The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Zzap! Frazzle! Waaaagh!

I've spent a good long while fiddling with Wurrzag, even to the point where I was trying to paint the cracks in the base with a syringe. (It's impossible!) However, I'm reasonably satisfied with the effect, so I thought I'd share some pictures. It's the sort of thing that looks okay in person, but I think comes out better through photography.

The next few shots were taking with a longer exposure setting, so they're a bit darker, but they show the colors a bit better as well.

 

And my favorite:

He's been submitted to CoolMiniOrNot.com, and there's some slightly different pictures of his finalized paintjob there, so I encourage you guys to go have a look and vote.

Now with more rock!

It's been a mighty busy day.

I started myself off this morning by washing the shield drone down to a decent, dingy greyish color that I felt much more comfortable with.

I then began to paint the fanatics. While I think they look pretty good, they are such a giant pain in the ass to paint. Their details are modelled terribly - there are no gaps, for example, between the arms and the body, just big hunks of shaped plastic that I assume one is supposed to paint black, and the chains are one-piece molded rubbish in some places. I was fortunate in picking a dark color for their robes, because anything other than black or dark grey would look terrible with how these models are made. Really poor quality on GW's part, but they fit the model well enough, so I guess it evens out.

The base was proving problematic around the middle of the day, though. I thought I could just use the new washes over a khaki color to achieve a nice little desert effect on it, but they've proven a bit unreliable as far as that goes. I think part of it is that there's very little surface detail on the rocks for the washes to grab onto, and partly because they're positioned at angles, so the wash pools in an unusual manner in unusual places.

 

To fix this, I grabbed my drybrush and a khaki color and started generously drybrushing it over the entire thing. Then, I grabbed some bleached bone and drybrushed around the edges and any details like cracks or the likes. Finally, I thinned out the Citadel Devlan Mud Wash even more to something like 3:1 wash to water and started very carefully reapplying it over the base. The results of this second try are a lot more pleasing, and I was happy with it, so I went ahead and blacked out the 'rim' of the base after it had dried.

 

Also, I took this one photo for giggles, but I have to post it because I love how it came out. I basically dimmed all of the lights around where I was shooting, and set the camera for something absurd like a 30 second exposure, and walked away. The shot that came out was actually truer colors than most of my others, which shocked the hell out of me. Not to mention it looked awesome cause the eyes glowed hard in the dark.

Untouched, aside from scaling and watermarking. I may start taking pictures in a slightly dimmer light.

All that aside, though, there's only a couple things needing to be done. There's a few details on the grots (like knives sheathed in little spots around their belts) that need to be picked out in a different color, and I wouldn't mind putting some checkered lines across their robes...

... Not to mention the OSL which I was considering. The whole 'green glow from the cracks' thing. I'm at the point now where I am afraid of doing that because I've both never done it before and I really don't want to screw the model up any! I may work up the nerve for it later - right now, I'm painting the old base I made for this model up in the hopes that I can use it as a test piece and try to figure out how it should all work. We'll see, though...

Change of staff

Aaand some work on the staff this evening. Honestly, it's... okay. I tried to do black wraps on the staff between the metallic bits, but I don't think it came out that well (or clearly!). I figured if I did brown wraps, and then put copper wire overtop of it, the wire would be impossible to make out against the rest of the staff very clearly.

I also couldn't pick a color for the lightning bits on either side of the skull, so instead I figured copper made the most sense for them, since it might help conduct Waaagh energy a bit better. The skull is okay, though I'm still trying to figure out how to do them with the new washes without making them look too dirty. For the purposes of this, the skulls all looking a bit charred on the warphead makes sense, since he does tend to zap-fry enemies, but in future I would like it if they looked a bit neater.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the tau drone on the back of the staff. I wasn't quite sure what to do with it, so I went ahead and just picked a random color to detail the rim. I wanted to sort've paint a glyph or something inside the white center, and a lightning bolt made the most sense at the time, but I think it looks kind've weak. (Not to mention off-center!) Still trying to make up my mind if I want to leave it as-is or not, since going over that with white again would be a monumental pain in the ass and I still wouldn't know what to put in its place.

Enough talk:

 

I also got a start on painting the grots' robes, which I hope to make a very dark grey/black with checker trim on spots.

More feral by the minute

More painting progress on Wurrzag, though truth be told it feels a bit sloppy. I broke down a bit towards the end there, on the spot behind where the ball and chain hang from his waist. I couldn't figure out what most of the details in that area were supposed to BE on that orginal model. They're not modelled particularly clearly, largely because on the stock model you have a grot hanging off the weirdboy right at that spot. Eventually I just figured the unknowns would get painted brown so they'd blend in with his cloak.

 

He's at what I would call a tabletop standard, at least, so I'm happy with 'em so far.

I have no idea how to paint his staff right now. I was going to do boltgun metal for the staff's rod itself and copper for the wires, but I don't quite know what to do with the glyphy sides around the skull. The tau shield drone will probably be pretty stock looking (tau-ish tan), with the addition of some sort of glyph painted onto the smooth inner part.

