's sufficient enough to count as a stormboy. Got all the wargear - chainsword, slugga(s), and a stikkbomb.

5 Stormboyz rocket into a bar…

Banged out two more stormboyz for the mob.

 

I'm fine building a couple more axes, but I need some alternative chain-weapon ideas. I'm giving some thought to making one 'stormboy' be a pair of grots who managed to get their hands on a rokkit pack - maybe one hanging from a harness, and the other riding on the top. 2 grots is almost equal to a boy, right?

Waaagh! from above

Stormboyz are 3 things: Shock troops, orderly, and disciplined.
I scratched my head a bit about what I wanted to do with these models and came up with a few rough ideas:

- They should be flying, or at least some of them. The 'just touching down' look is fine, but I wish they hadn't cast the base terrain into all of their feet. That aside, their body poses are still pretty dynamic, and they can easily be made to look like they're 'suspended' in the air.

- Gas mask helmets. Once hortwerth made his Death-Korps-ish helmets available for sale (here from The Warstore for those in the US, and here for those in Europe). Gives the stormboyz a somewhat intimidating, uniform appearance.

- Similar weapons. Here, I think I've decided to give the whole mob of 20 chain-bladed weapons, meaning chainswords, chain-axes, that sort of thing. A buzzsaw or two may make an appearance if I end up cannibalizing one of the new nob choppas into something smaller. I thought that might help with the 'shock' part of shock troops, since a mob of orks blasting towards you with revving weaponry is probably enough to force a morale check on it's own.

So I started off with this guy:

 

The stormboy was hacked free from his molded-on plastic base detail. The choppa arm is the one swinging the chain from the warbike set, with the chain hacked off. A 2nd edition ork choppa was added in it's place. The slugga arm's from AoBR, and just reposed a bit with some greenstuff and pinning. The head's straight from Micro Art Studio.

I have some 14-gauge galvanized utility wire that I used to suspend him in the air above the base. I decided on this stuff instead of the normal flying base because although I have about 40 of Games Workshop's clear flying bases, there is not a single one that doesn't have ridiculous air bubbles in the stems. I've also read stories about how easily same stems can snap, and being a klutz, I figure galvanized wire will be better to work with.

A washer was added underneath the base to help with balance issues, even though the miniature could still stand without it:

I'm going to get some 2-part plumbing epoxy later and just cover the whole base over so the stem will hold a bit firmer into the base.

I figure the stem can be hidden at least to a tiny degree by the addition of either flames or smoke. Sculpting flames would be fine, but I'm sort've giving smoke more thought right now because a bit of steel wool would probably be easy to add, and it's certainly much easier to paint than fire.

Anyway, I made two more stormboyz after this guy as a start on my mob of 20, so here they are:

 

Yeah, I see the mold lines, don't worry.

I'm going to try and limit the number of identical weapons I have in the full group of 20 to maybe 5 max, so I don't end up with too much redundancy in the chainswords. I really like the 2nd ed chainsword on my first stormboy, but a lot of input I'm getting about these suggests they might be too weedy in comparison to the current-edition chunky chainblades ork boyz have. I'm not sure if I want to change the weapon or not, honestly.

Anyway, that's a start.