Right now I'm thinking the staff's lightning bolt parts need to be done up in a red or yellow. Leaning towards red, because I hate painting yellows.

Anyway, I'd love feedback.

An ork of color

I've been painting Wurrzag, though slowly, because I've also been playing the greenskin campaign in DoW: Soulstorm. There's a lot still to do, but we're getting there.

 

I'm mostly trying to get the basics on him, but it's a pain in the rear because there's so many nooks and crannies that I have to get at! I would have loved to be able to paint him in separate pieces, but I guess I'll deal with 'em as best I can.

Wurrzag himself is maybe 1/3 done. The grots and base haven't even been started yet. Ugh!

Done makin’ em weird

So Wurrzag is, as far as I can see, done.

I went ahead and added two chains coming out of his back, from the big coil the stock weirdboys all come with. I left them both dangling in the air. One of them has a charred grot hand and forearm hanging from it, still gripping tight onto the chain. I sculpted the extra forearm with a bone sticking out of it just so I can make sure it's obviously intended to be a missing limb.

The other shorter chain has a bell I salvaged off of the original warphead staff's chain.

 

They're small details, and thus sort've hard to make out in the photos, but there you go. I rounded off the front of the base with the addition of a fried marine skull to help fill the empty space. I hollowed out a power armor helmet, cut away a bit of one side, stuck a skull inside, and viola, instant zzap-fried marine. It'll be fun to paint the skull inside a nice charred color just to sell the point.

I think it's time to prime and paint.

I want the base to glow, but that's obviously not going to happen via the use of LEDs, so I've decided upon trying to paint OSL with this to some tiny degree. I want to paint a bright green light glowing out from the depths of the cracks in the base, and maybe include some light green ambiance on the grots and Wurrzag's lower half. Thing is, I really have no idea how to do this, so I would appreciate help! I've seen a couple tutorials for OSL previously, but I'm not so sure I know what I'm doing.

I'm more concerned about the order things have to be painted in than anything. For example, I'm priming the piece white. After that, should the first thing I work on be the bright green in the recesses, or should I paint the whole thing up first and do OSL afterwards? Can you achieve an OSL effect with bright green by just making thin washes of something like Scorpion Green and repeatedly applying it to a particular area? Give me a hand here.

Lit up with Waaagh!

Thinking to myself that his base was a bit too tall, I grabbed my dremel and a cutting wheel and took a stab at carving it down to be slightly less thick. In doing so, however, I realized that I had made a bit of a mistake! I have coin-cell batteries which are basically the same dimensions as a quarter, and battery holders that fit them that I intended on concealing on the underside of the base. Unfortunately, I had cut too much of the base's height down to adequately fit the entire battery holder.

After a bit of swearing and contemplation, I hacked the battery cell holder itself apart and took the metal contacts out, resolving to build the battery enclosure into the underside of the base.

An hour later, I have this ugly little gem to show for my efforts:

Like all of my electronics work, it's pretty terrifyingly ugly, but damn if it doesn't still work. The gray stuff is a two-part epoxy called 'mighty putty', which can be obtained here. I would seriously suggest that anyone who does converting on a large scale grab some of that stuff. It mixes up easily, dries in under five minutes, and creates rock-hard holds. I used some of it on my old Stompa project as a structural support, and I have no doubt in it's strength. In this particular instance, I used it to hold the contacts stable on the underside of the base and to stick some of the extra wire down. There's a tiny switch stuck to the underside that you'll be able to see, as well, anchored by the putty. I put the switch on the underside for one simple reason: back when I did my old Guntrukk project, in the days of yore, I implemented the switch that turned the lights on and off on the exterior of the model, hidden inside a 'rocket'. The problem this led to was that every time I tried to transport it, the switch would get toggled, and subsequently run the batteries and LEDs down to nothing. What this suggested to me was that any time you work with electronics on a model, you want the switch to be recessed or tucked away somewhere that it can't accidentally be switched, hence its placement underneath the base.

When all the wiring is said and done... it lives!

 

The staff is noticeably dimmer than the eye LEDs largely because it's a different type of LED - the one lighting the eyes is a Surface Mount LED, which is a tiny square that projects the light in a decent arc, whereas the one that I was able to fit into the staff was your standard rounded-top LED, which projects light forward in a cone. The cone of light in the staff, however, is pointing upwards, meaning the light coming out of the eyes and mouth is mostly reflected off of other surfaces inside that skull first.

Despite that, it's only a tiny detail, and I think it looks fine. Certainly too late to change it now.

Anyway, the model's roughly 85-90% done, and needs a couple extra tweaks and additions. I'm very happy with how he looks currently, though - I got over the fact that the staff wiring was fairly obvious going down the chain by convincing myself that I'll make it look like rope come paint-time.

What’s weirder than two bases?

Wurrzag's another project of mine that fell on the backburner and stayed there for a little while, but it's been more than long enough to finish him off, so I'm getting off my lazy butt and doing it!

First order of business was to scrap the old base. Despite being relatively close to what I had originally pictured for the warphead's base, it was a bit too messy and not defined enough to suit my needs. It also left hardly any room on the underside for the requisite electronics I had to install, like a battery or switch. I went rummaging and came up with this old lid instead which is plenty roomy on the underside and had a nice flat surface for me to work on. Then, I grabbed some of my thicker styrene, cut a circle out with a jeweller's saw, and used the same saw to carve the disc into 'fragments' which I then roughed up with a knife and glued at angles pointing up towards the middle, to create a 'the earth is upheaving' look. A bit of putty underneath the pieces and around the edges, and viola, we have a new, much improved base.

 

The next step was to get Wurrzag onto the base. I managed to hide one set of the wires - the ones for his eyes - by coiling them around the rope hanging from his back and down into the base. The other wires that lead to the LED in the staff were twisted to look like rope and looped around the chain of one of the fanatics holding Wurrzag to the ground. The main supporting wire that holds most of his weight (the metal one) was subsequently disguised with the addition of a 'wrecking ball' weight at the end touching the base.

 

The only thing I am having a problem with right now is that visually, the front seems kind've open and empty. I'm considering maybe getting thin flying bases or some other relatively invisible support, crumbling some cork, and suspending rocks 'floating' in the air maybe an inch to half an inch off the ground on the base, to make it look like there's a whole lot of power going on.

Another thought I've been entertaining is to have that non-staff hand clutching something like a fetish. I have a squig foot I've been saving for a while from when I removed its legs and replaced them with tires... He could have a lucky squig's foot charm in the other hand, maybe.

More to come!

Rocky outcropping or Bondo disaster?

Been hard at work on the base for this guy today. It's been an interesting time so far.

First I stopped by Home Depot to pick up some of their expanded polystrene foam housing insulation. You can get about 10 feet of this stuff for which isn't all that bad considering I could probably make an entire board out of it.

I cut a circular cylinder out of the foam that was about the same size as a large 60mm base, then cut out the 'rocky' parts. A bit of sanding later and I had the general shape of the base that I had illustrated earlier. As before, I'm trying to make it look like the earth is buckling upward beneath the weirdboy where he is floating.

Housing insulation foam by itself is not a worthy base material. It melts when you spray it, and it is relatively fragile - two things I hate. With that in mind, I took a trip down to my garage and cracked open a can of Bondo, an automotive repair putty. I slopped that stuff on the base after I had mixed it up and with a couple sticks started working it over the foam in an effort to both fully coat it and encase it in the rock-hard stuff. It was messy work - bondo sticks to prety much everything, even the tools you use while you try to work. These were my results:

 

I needed a decent texture for the top of these supposed 'rocks' so I mixed up a batch of Apoxie Sculpt - it's a gray, two-part epoxy that comes fairly cheap and can be smoothed into a lot of different shapes. I put a thin layer of apoxiesculpt over the tops of these rocks and some of the problem areas on the sides and grabbed a flat bladed sculpting tool and just starting having at it. After haphazardly gouging a couple lines all over the surface in a feeble attempt to give it some sort of rocky texture, I came up with something passable.

I will be the first to admit it's not all that phenomal. It's also fairly hard to photograph, as some of the pink bondo goop that needs to be removed from the base is blending in and making the edges hard to distinguish. Still, it's not bad for a first try.

My photos are rubbish right now because I've been rearranging a lot of the lights in my room and I don't have my tripod right now. Still, you get the idea.

I ordered a box of night gobbo fanatics this afternoon because apparently every store within driving distance has decided they don't want to stock any. Until then, I'll probably be entertaining myself with a bit of sculpting on the actual model, much as I hate to do it.

Half banner, half bludgeon

I'm definitely going to pick up some Night Goblin Fanatics for this. If nothing else, I've been wanting to put wrecking balls on my Killa Kans, so if they don't work for this project I'll at least have an alternate excuse to get 'em.

I have had a LOT of trouble with this miniature today. Firstly, the eyes in the head inexplicably stopped working. I spent a few hours today swapping out LEDs and re-soldering connections and generally messing around until I realized that the metal in the miniature itself was causing a short circuit! I've lit metal models before and never had any trouble like this - I think GW must be using a new metal formula that conducts or something, because the older metals I have definitely do not. Anyway, I wrapped one of the LED leads in electrical tape to avoid any trouble for the time being.

The whole thing isn't completely wired together yet because I've got a bit more work to do.

I wasn't sure what to do with the staff but I doodled up a couple ideas and this is the one I went with.

There's some sort of tau drone bit backing the skull that needs some detailing, too, but I think I like the way the thing looks. It's large, but it looks as though he could whack something pretty decently with it if he has to.

I like to picture him having conversations with the skull on his staff.

Anyway, more work to come.